Writing for Children

NANOWRIMO SUCCESS PART 1 - PREPARE

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is about to start. Every November, writers from around the world set out with the goal of writing a novel, about 50,000 wor…

TIPS FOR YOUR MYSTERY OPENING CHAPTERS

The first page of your mystery needs to intrigue your reader. It has to pull them in and make them wonder what’s going on or who did it. Today we bring you tips…

PLANTING CLUES

You’re in a race with your readers. The readers are trying to guess what will happen. You’re trying to spring that ‘whodunnit’ on the readers before they guess. Who will win? Those rea…

INTERVIEW WITH KATE MILFORD

Kate Milford is the New York Times bestselling author of The Thief Knot, as well as Greenglass House (winner of the Edgar award for juvenile literature, long-listed for th…

PLANNING YOUR NOVEL

At any time you speak to a writer, they may easily be either planning a novel, writing a novel, or revising a novel. Always. And sometimes a writer could be doing more than one of…

FOR THE LOVE OF GENRE

Anyone who has been writing for children for any length of time knows that folks have a tendency to see writers for children as dabblers and writers for adults as real writers. …

REAL SPEECH FOR REAL PEOPLE

Today’s episode is adapted from one of our lessons in the Shape, Write, Sell Your Novel course. This course will work with middle grade and YA novels as well as adult nove…

INTERVIEW WITH JAMIE K. SCHMIDT

Today’s guest expert is USA Today Bestselling romance novelist Jamie K. Schmidt, who also blogs for us on occasion. Jamie writes contemporary love stories and paranorm…

8 STEPS TO PERFECT DIALOGUE FORMAT

Formatting dialogue in any manuscript can be perplexing. This rebroadcast of a popular episode has 8 guidelines to make your dialogue the best it can be.

Let a o…

HOW STRUCTURED IS YOUR PICTURE BOOK?

One of the major problems editors encounter when reading picture book submissions is the lack of plot, or even purposeful organization. Today’s podcast is inspire…

BECOME YOUR OWN EDITOR

Today’s episode is an excerpt from our Writing for Children and Teens course at the Institute of Children’s Literature. The course consists of 10 assignments designed to help y…

COMMA LONG WITH ME

I admit I love punctuation. I love all the little rules surrounding periods, commas, and quotation marks. Maybe it’s because my mom was a professional editor, maybe it’s the added …

INTERVIEW WITH EDITOR PAULA MORROW

Although Paula Morrow has written more than 70 books and hundreds of magazine pieces (fiction, nonfiction, and poetry), she considers her main talent to be editing.…

BASIC STORY ELEMENTS

Today, we’re discussing three basic story elements: characters, setting, and theme. Learn how they all work together to help you tell a complete story in this rebroadcast of a po…

INTERJECTING HUMOR INTO YOUR WORK

We constantly hear that agents and editors are looking for humor. If they don’t say “humor” outright, we hear it in words like “quirky” and “whimsical.” So how do yo…

HOW TO WRITE FUNNY

Is laughter really the best medicine?

I don't know, but I do suspect that laughter is a great way to get published. If you spend much time listening to acquiring editors or librari…

PLAYING FAIR WITH PLOT

Good stories have lots of moving parts. Inspired by an article from our own Jan Fields, this episode challenges us to get all the parts to come together in a way that works.

Ma…

INTERVIEW WITH NANCY COFFELT

Author/illustrator Nancy Coffelt began her career as a fine artist, but when she found that the titles of her whimsical works were getting longer and longer AND longer, s…

PACING 101

You hear the word all the time from teachers, critiquers, and editors. “Nice brisk pace.” “Kind of slow, pick up the pace”. “I like it, but the pace is a bit slow in the middle.” So what t…

VOICE

You may feel like you are struggling to find it. The first step in succeeding is realizing that it isn’t as far away as you might think. “Relax. Know that you already have a distinctive voice,”…