Writing Tips
TIPS FOR FINDING IDEAS FOR YOUR CHILDREN'S STORIES - Patrick A. Davy
Perhaps, for the longest time, you have been thinking about writing a children’s story. After all, your elementary and high school teachers said you were a good creative writer. Each time those teachers gave your class writing assignments, you were always the first one to finish the assignments. When the teachers returned each assignment, you were sure to find an “A” or “A+” written in the upper right hand corner of the page and the word “Excellent” at the bottom or top of your literary masterpiece.
After your high school days, the good-writer title your
teachers gave you stayed with you through college. Your
professors and writing instructors sang your familiar good-writer praises. “There’s no turning back now,” you said. “One day I’ll become a children’s writer.”
When you had passed the college milestone and started to head for the children-writer finish line, you realized you needed to sharpen some of your writing skills. With this new realization, you stopped to take all the children’s writing courses and workshops you could afford.
With your acquired writing skills, you locked yourself in a quiet room and turned on your computer or grabbed your writing pad and pencil. You waited for ideas for your long desired children story to pop up in your head. Instead, you stared at the blank notepad or computer screen and started tapping the side of your head with your finger.
After five minutes of trying to tap ideas in your head, you still do not know how and where to start, what you hope will be, the next great children’s story since Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham. You scribbled on the notepad, crumpled the paper you had written on, and threw it in the wastebasket. If you are using a computer, you are likely to type a few words on the screen only to hit the backspace key several times.
You stared at a clock on the wall and realized since you sat down to write, thirty minutes had past. However, all you have in front of you is a wastebasket full of crumpled paper and a blank notepad or computer screen. You jumped up and walked up and down the street you lived on, hoping to jumpstart your writing engine.
You returned to your desk after treating yourself to yet another familiar view of the street on which your house is located. You cracked your knuckles, took a deep breath, and positioned yourself for your story to start pouring out of your fingertips. Suddenly, you felt as if you had never left. Your writing engine began to start and stop again.
If the examples above describe, in any way, what happens to you when you sit down to write a children’s story, I suggest the following four tips for finding ideas for your stories.
1. Use Your Life Experiences as a Child
Think about how you or someone you knew might have defeated a school bully who kept teasing and stealing from other children. How you or a childhood friend avoided a spanking for doing something wrong. For example, how did you explain or would explain arriving at school late four days in a row despite living a block away from school and leaving home thirty minutes early each day? Another childhood experience might be a child’s parents moving the family to another state or school district to start a new job. How did the child cope with leaving the school friends he or she had made over a six-year period and starting new friendships at his or her new school?
2. Read the Newspaper, Listen to the Radio, and Watch Television
Be on the lookout for newspaper, radio and television coverage of events and stories about children. Then play the what-if game with the stories. For example, your local newspaper reports on a local elementary school boy who ran the fastest one-hundred meter dash, for his age group, at the at a state sporting event. You play the what-if game by asking yourself what if the night before the event, the boy’s parents decided he would not participate in the racing event. His parents tell him he needs to study to retake an exam he had failed during his school’s last marking period. How does he convince his parents to let him take part in the racing event?
Although the punishment might seemed severe for an elementary school boy failing a test, what you would have done, by playing the what-if game, is create a conflict or problem for the boy to resolve. A conflict is what drives any good story. The protagonist or lead character must have something he or she must accomplish. The more problems and obstacles the lead characters face, in trying to reach their goals, the more interested readers will be in your stories.
Your stories should not only have conflicts just for having them, but the conflicts must be resolved, preferably toward the end of the stories. After all, the reader is looking to see how the characters get out of the predicaments you have created for them. It is also preferable that your children stories have favorable outcomes. Most preschool children up to beginning readers understand what they read as facts. Therefore, you want to leave them with a positive feeling.
3. Talk to Children Librarians
Children librarians can let you know what kinds of children stories and books are common among children authors. At a minimum, librarians can direct you to where you can examine the stories and books children are reading. From knowing what children are reading, you will be able to come up with story ideas that match your target audience.
4. Spend time with Children
Spend time studying children in the age group for which you wish to write. Observe the things they do and how they do it. Listen to how they speak (dialogue). Authentic dialogues add a sense of reality and believability to a story. Most important, listen to what children are talking about to get ideas that are basis for children’s stories.
So there you have it. You no longer have to crumple the pages of your notepad and toss them in the wastebasket when you sit down to write. Neither do you have to stare at a blank sheet of paper or computer screen. Rather, it is time for you to start writing that one-of-a-kind children’s story or book.
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