On May 6, 2011, welliewalks wrote, How do you go about writing short stories or children’s books (children as in ages 7-9)? I like writing loooong stories and novellas because I can take a while to develop (and “solve” it) the plot and add more details. I feel like short stories can’t have a complicated plot because it would take longer to write them. Does anyone have advice on writing short stories and kid’s books?
And Emma wrote, I’m writing what I thought was a children’s book, and I’m realizing it may not be for the age I expected. It involves things like court trials, attacks from other nations, espionage, etc., granted the good guys always win. How much is too much for little kids? How much can the different age groups handle?
And more from Emma (or from a different Emma) two months later: I got a book about publishing with 30 pages of writing contests for amateur novelists, and it’s great, except for one thing; almost all of them must be short stories, and all of them have word limits, but I’m a very long-winded writer. How do you deal with word limits, and what details should you cut?
In answer to Emma’s second question, Charlotte wrote, I thought I’d weigh in on the word limits thing because I have had some experience in this. I’ve done several 500-word stories for the sake of writing contests, and I also had word limits on a lot of the scholarship essays I did the year I graduated high school. The thing about working with a limit is that every word and every sentence counts a lot more than in a longer piece. You’re free to get picky with your adjectives, because you want to get ones that give you a strong sense of the setting in place of a long description. I find that my words are a lot more vivid in my short stuff, probably because with something that small, you can easily go over it about 300 times before submitting it, combing out the unnecessary words, changing adjectives around and changing them back, etc., etc. Always keep in mind exactly how many words you’re at and how many you have left–Microsoft Word will tell you, and if you print your story off (I do a lot of my best editing manually), write the number at the top and keep track of what you take off and what you add on. Knowing what your budget is can help you decide what you can keep and what needs to go.
Along that same line, the plot itself obviously can’t be that long in a short story. Judging by a lot of the short stories I’ve read in school, etc., this is more of a genre that focuses on one event or emotion or aspect of life, rather than being a series of events like a novel is. There are a million and one different ways of writing a short story where all the action consists of the protagonist making herself a cup of coffee, or walking around her house, etc. It’s what’s going through her mind that makes it great. What I guess I’m trying to say is that short stories are more mood-driven than plot-driven–that’s why it’s a different genre–so the details that don’t contribute well to the mood and theme of the story are the ones to drop.
Excellent advice!
If you like inventing many scenes and building a story slowly, the short story may not be for you, but it’s worthwhile to try something new. As for detail, although you have fewer scenes, you still want richness so the reader can enter them fully, and you still want to portray rounded characters. You’ll need setting, but maybe not more than one or two, and dialogue, and thoughts, and action, all the facets of longer fiction. You can be long-winded in a short-winded way.
Along the same lines as Charlotte’s comment, trimming excess words, sentences, paragraphs, pages tightens the work. When I revise even a novel, I delete. And when I return to one of my books for one reason or another after it’s been published, I always find more I wish I had cut. When I go over the blog post before moving ahead with it, I use my knife. If writing short stories makes you a more concise writer of long stories, that’s a big benefit.
Although I don’t read many short stories, I’ve had a few published in anthologies for children anyway. In spite of my bad example, I’d suggest you read short stories, a bunch of them, to get a feel for their scope and economy. If you have a word limit, like 500 words, which is very short, I’d read a collection or two of short short stories (which there are). By reading you gain an intuitive sense of the genre, which will come through when you start writing.
My stories have ranged from ten to twenty-five pages, which is much more than 500 words. However, I’ve written narrative poems in fewer words, and in them, as in the short story, compression is key. One poem (not written for children) is about a modern-day Cassandra attempting and failing to warn a class of fourth graders about the troubles that lie ahead for each of them. The reader sees them listen and believe and then forget the moment they leave Cassandra’s tent at the state fair. That’s it, but the reader knows that each child will suffer as Cassandra said and that Cassandra suffers already from knowing she couldn’t help. The poem is 300 words long, and a short story could do the same thing, and so could a 600-page novel. In the novel we would see the dismal future played out for each child, but that isn’t necessary to convey the meaning.
My poem centers on an idea, but it could focus on a character, which many short stories do. There will be fewer characters in a short story than a novel, but they should still be well developed.
