The Hardest Books to Write
True children’s books are some of the hardest books to write. Making a story engaging to a child takes a rare talent. Anyone who thinks it’s easy has never tried.Share on X
Children’s books are some of the hardest books in the world to write.
This surprises people, because the books are short and the words are simple, so how hard could it be? Brutally hard, as it turns out. Writing a story that engages a child, that holds the attention of a young reader who bores easily and has no obligation to be polite about it, takes a special talent that not every good writer has.
A child will put your book down the instant it stops being fun, and they’ll never tell you why. That’s a tougher audience than most adults will ever face.
So I’ll be fair about my own work. Most of what I’ve written for young readers sits at the low to middle end of young adult, short of true children’s books. And there’s a reason for that, and that reason is the most useful thing I can tell an aspiring writer on this particular day.
Watch: It's International Children's Book Day, WCCO - CBS Minnesota
Young Adult Is the More Writable Cousin
Young adult is much more writable than children’s books. The audience is closer to adult readers, so the craft you already have transfers. Children’s books need a special gift.Share on X
Here’s the distinction that matters. Young adult is far more writable than a true children’s book.
YA readers are closer to adult readers in what they want. They can handle real plot, real stakes, real character development, and longer, more complex stories.
The craft you’ve built writing for adults mostly transfers. You still have to know your audience, keep the pacing tight, and respect their intelligence, but you’re working with tools you already own.
A real children’s book, the kind aimed at a young child, asks for something different and rarer, the ability to be simple without being dull, to hold a small child rapt with very little. That’s a particular gift, and I respect the people who have it because I know how hard it is.
If you want to write for young people, my honest advice is to start where the craft transfers. Start with young adult. You can grow into the harder end of the spectrum later if it calls you, but there’s no shame in writing for the audience where your existing skills work.
How I Got Into It
My path into young adult writing started, like a lot of my work, with a client.
A client came to me wanting a low-end young adult book about a stuffed animal that travels through the internet. I thought it was a great idea, so I wrote it and delivered it. She never took it any further, she’s a busy woman and life moved on. That happens more often than people think in this business. A good book gets written and then sits because the person who commissioned it ran out of time.
But the concept stuck with me. So I took the same core idea, an animal moving through the digital world, and built my own series out of it, different enough to be entirely my own work instead of a copy of the job I’d done for her. That became the Wild Tiger series. That’s a normal and honest way these things happen. A concept sparks something, and you develop your own version into something new. The client got her book. I got a series.
Nobody’s idea got stolen, because an idea worked into your own distinct execution becomes yours.
Learn From the Master of the Form
When I started writing for younger readers, I didn’t wing it. I studied the best teacher available, and for young adult, that’s the Goosebumps author, R.L. Stine.
He wrote a guide to writing for young readers, and it’s excellent. I read it three or four times, because the man has sold hundreds of millions of books to exactly the audience I was trying to reach, and you don’t argue with results like that. His method is refreshingly practical. Think out the title first, then build the plot to fit it. Know your ending before you write the first sentence. Picture a specific reader of the right age and write directly to them.
Keep the pace relentless, because a young reader won’t wait around for you to get interesting. None of it is mystical. It’s craft, broken into steps you can follow, and it works.
If you’re serious about writing for young readers, find that kind of teacher and study them hard. The instinct to just sit down and write a kids’ book because the words are short is exactly the instinct that produces bad ones. Writers build the good ones on technique, and you can learn the technique from people who have mastered it.
Why It Is Worth the Trouble
Writing for young readers is harder than it looks, so why bother? Because of what books do for young people, which I know firsthand.
The right book at the right age can change a child’s life. It can be the escape, the friend, the door to a bigger world, the thing that turns a kid into a lifelong reader. I’m the product of exactly that, a child who found in books a way out and a way through. Every writer who manages to engage a young reader is potentially doing for some kid what books once did for me. That’s worth the difficulty.
My own young reader books, from the Wild Tiger series to standalone stories like The Boy Who Owned the Wind and The Girl Who Hated Miracles, exist because I believe the effort matters, even when the writing is hard.
How do you mark International Children’s Book Day?
Get a book into a young reader’s hands. That’s the heart of the day. Read to a small child, hand a novel to a teenager, or donate to a program that puts books in front of kids who don’t have many. You won’t always know which book becomes the one that matters, so give generously and let the right one find its reader.
If you write, or want to, take the day as an invitation to try the hardest, most rewarding audience there is. Start with young adult if that’s where your craft fits, study someone who has mastered the form, and respect the difficulty instead of underestimating it. Writing for young readers is a real discipline, and the writers who do it well are doing some of the most important work in publishing.
April 2 is a good day to take that work seriously, whether you’re reading these books or trying to write one.