Writing a Children's Book

Lesson 6: Writing the Middle.

Challenges, Choices and Chances Continued.

Word of Warning

Despite the terrible choices YA and SCB characters sometimes have to make, most editors (and most writers) avoid producing children’s books that end in utter hopelessness. The fairytale saviours such as rich uncles and restored fortunes and reclaimed long-lost parents are out of fashion, so you should avoid painting your characters into a corner from which they have no chance. Sometimes, characters end up sadder-but-wiser, and sometimes they end up dead. Often they seem worse off at the end of the book than they were at the beginning, but they should always have something in compensation.

In "Trinity Street", Gerhardt’s world has crashed down and Tell has lost her best friend, her family and her century, but against that they have each gained something. They have one another, Tell has been saved from a hideous lingering death and Gerhardt has done what he could to right the wrongs to which his ignorance contributed.

The biggest challenges and choices in a book need not be physical. Sometimes a moral dilemma can seem insurmountable. Will a protagonist betray one friend or the other? Sacrifice a friend/relative to save him/herself? Support a friend who is wrong against an enemy who is right? Take the easy way even when it’s dishonest? Shield a friend who has done something terrible?

The second stream of the book is the stream of character.

In most trade/mainstream children’s books, characters change and develop in the course of a story. Strengths and weaknesses of personality emerge, strengthen and weaken. Characters develop confidence, trust, cynicism or despair.

If character development is to be an important part of your narrative, you need to keep it under control. Your characters should react as themselves to every choice or challenge, but different challenges can bring out different facets of personality.

If your character stream is about the deconstruction of an apparently solid personality, you need to give some thought to how and why events will undermine that person.

If your protagonist is growing in strength, you need to know why.

In some books, one personality grows while another fails, so you might need to look at how one set of circumstances can benefit one personality while weakening another.

Character growth or disintegration tends to be faster and/or more extreme in single title books rather than in series. In some long-running series characters remain reasonably static. Protagonists are introduced in the first book and remain much the same until the end.

“The Orange Outlaw”, not only a JCB, but also a book in a long-running series, may be an example of this. There will be more about series and series characters in Lesson 7.

The third stream of the book is theme.

The theme is enmeshed in character and plot, and many character passages and incidents in the plot will illustrate or enlarge on it. Since theme is something that can appear almost automatically in a story, it isn’t always easy to control.

In some cases, it seems to work better if you deal with theme in the second draft, after you have had a chance to read the first draft and see what is already in place.

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