INTRODUCTION

So, you want to write stories for children. That is something that many people have dreamed of doing their whole lifetime. The children’s book industry is booming and publishers are always looking for fresh new content. This is a wonderful time to start.
I have been writing stories for children since I was about 12 years old. I am now in my late 40’s and I have written 900 children’s stories to date.

Writing for children can be both fun and profitable. It can be very rewarding and satisfying too.

Sitting in front of a blank computer screen or a blank sheet of paper is no fun. Don’t despair and don’t sit in front of that blank computer screen or blank sheet of paper for too long. The best way to get over this problem is to just jump right in. Start writing the first thing to comes to your mind. If your mind is blank as well, then we have problems, however these problems can be quickly overcome.

I have come up with ideas for more stories by looking around me, remembering my dreams from the night before, going to different places, picking a word out of my head and writing about it, watching people around me and especially watching and listening to children, my own life experiences.

“But, I’ve run out of ideas?” you might say. Guess what, I don’t think I have ever had that problem. Maybe I’m just lucky or maybe I’m gifted but I have never once ran out of an idea for a story.

“Where do you get your ideas?” you may ask.

Here are some ideas for you to consider:

1. Look around yourself at your surroundings. If you are on a subway, think to yourself about that man sitting across from you on the subway. He must have a story to tell. Where did that man come from? What is he doing on the subway? What is his life like? This idea brought forward a story for me called Subway Sam.

2. What did you child do that was cute or different this past week? I have written several stories based on something my children said or did that was cute or different. Jenny's Pet Dinosaur was based on some imaginary dinosaurs my daughter, Jenny, had when she was younger.

3. Have you ever gone on a trip or gone camping? Telling about your experiences on a trip and what you have seen is a wonderful idea writing a story. One such story that I wrote using this idea was The Troll Family Go Camping.

4. Take an idea or an event and twist it around. Everyone knows that the Easter Bunny is good but what would happen if he wasn’t good. That was the inspiration for my story, The Easter Bunny's Twin Brother.

5. Did you buy anything new lately? When I bought my new computer, I wrote a story about it called Travellin' Rick Buys a New Computer. These types of stories can serve as wonderful reference tools to others wanting to purchase the same thing.

6. What types of pets do you have? What types of pets have you owned previously? Animal stories can be wonderful stories to write about. I have written hundreds of stories on animals, some of which are, Fluffy and Misty and Thunder and Lightning.

7. If you just can’t seem to come up with anything from the suggestions above, think of a word and write a story based on this word. This has been the basis of many of my stories including Oatmeal and Peppermint.

Developing characters is an essential part of story writing. We need to know who is going to be in our stories in order to write them. I have written 900 children's stories to date and have several sets of characters that I use over and over again in my stories. These characters are:

· Fawn and Spot

· Billy Troll

· Racum Raccoon

· The Troll Family

In all of the stories that I have written, each character is different from the other. In Fawn and Spot, Fawn is a trouble-maker and Spot is more subdued. In Billy Troll, Billy tries to do make things right through his music. In Racum Raccoon, Racum is caring toward others and helps his friends not to get into trouble. In the Troll Family, family values are important.

Sometimes I write stories that won't appeal to any of these characters so I create a separate character just for it. I may never use that character again. One such character is Pirate Pete.

The fun part of our story writing is developing our characters. Story writing allows us to make up people from scratch. We can develop our characters to look a certain way, to act a certain way, to dress a certain way. We can do whatever we want to do with our characters. We can let our imagination run wild!

Developing characters to use in your stories is a fun, first step in creating a good children’s story. After all, characters are the focal point of any story. Without characters in your story you won’t have a story. In my story Fawn's Bad Mood, Fawn is very upset at first because he can't go to Nanny's birthday party. You will then notice that Fawn is caring toward Nanny and the whole reason that Fawn was upset was because he thought he wouldn't be able to see Nanny on her birthday.

When creating characters for your stories, you want characters that others can relate to. You want to make them real, with emotions and feelings. In my story Fawn and Nanny, there are a lot of emotions that Fawn uses in this story when Fawn learns that Nanny has passed away. Fawn becomes angry and then he cries his heart out because he misses Nanny terribly.

Fawn is loving as in the example of Fawn's Bad Mood. We also find that he is caring and considerate and has a bad temper. We also find that Fawn can be full of fun. However, Spot on the other hand, is more gentle and considerate. Spot has a lot of patience in dealing with Fawn and she does not want to see Fawn get into trouble.

Fawn and Spot were a lot of fun to create. When I get an idea for a story that includes something fun or silly, chances are I will probably use Fawn and Spot as the characters for that story. I have a host of other characters that I use in my stories. If I am trying to get a point across in my stories to be kind to others, I tend to use Racum Raccoon for those types of stories. If I want to do a story that is about music and singing, I will use my character Billy Troll. If I want to write a story about family values, I will probably use the Troll Family characters to write about.

