In the 70's/80's, kids loved the exciting tale of an orphan sent to live with his aunt and uncle who found out he was actually a very powerful being and part of a rare group few believed existed. He went off with a wizened old mentor to train, and in the end he faced the big bad confidently, but not without loss. Love turned out to be his greatest asset, as it was the sacrifice of one of his parents which saved his life.
Back then, they called it Star Wars. But kids in the 90's/00's enjoyed the same story starring a boy named Harry. Just replace light sabres with wands and rename Leia/Han Hermione/Ron. (I'm not sure, but I think Neville may secretly be a wookie.)
Wonderful example! I have also seen a lot of people talking about kids characters needing to be extremely shocked by fantasy settings, but in my reading experience, most child protagonists, while surprised when they find themselves in a strange world, aren't exactly dying of shock. Take Alice, for example. Her reaction? "Curiosor and curiosor!" Not exactly "OHMYGODWHATTHEHELLMAN?" And Dorthy, when she makes it to Oz, says "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore", which doesn't strike me as all that super amazed, just a statement of fact. Maybe surprised, but not ready to faint. It seems to me a lot of ADULTS would freak out, but kids... they roll with things like that a lot easier. We as writers, in my humble opinion, are the ones who need to remember that. WE may be adults, but our protagonists are not, and therefore would not react the same way we would in most situations.
And that ^^ I believe, is probably the very hardest thing about writing kids' books.
The main difference I've found in writing for kids versus adults is being very careful in kid-writing to make absolutely sure I need whatever bits of inner dialogue and introspection I add in. The plot, the connection with the characters and the interesting details of the world-building are what I think the majority of kids are reading for. They aren't reading to come to some deeper understanding of themselves or others, though in the best books it happens anyway.
Exactly! I've struggled with that a lot in my career. My first book,
The Veiling Society, has far too much explanation and inner dialogue and far too little action. At the time I knew something was wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on what, exactly. It's funny how we have everything we need as kids to write kids' books except professional writing style, then as adults, when we gain that, we lose everything else and have to find a way to get it back.
What makes writing for kids hard is different from What makes writing for kids different from writing for adults, and why don't the people in my writing group get it?
Not really. To me, many of the issues children's writers face are very different than those adult writers face -- issues that have been mentioned in this thread so far, in fact. My experience with speaking to adult writers and children's writers has been very different, which to me has a lot to do with those things we do not have in common. So I didn't really ask why adult writers don't "get it" (actually I belong to SCBWI, which is my writing group, so they DO "get it"), I asked what the differences are and what you all, as fellow children's writers, struggle with.
Writing for kids isn't actually harder than writing for kids, but it definitely takes some different skills.
I'm guessing your second "kids" is supposed to be "adults", so I'll go with that.
And I entirely agree. I don't believe any kind of writing is harder than any other kind. Actually, I couldn't write a PB if you paid me, and have a lot of respect for those who can. The same goes for poetry. Some people tell me they're amazed that I can write novels. It's all difficult/fun/amazing for different reasons. So yeah, I entirely agree with you here.
For one thing, not everyone can really put themselves back in the mind of a kid. So they write from the perspective of a grown-up looking back fondly on the past--which feels phony or patronizing or boring to kids. Or they write from cliché, which is just as bad.
Once more, we come back to this theme... which just confirms to me that it is quite possibly the hardest part of being a kids' writer. How do you get back your own childhood? You can't, of course, but in order to truly write for kids, you have to get as close as possible, which isn't at ALL easy to do.
Another thing that I think is more of a challenge is the need to get right to the point. When I read an adult book like The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I am amazed at how much extraneous detail and backstory gets included. Kids want the story, the whole story, and nothing but the story. If it isn't important, move along.
Which makes certain genres a very big challenge. Science Fiction, I have found, is one of those genres. There is generally a lot of backstory to a SciFi story, and a lot of world-building as well. Of course, a writer doesn't want to put everything they know into a story, but what should be put in, and what should be left out? Another aspect of that difficulty is whimsy. At least for me. I adore whimsy, but I can't seem to quite get it right. Things still have to make SENSE for me... work for the plot and storyline... and whimsy is very difficult to do that with. It either ends up being gratuitous or confusing. Ugh.
