The Children’s Writer’s Biggest Challenge — How to Write a Child-Centred Story

Why you won’t get your children’s story published until you can achieve this

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

“I’d love to write a children’s book.” I hear people say this a lot, and I see many different kinds of manuscripts as an editor and critique. A majority are picture books, but I also critique novels for different ages. The one issue I see with most of them is that the perspective or tone of the story is too “adult”.

This is a fault (I use the word “fault” to mean that it’s a barrier to publication) that can be hard to pin down or explain. We were all children once, but not everyone remembers their childhood in a way that can be recreated in children’s books. Most adults tend to write children’s stories in one of two ways. They either try to write the kinds of books they loved as children, or they try to write a story based on their idea of what a child is like. Neither approach gets inside a child’s perspective or world view in a way that will engage a child reader.

Kids are clever. They can sense being talked down to, or lectured to, and they can sense an adult “faking it” on paper within a couple of pages. They might not be able to say why they don’t like a story, but it’s usually the tone or voice. On the other hand, one of…