When I develop characters for my stories there are several factors that I consider:

· Physical characteristics

· Mood/Attitude

· Outward appearance

· Likes/Dislikes

Your story might have one character or many characters. This is all up to you and how you want to develop your story. We have to decide what the character in our story is going to be like? To make our characters seem real in our story, our characters must have a life. Here are some important questions you can answer about the characteristics of your character. These questions will help you develop your character.

1. How old is our character?

2. Is our character a male or female?

3. Will our character be a person, an alien or even an animal?

4. What colour hair, or fur will our character have?

5. What type of clothing will our character wear?

6. Is our character tall or short?

7. Is our character healthy or ill?

8. Does our character have lots of friends or is our character shy?

9. What types of food does our character like?

10. Does our character wear glasses or contact lenses?

11. Where does our character live?

12. What nationality is our character?

13. Is our character nice or is our character mean?

14. Does our character go to school?

15. Is our character good in school?

16. Does our character like sports?

17. Do our characters have a family and if so, who are their family members?

18. What kind of hobbies does our character have?

A plot is a series of events that take place in a story. A plot can be suspenseful or even dramatic. There are several parts to a plot. We will take a look at these parts in detail below.

Conflict:

Conflict is a battle or a series of problems that will hopefully be cleared up at the climax of the story.

Complications:

Complications prevent the conflicts in the story from being cleared up right away.

Rising action:

The rising action is the part of the story where a conflict is just about to be solved as the story progresses toward the climax.

Climax:

The climax of the story is usually the place in the story where the conflicts are ready to be solved. The drama is intensified at the point in the story. The reader should be sitting at the edge of his seat.

Falling action:

Falling action is the part of the story right after the conflict has been resolved.

In my story Puggles, the conflict in this story starts when six year old Barbara spends more time with her computer than with Puggles, her favourite teddy bear. As the story progresses you will see that one of the complications of this story occur when Barbara is totally engrossed in her computer game and completely ignores Puggles. The rising action in this story occurs when Barbara goes over to her bookshelf and takes a book off the shelf but completely ignores Puggles. The climax of this story occurs when Barbara becomes sick and wants Puggles. The falling action of this story occurs as Puggles is now content in knowing that Barbara still loves him.

Some authors use a graph to plot out their story before they begin writing it. Take a look at the plot diagram below.

 THE USE OF DIALOGUE

Dialogue brings a story to life. Instead of just telling a story, using dialogue makes your characters real. Dialogue should show your character’s personality and shows what your character is thinking and feeling. Dialogue is very important to make your story come alive and being able to bring the story forward.

Writing dialogue may be difficult for some writers. Take a look at the diagram named dialogue below.

There are several different types of children’s writing. They are:

· Short Stories

· Picture Books

· Fiction

· Non-Fiction

Short Stories

Short stories for children are a lot of fun to write. Children love them because of the fact that they are short. A short story answers the following questions in a relatively short amount of time:

- Who

- What

- Where

- When

- Why

Most of the stories that I write are short stories.

Picture Books

Picture Books work very well for younger children, who are just learning to read. Young children can relate to the pictures they see in a picture book, sometimes making up their own stories to go along with the pictures they see. Picture books can spark the imagination of a young child. A lot of my stories would make wonderful pictures books if I had them illustrated.

Fiction

Fiction is a creation of the author’s imagination. Fiction is based totally on fantasy and not on real life events. An author, who writes fiction, can have a lot of fun writing these types of stories. The story can be based on whatever the author wants to base it on and the author is allowed to create worlds and characters that do not exist. Most of my stories are fiction.

Non-Fiction

Non-fiction is a story based on real life events. There are really two types of non-fiction stories. The first type being stories based on world or historic events and the other type based on something that happens in your own life. Most of the non-fiction stories that I write are based on events that occur in my own life.

Children’s writing seems to come alive with the proper illustrations. If you are both an author and an illustrator, then you have it made. I consider myself to just be an author. I have illustrated a couple of my own stories, though. Please take a look at the diagram entitled Neon Cop below.

It is not the best illustration in the world, but it will serve its purpose. For those who just don’t have any artistic talent in them, there are a couple of alternatives for you to think about.

1. You could hire an artist to create illustrations for you.
2. You could use royalty-free clipart for your illustrations.
3. Try to illustrate your story yourself.

The internet is an excellent place to look if you want to hire an illustrator for your work and there are lots of excellent places on the internet to look for royalty-free clipart.

