Writing Children's Books For Dummies - Peter Economy

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       Coming-of-age issues of socially, economically, spiritually, emotionally, or politically marginalized kids.Gay teenagers, straight teens in gay-parent families, cross-gendered teenagers, pregnant teens considering their options, teens experimenting with drugs and not completely messing up their lives or dying because of it, teens falling in love with older adults and acting on it, and the like.

       Kids who seem to live perfect lives until you look under the surface.

       Teens in complex situations (but not always weighty or incendiary).Sometimes just being a teen at an exclusive prep school can present abnormally difficult situations, especially if it turns out your peers are all the walking undead.

      In YA novels, the protagonists don’t always win at the end. Whether they’re human or not human, their issues often parallel those of human teenagers: trying to fit in; making a difference; finding love; scouting out acceptance; breaking out of their parentally imposed limitations; seeking independence; proving their worth; conquering physical, emotional, cultural, and spiritual demons; and so on. With few exceptions today, the protagonists of YA novels have lost their innocence (different from losing their virginity), but that doesn’t mean they’ve lost hope, strength, or their ability to imagine a better life, a better self, and a better world.

      

Some YA books are considered crossovers, meaning they can serve as both a young adult book and a contemporary adult book. An example of a crossover title is Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (Knopf). Although the publisher primarily designated the book a young adult novel (and Hollywood made it into a movie for kids), you can also find it in the adult section with Zusak’s other books.

      Writing YA books

      Young adult books are filled mostly with words and rarely have any illustrations. So if you’re hankering to break into the young adult field, be ready to write well for 200 pages or more. The criteria are similar to those required for writing good middle-grade fare (discussed in the section “Writing for the middle grades,” earlier in this chapter), with some real differences noted:

       Characters: Strong, interesting, uniquely drawn characters who have a problem — only they might not try very hard to solve it; in fact, they might wallow in it for a while.

       Riveting stories: Storytelling that absolutely sparkles and makes all those apps on the young adult’s smartphone or tablet nonexistent.

       Language: Writing that uses language to paint pictures in the mind and writing that has style and voice (which we delve into in detail in Part 3).

       Voice: A unique voice that stands out — arguably the most important element of good YA fiction.

       Audience: A clear grasp of the audience and their concerns.Teenagers are serious about their lives, problems, and issues, and people who write for them have to treat the subject matter seriously.

      Exploring the Genres

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Taking readers into the fantastic and the historic

      

Telling stories about people

      

Conveying a message (subtly)

      

Making them laugh

      

Solving a mystery

      Genres are the general nature of major children’s book categories. They’re like big buckets into which publishers throw a bunch of books that the authors wrote by using certain similar conventions. For example, mystery is a genre of fiction, as is action/adventure.

      

When you hear about conventions of a genre, think customs or rules widely accepted because authors have used them that way for a long time. Basically, conventions are expectations that a reader has for a genre because that’s what they’re used to reading; for example, if a book falls into the mystery genre, the convention says that it has a problem that an intrepid protagonist has to solve and a solution that the protagonist struggles to figure out, finally making that crucial discovery. Sometimes you want to stick to those conventions, and sometimes you want to veer away from them to make your story more interesting. Either way, it helps to know a bit about the genres out there.

      In this chapter, we explore many of the various genres in which you can find children’s books. If a distinctive style, form, or content composes the very nature of certain genres, we talk about those, too. We also dip into the series pool, where single characters can take off into multi-book adventures.

      

If you aren’t writing plays, poetry, or nonfiction, you’re probably writing fiction. And you can cross, mash, or mix up fiction genres if you’re confident in each of the genres you’re subverting. Just make sure you research the genre (or genres) you’re writing in so that you subvert in the right way.

      Some children’s book genres are quite literally out of this world — or at least beyond the conventional, everyday life that most of us are familiar with on this planet we call Earth. You can take a look at some of the most popular of these genres in the following sections.

      Science fiction

      Writers of science fiction can manipulate settings to fit narratives or make up out-of-this-world settings altogether. Sci-fi writers rely on the utter suspension of disbelief, which is a fancy way of saying that you have to believe what you read, no matter how implausible it may seem. If the writer of science fiction does their job well, they set up the story and characters in such a way that they seem to be describing something that seems familiar enough to the reader because the author bases their fictional time frame on things that already exist today. Science fiction takes existing scientific principles and theories and uses them in the plot. The author wants the reader to take this unreal setting literally, not metaphorically, and you need to make your sci-fi characters believable.

      Subgenres of sci-fi include apocalypse, space travel, utopia/dystopia, cyberpunk, first contact, high tech, space exploration, space opera, speculative, steampunk, messianic works, and more. One of my (Peter’s) favorite books when I was in first grade (although it’s hard to find today) was Louis Slobodkin’s The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree (Aladdin).

      Writers usually write science fiction for older children, so the formats that work best for it include middle-grade books, young adult books, and graphic novels.

      Fantasy

      Fantasy relies on the notion that real people in real settings can encounter magical things and can often perform magic. In other words, some people have special powers, whereas others don’t.

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