Focus On Writing Fiction For Children

Children’s publishing is a vibrant yet challenging market for today’s writers. Editors say that 95% of submissions are poorly written and inappropriate. Because children have short attention spans and a wide range of reading abilities, it takes more than just a good story to be successful.

Work with a professional children’s author to take your writing skills to the next level, and interact with other children’s writers. You will also find ways to take the seemingly abstract concepts behind writing for children and apply them to the story or novel you are working on. By the conclusion of this workshop, you will have written and revised up to 2000 words of fiction for children.

Course level:  Intermediate / Advanced

Required Book:  None required

Workshop Length:  7 weeks

Tuition:  $325.00 ($292.50 for VIP)

Start Date: View Focus On Writing Fiction For Children Course Schedule

Course Structure
This workshop will consist of seven one-week sessions. The sessions will include online lectures (text based) and reading assignments, as well as suggested reading in successful children’s books to reinforce and explain the principles presented in this course. Each session also has a writing assignment specifically related to your story or novel, which will be submitted to the instructor for private review at the end of the first week of each session. During the second week of each session, work will be posted for group review and feedback in an on-line critique-group format. Throughout the workshop you will participate in asynchronous lecture discussion and encouraged to take advantage of ongoing informal discussions and posted self-directed writing exercises. (1.4 CEUs)

You will learn:

  • To connect your character to your reader through strong beginnings
  • To recognize telling and change it to showing
  • To identify what a child reader wants from the climax of the story – and deliver
  • To develop rules, checks, and rewriting procedures for a writing process

Who should take this course:

  • Writers who have already completed a first draft of a fictional children’s story (early chapter book or middle-grade novel)
  • Individuals looking to take their work to the next level with coaching and feedback from a professional children’s author
  • Graduates of Fundamentals of Writing for Children Workshop or writers with a strong grasp of mechanics, composition, and basic fiction writing skills

Focus On Writing Fiction For Children Writing Workshop

Course Outline

Session One: Connecting Your Character to Your Reader

  • The fictional dream
  • The revision process
  • Identifying your many target readers
  • Writing your story in the proper format
  • The writer-reader contract
  • Hooking the reader with strong beginnings

Writing Assignment: The first 500 words of your story

Session Two: Number One Rule of Writing: Show, Don’t Tell

  • Reason behind the concept
  • How to recognize telling and change it to showing
  • Power words that do more
  • When we must show and where we can tell
  • The role of narration
  • Using narration for pacing and rhythm
  • Narrative summary
  • Narrative transitions
  • Narration within action
  • Narrative descriptions
  • Writer intrusion

Writing Assignment: A 300-word scene that shows real-time action and includes narration; A 300-word scene of dialogue that includes narration

Session Three: Characterization and Point of View

  • Empowering the child
  • Complex, rounded characters
  • Understanding our characters
  • Characterization through interior monologue
  • Characterization through dialogue
  • Characterization through action
  • The role of other characters
  • Choosing our point of view character
  • Types of point of view

Writing Assignment: A scene of up to 750 words showing characterization

Session Four: Conflict and Subplots

  • The main story problem
  • High-stakes story problems
  • Importance and types of conflict
  • How to present conflict in text
  • Internal monologue
  • Roles of antagonist and minor characters, and getting the most from them

Writing Assignment: A scene or scenes of up 1,000 words that show conflict about the main story problem, show conflict from a subplot, and/or show conflict within the protagonist through interior monologue

Session Five: Scenes and Plot

  • Plotting stories through scenes
  • Definition and components of scenes
  • Major scenes and plot points
  • Transitions between scenes
  • Presenting backstory and flashbacks
  • Using scenes and rhythm to manipulate readers’ emotions
  • Definition of plot and what it must accomplish
  • Arcs and trajectories
  • Character-driven plots

Writing Assignment: A scene of up to 1,200 continuous words containing a dramatic scene that shows emotional change in the character (and, by extension, the reader)

Session Six: Endings and After

  • The climax—what it is and what it must accomplish
  • Identifying what the child reader wants from this major scene
  • Where and how to end a story
  • The professionalism in submissions
  • Line-editing
  • Active, expressive verbs, deadwood and redundancy
  • Style manuals
  • Word searches

Writing Assignment: Submit up to 1,500 continuous words in final-draft form that lead up to and include (at least part of) the story’s climax

Session Seven: Keep Writing

  • Workshop Wrap-up

Writing Assignment: Submit up to 2,000 words of text in final-draft form. (Can be continuous or several units of text you want final feedback on.) Include a list of potential appropriate publishers where you plan to submit your story.