If you just don’t have the money to hire an artist and clipart doesn’t appeal to you, you could always try drawing yourself. There are several websites that have drawing courses that would teach you how to draw. What I did, when I drew the above illustration is closed my eyes and tried to picture the scene in my mind that I wanted to draw. Once I could see it clearly enough, then I would take my pencil and paper and start to draw. Try it and see what you come up with. Have fun and don’t hold back.

If you know that you cannot draw, no matter what, don’t worry about it. If you are going to submit your story to a publisher, chances are the publisher will be able to match your story up with someone who can do a really good job of illustrating it. 

Now that you have written your story, edited and/or rewritten it, you can now start thinking about publishing your story. There are two options available to you. You can try to publish your story with a publishing house or, you can self-publish your work.

With self-publishing, you have several publishing options available to you. They are:

1. create an ebook

2. create a website containing your stories – you can see my website at www.bedtymetales.com

3. self-publish your stories in a paperback booklet form

4. create an online magazine to self-publish your stories in

5. create a CD-ROM with your stories on it

The internet has made it so easy for anyone to be able to self-publish their work in several different formats. Once you have decided on the format that you are going to create, you can then setup your own online store to sell your work in. For an example of what you can do with a store please take a look at mine at www.sparkysbooks.com.

Create an eBook

It is very easy to create an eBook. You can either use HTML or PDF format. eBooks are wonderful because you can setup them up so that when someone orders them they can be downloaded instantly. There is nothing to ship so you can sell your ebook for less money.

Create a Website

Websites containing children’s stories are very popular. My website receives approximately 50,000 hits per month. Websites can be a lot of fun to create too. If you are not web-savvy, there are a lot places on the internet that would create a website for you for a reasonable fee. One word of advice though, shop around to get the best website designed for you for the best price.

Booklet Form

With the advances in computer equipment these days, it is very easy to self-publish your stories in booklet form. All you need is a word processor, a colour printer, card stock paper, long reach stapler and a paper cutter. All of these items can be purchased at your local office supply store relatively cheap.

Online Magazine

Online Magazines can be a lot of fun to create. You can have many different kinds of material in your magazine such as stories, puzzles, riddles and quizzes. You can set your online magazine up as a web page and sell subscriptions to it.

Create a CD-ROM

You can easily create a CD-ROM with your stories on it. You can do this by using HTML or PDF. If you don’t know too much about HTML or PDF, you can easily find someone to do this for you. You can add your CD-ROM titles to your online bookstore.

What! More work you say! Yes, I’m sorry, but editing and rewriting are all part of the process of writing.

Editing

As far as editing is concerned, you should check your writing for spelling, grammar and sentence structure. I find the best way to edit my stories for spelling is to use the spell check in a word processing program. I find that this method will catch most of the spelling errors. After using the spell check, I will print the story out and then read the story over to see if I have missed any spelling errors. It is always easier to catch spelling errors if they are right in front of you in black and white. It is always a good idea to read your story aloud. This will help you to catch a lot of grammatical errors. You should also get someone else to read your story over and to have them point out to you any further spelling or grammatical errors that you may have missed.

Rewriting

I’m going to let you in on a little secret and what I’m about to tell you will probably blow the top off every writer in the world. This is a well-guarded secret but I feel important that I should share it with you. Okay, here it is: I have never rewritten any of my children’s stories. Yes, you read that correctly. I believe that I have a gift given me from God. When I sit in front of my computer, laptop or pocket pc and start writing, the words flow from my fingertips to my keyboard. After reading my story over and proofing it for spelling and grammatical errors, I put it away until I am ready to use it. It doesn’t need rewriting. Now, I’m not saying that your stories don’t need to be rewritten. They may in fact have to be. Rewriting can be destructive to some stories. Be careful when you are rewriting that you don’t disturb the original flow of your story.

The best way to go about rewriting your story, is to read your story over carefully and see if there is any parts of your story that are weak. Maybe the main character does not seem to be a strong character in the story. Maybe you need to explain a situation more clearly. Maybe you need to use more dialogue in your story. Remember not to take away from the original flow of your story, though.

Publishing a children’s book can be hard work but it is very rewarding. There are three easy steps to getting your children’s book published.

1. Submit a query

2. Submit your manuscript

3. Waiting for your royalty cheque

Submit a Query

By submitting a query to a publisher you are advising the publisher of the type of book that you would like to write. This way you can actually see if a publisher would publish the type of book you want to write before actually writing the whole book. When submitting a query don’t forget to include a sample chapter or two.

Submit your Manuscript

Once the publisher has agreed to your query, you can submit your manuscript to the publisher. Make sure that your manuscript is typed clearly and neatly. Make sure that you package your manuscript securely when sending it by mail. The best way to send a manuscript is to send it in a cardboard box with a lid on it.

Waiting for your Royalty Cheque

The best part about publishing your book is the royalty cheque. This makes all the effort of writing the book worth while.