Some people assume that writing for children is easy, but it is not really any easier than writing for adults. It has its own set of challenges.
Write for Children
Some people assume that writing for children is easy, but it is not really any easier than writing for adults. It has its own set of challenges.
by Laura Backes, Write4Kids.com - The Children's Writing SuperSite
I love my job. I get to spend entire days in the children's section of the book store and call it research. I also get to celebrate birthdays of people I've never met. We recently marked Maurice Sendak's 75th birthday, and the 40th birthday of his most famous child, Max from Where the Wild Things Are. So I took the opportunity to reacquaint myself with some of Sendak's impressive body of work, and to meet Brundibar, his newest picture book, written by Tony Kushner and based on a Czech opera of the same name.
Whether illustrating someone else's words or his own texts, Sendak could never be accused of taking the easy route to publication. His books are complicated, deeply emotional stories, with subtexts that often illuminate the dark side of human nature. In an interview appearing in the November/ December 2003 issue of The Horn Book Magazine, Sendak says "...we can get away with things in children's books that nobody in the adult world ever can because the assumption is that the audience is too innocent to pick it up. And in truth they're the only audience that does pick it up."
by Laura Backes, Publisher, Children's Book Insider, the Newsletter for Children's Writers
© Copyright 2001, Children's Book Insider, LLC
Dr. Seuss did it, and in the process changed the face of the publishing industry and became a beloved household name to children for several generations. So why do so many editors say they don't want stories written in rhyme?
Many beginning writers ask about this well-known submission "Don't". The truth is, some publishers do have a strict policy against rhyming stories - they simply don't publish them. But most would snap up a good rhyming story in seconds. The problem is that reading bad rhyme is like listening to nails on a
blackboard, and it's so easy to write bad rhyme. So if editors say they don't like stories in verse it's probably a way of discouraging the people who don't know what they're doing.
