Writing for Kids

16 Articles with Invaluable Tips for Writing for a Young Audience

The following articles by Laura Backes of cover 16 important considerations and useful navigation when writing books for children.

Learn from this Children's Book Insider expert invaluable tips and techniques for writing for a young audience, including special topic considerations, trends, research, and marketing — plus excellent instruction on general writing, story development, and editing skills. Read more of Laura's blogs and articles at write4kids.com.

Researching the Market
By Laura Backes
My systematic, three-part approach to researching the market, which works for book and magazine publishers.

Understanding Children's Writing Genres
By Laura Backes
A definitive glossary of children's publishing genres.

A Look at Current Trends
By Laura Backes
In the constantly-changing world of children's book publishing, it's often hard to keep up with what's hot.

Turn Personal Struggles into Books for Children
By Laura Backes
Tips to keep in mind when creating and selling books based on real-life events.

Tips for Writing Mysteries
By Laura Backes
Mysteries are very popular with middle grade readers. They are generally fast-paced stories that build self-confidence by allowing the reader to solve the crime.

Writing Great Beginnings
By Laura Backes
When an editor opens up the envelope containing your manuscript and begins to read, you have 10 seconds to get her attention.

Writing About Controversial Subjects
By Laura Backes
After the Columbine shootings, I wrote that, as writers, one thing we can do is realize that all kids deal with pressures and problems that we never faced growing up, and we should make a greater effort to address this in middle grade and young adult literature.

Characters and Point of View
By Laura Backes
The point of view — how you choose to tell your story — determines the voice of your writing.

Working with Cause & Effect
By Laura Backes
Successful fiction is dependent on a logical progression of cause and effect. In real life nothing happens in a vacuum; feelings are a response to an event, action is followed by reaction.

Great Fiction Comes from Writing Lightly
By Laura Backes
Great fiction appears effortless to the reader. The characters and setting are so real, the story so believable, that the reader is completely unaware of the author behind the words.

A Common Pitfall — Expository Dialogue
By Laura Backes
Dialogue adds to the narrative by allowing your characters to speak for themselves. It's not simply narrative surrounded by quotation marks.

Eliminating Lazy Writing
By Laura Backes
In order to make your manuscript rise above the rest, you not only need an enticing story and vivid characters, but your prose must be solid and fresh.

Tips for Developing an Original Voice
By Laura Backes
A story without a strong voice does not come alive for the reader, does not touch the reader's imagination. ... Voice is the simplest writing technique to learn, because it's already in you.

Eliminating Passive Writing
By Laura Backes
Passive Writing is common pitfall, one so insidious that it even pops up in the writing of very experienced authors from time to time.

Writing Powerful Endings
By Laura Backes
Tips for leaving readers of your story with a satisfying conclusion by writing powerful endings.

Editing Secrets
By Laura Backes
Checking your basic grammar and spelling are of course important, but authors need to go beyond surface editing if their work has a chance of catching an editor's eye.

Updated 1/5/14