An important aspect of many novels (discussed in a long-ago blog) is character change or failure to change, a feature shared by many short stories. In the poem I described, the characters fail to change, which makes it sad. My novels focus outward on the world, usually a fantasy world. My short stories have a narrow field of vision, family or a few friends. In one, for example, the main character comes to understand and accept that her parents are more involved with her sister, who constantly creates problems. All that happens is that the main gets the lead in the class play and the sister threatens to change religions. In a single scene the reader sees the family in action.
An analogy might be an oven (the novel) versus a pressure cooker (the short story). In the oven the ingredients cook gradually while in the pressure cooker the boiling point is unnaturally high and comes fast. Another analogy might be a house versus a tree. In a house, many posts support the weight of the roof; with a tree, a single trunk holds up the canopy of leaves. In the novel, many incidents build to the climax; in the short story very few, and each one must bear a lot of weight.
On to writing for children. A reference book you may want to read is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Children’s Books by Harold Underdown, which, alas, didn’t exist when I got started. The book I read and went back to again and again is How to Write a Children’s Book and Get It Published by Barbara Seuling. Both are excellent.
I also read tons of kids’ books, including the books in the Newbery bookcase at my library and the new novels that were generating a lot of buzz. Later, when my editor asked me to write The Princess Tales as chapter books she sent me sample chapter books to read and study. (My favorite was Is He a Girl? in the Marvin Redpost series by Louis Sachar of Holes fame.) If you want to write for seven-to-nine year olds, read the books they’re reading, which covers a lot of ground. Some seven-year-olds read Ella Enchanted and Harry Potter. Some nine-year-olds read Junie B. Jones.
My education as a children’s book writer also included taking classes, joining critique groups, attending conferences, and joining the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. It was a process that took nine years to earn me my first book acceptance.
Some people – no one reading this blog, I’m sure – think writing for kids is easy. These people, I believe, have forgotten what it was like to be a child, how complicated it was, maybe more complicated than being an adult. Kids have to negotiate at least two universes, the world of adults and the world of their peers and possibly a third, the world of school, and all the while learning at an incredible pace, learning not only school subjects but the everyday science of being human.
Because of this complexity, children can handle the kinds of topics Emma asks about, such as “court trials, attacks from other nations, espionage, etc.” In fact, many kids are drawn to high drama and like to watch stories played out on a grand stage. I think that’s why children enjoy fairy tales and fantasy, because the events are huge, involving royalty and kingdoms, love, jealousy, rage, death.
The biggest difference between children’s and adult literature is the age of the main character. In a kids’ book the main will be a child, usually a little older than the reader. Occasionally the main will be an animal. Of course the reason is that the child can more easily identify with a child than with an adult.
I don’t mean to minimize the differences between books for children and books for grownups. I’m teaching my summer workshop for kids now, and each week I’ve been reading a poem aloud to them. It’s been a challenge to find the right poem, not because of subject matter but because of tone and sophistication and sometimes language. If I say that children can’t handle sophistication, it wouldn’t be entirely true, but we have to develop an ear for what succeeds and what doesn’t, which we do by reading and by writing and trying what we’ve written out on writing buddies and friends. Not necessarily by trying our stuff out on kids, who may be too polite, who may not know what standards to apply, who may be too forgiving.
And there are differences between writing for teens and writing for younger children. You can go darker with teens and more psychological. I’m distinguishing between dark and sad. Sad works with the elementary school crowd, dark not so much. Young kids understand the death of Bambi’s mother in Bambi, while the meaning of Hamlet’s indecisiveness and eventual death might elude them.
As for psychological, I once asked my workshop students to write a self-portrait, not only of their looks but also of their inner qualities. Those over eleven loved the assignment; those under couldn’t do it, and I had them write a portrait of a best friend instead, and that they enjoyed. Older kids like to look within. Younger children focus out.
Sometimes the author herself doesn’t know who her proper audience is. When my friend Suzanne Fisher Staples wrote her first novel, the wonderful Shabanu, she thought she was writing for adults until her editor told her she wasn’t, and the book went on to win a Newbery honor in 1989. Suzanne isn’t the only writer to whom this has happened. I’ve heard similar stories, and the people at HarperCollins thinks my book of mean poems, Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It (out next March), may appeal to adults as well as to children, but I thought I was writing it strictly for kids. So we can be surprised.
These are the prompts I was given (and remember) for the short stories I’ve written. See what you do with them:
• A character on the edge (not specified what kind of edge).
• A brush with religion.
• A mystery or mysterious story.
• A wish.
• A grandmother story.
I was also asked to write a story about menstruation. I came up empty on that one, but you may have more success.
Have fun, and save what you write!