WRITING FOR CHILDREN: Know The Number One Ingredient

WRITING FOR CHILDREN: Know the Number One Ingredient

When writing for children, we must remember the number one thing is to LOVE WHAT WE ARE WRITING.

Trust me when I say that if you don’t love the story you are telling, it will show up on the page.  It will lack the heart that is necessary to connect with one of the toughest markets in all of publishing; middle grade fiction.

If you set out to make the best-seller list, you will most certainly fail. When you are……writing for children from a headspace that is trying to manipulate the outcome of your craft, it will show up as manipulation and again, you will fail.

When we are writing for children, we never hope it turns out to be terrible.  Every author gives it their best shot, but writing is hard.  A blank page continues to scare off would be writers every single day, which is why we MUST make sure to write from our hearts and not our heads. Write full out from the most deepest part of your soul and let the ‘taffy’ fall where it may.

A successful career when writing for children comes from the love your pour onto the page. When you do that, your readers take note and can actually feel the love you are giving away. When one person loves what you have done, they will tell someone how much they loved it. In turn, that person will tell someone about how much they loved your book.

When the dust clears of our fast food mentality in life, hopefully we can embrace the realization that only one thing in life rules: LOVE.  If you living your life from a place that is without love, you are missing the greatest adventure of all.  Life is ahead of us and it is our duty to run towards it with all the love we have.  It is our duty to share the love inside of our hearts with anyone who will listen.

If you find yourself with a sense of fear by putting yourself in a place of vulnerability, you are again missing the point of life. You might hear someone say that life isn’t a bed of roses. I don’t beg to differ, I KNOW IT IS. It is a place of imagination and wonder.

When you write for children, you must put on a show of hope! You must show your readers that life is indeed great, and greatness is attainable to those who are willing to go for it. You must not fight for it, because the energy behind your ‘fight’ simply places love outside of who you are. Instead, you must STAND for love. You must be love, and in the end, you must sit down and WRITE. FULL OUT.

Eric DelaBarre is an award-winning filmmaker and is the author of Saltwater Taffy: A novel of Adventure & Self-Discovery.  Copyright October 11, 2010 All Rights Reserved