Children's Books Writing Ideas

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Laura Turner and today we are going to talk about some ideas for how to write children's books. Depending on what you want to write, everything is going to change but I want to give you just a few ideas to help get you started in figuring out what you want to write about in your children's books. The first thing is to think about what age you are going to write it for. Are you going to be writing for preschoolers, just learning how to read. Or sort of the more advanced middle school kids and things like that. That will greatly influence what you are going to write. The second thing to think about is how you are going to market your books. Since this is a huge world with many writers all trying to write the same thing, try to figure out how you can make your books attractive. Can you make a series of books based around the same idea or character. For example, you know Tom the cat makes friends, right. And then Tom the cat has, goes on a field trip. Sort of teaching children lessons about life, pertinent to their age group. Ok the next thing to think about is are you going to write about, about kids for kids or are you going to write about say animals for kids. Children are very imaginative and they really enjoy to see things that are different then the real world around them. And a lot of children's books like for example, The Wind and the Willows, contains characters, that are very well illustrated in the back here, who have human like qualities but are actually animals. See we have ratty and toad and Mr. badger. So think about how you can sort of personify your characters as animals. Roverandom is another good book to read by Tolkien, he wrote Lord of the Rings. About a dog who goes on an adventure to the moon. Ok. And then think also about how you can market your book with illustrations. We have lots of illustrations in Wind and the Willows that I'll show you. And always think about illustrating the most dramatic moments of your story. Ok this is toad hanging from the chandelier. And also Tolkien illustrated his own books so think about how you can market yourself as a children's book writer if you can actually do the illustrations all yourself. Rather then getting someone hired to do them for you. As we'll look at these. Ok. So hopefully that will get you started and have fun writing."