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Writing for Young Readers!
WRITING FOR YOUNG READERS This course will focus on writing juvenile novels, that is, fiction books for readers too old for picture books and too young for adult novels. This is a wide age range, from about seven or eight to older teens. Writing picture books is very different from writing for older children; in fact, most picture books are written by artists rather than writers because, by definition, in picture books more than half of the story is told by pictures, not text. Some have no text at all, and others have very sparse text. I’ve never written picture books so I wouldn’t presume to tell others how to do it. Our aim is books for older children, middle or upper elementary grades, middle school, junior high, or high school. This field is often overlooked by beginning authors, but it shouldn’t be. These books are such fun to write and easier to get published than either picture books or adult novels. There is less competition. They can be about almost any subject, any interest you might have, any hobby or sport. They can be fantasy, sci-fi, biographies, historical novels, animal stories, or mysteries—it’s wide open. In this course, we’ll take a close look at the characteristics needed for a good juvenile novel, and at the three necessities for writing a salable book. We’ll look at construction, plot, and lengths appropriate for various age levels. We’ll talk about creating characters, writing believable dialogue, and blocking your book out into scenes and chapters. I’ll nag you about the more common mistakes made by beginning juvenile authors. Grammar goofs and punctuation pitfalls will also be red-flagged. We’ll look at the process of getting published, what to expect once your book is sold, whether to use an agent or go it alone, and what the bunny-eat-bunny world of children’s literature is like. At the risk of tooting my own trumpet, I should point out that many who write how-to books or courses or speak at workshops and symposiums, may not actually be very successful in their fields. I wrote juvenile novels as a fulltime profession for more than thirty years until I retired exhausted but happy. I had eighty-one books notched up on my desk leg, most in print for many years. You can find at least a few of them in almost any public library although the first was published forty years ago. Several have won major literary awards, many were published abroad, and a satisfying number made the American Library Association’s Best Books list. One was a Disney TV movie and has been continuously in print for more than thirty years. To view a list of Lynn’s published books, |
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