February Experiment: Writing Children and Children's Fiction (Patreon)

Big and Small: Writing for Children

Greetings from the Mad Fiction Laboratory! As I write to you, Schrodinger’s Storm bears down upon us—we are warned by the weather service that ALL THE SNOW is coming to dunk on us, and yet, the actual weather report predicts a mild couple of inches. No one knows what to expect, but for some reason every business is closing like Jadis, the White Witch is coming to town. We are meant to be hardy and tough here in Maine, and yet, fear is on the wind. 

Not I, of course. Snow your worst.

This month, I thought I would drill down (see? Drill down? I did a business speak!) into one of the most common issues I’m asked when I am out and about talking about myself and smiling politely when people have more of a comment than a question: the difference in writing for adults versus writing for children. 

The world of children’s publishing is very different today than it was when I was growing up—in that it is a world. With continents and zones and climate and vast diversity of flora and fauna. I spent most of my career writing for adults, only to have a middle grade hit on my hands, and suddenly found myself expected to speak on the features of this world as though I was born there.

The truth is, I have proceeded through children’s publishing much as I did adult publishing—bumblingly, writing what I felt was important to write, mashing every button I could find like I was playing some new Streetfighter game and hoping for a combo. 

But I have learned a few things to cling to.

Some of it is easy: simplify vocabulary and particularly sentence structure. The very first YA story I ever wrote was completely horrific in subject matter, involving parent/child cannibalism and other wholesome fairy tale tropes. I was sure they would reject it. But my editors loved the story—they just asked me to go through and remove some commas so that my sentences were all single-clause. Almost any subject matter beyond hardcore sex is permissible in middle-grade and YA these days. Multi-clause sentences, however, must be used sparingly. 

While I do simplify my vocabulary for writing middle-grade, I refuse to do it too much. WORDS ARE FINE THEY ARE NOT SCARY. Children come across words they don’t understand every day because they are literally still learning English. They learn by coming across these words. It’s not hard to find out what they mean or sort it out from context—that is what young readers do just to get through a day in their lives. I won’t talk down or pretend that my readers aren’t as intelligent because some of them can’t yet buy a beer. Beer is overrated. Language is not. That said, it’s key to make words that may be new clearer with context, and to present words you absolutely know a child won’t understand (like, oh, let’s say katabasis, I think the worst word I have inflicted on small humans) as something to be learned right here and now rather than to be already acquired, by, for example, having a character in the story learn it as well. Nevertheless, children are capable of much more than we give them credit for—and we are extremely inconsistent with that credit. We think nothing of giving a kid Alice in Wonderland or Wind in the Willows, despite both those books containing vocabularies and Latin puns far beyond the reading level of most contemporary adults OKAY I REALLY CARE ABOUT THIS ISSUE BREATHE CAT BREATHE.

Sexuality is something that has become very acceptable in YA (oh boy, it was not when I was a teenager, but the fact is, when I was a teenager, YA as a concept barely existed. I went from The Hobbit to Stephen King with no stops in between) and as long as you’re not too graphic, or you use a metaphor like I don’t know I’ll just pick something out of the blue let’s say vampires, you’re fine. You are emphatically not fine in middle-grade. Love, sexuality, and romance are just starting to become issues in the lives of kids 10-14, and middle-grade publishers are fine with love stories, and the beginnings of romance, but sex is right out. Dem metaphors still work fine, though. My favorite middle grade novel is Seaward, by Susan Cooper, and I was in my 30s before I realized what that whole scene with the primeval Snake swelling and growing and being all dreamy at Cally was all about. Because kids don’t understand what certain scenes are all about constantly. They don’t care, as long as there’s something else to like in there. They either skip it and stitch together a story they do like from the parts they do understand, or they interpret it according to their own experience, shrug, and move on. That’s how the real life of any child works—kids don’t understand tons of what happens in the adult world. They either ignore it or re-interpret it and only fully understand years later. They have no problem doing this psychic surgery on books. Much like vocabulary, in my experience, it’s adults that worry over whether a young reader will be alienated by things they don’t immediately understand without effort, or put off by a dark story. Kids love new experiences, learning about the weird and bizarre, and are positively obsessed with anything an adult says is too scary or too grown-up. Don’t go for gross-out violence or behind-the-beaded-curtain sex and the entirety of narrative is permissible in children’s fiction, no different than adult. 

So if you can write about more or less whatever you want, more or less however you want, what’s the main difference between writing for big people and writing for small people? 

Well, it’s that you’re not just writing for small people, you’re writing about small people.

And this is what I really wanted to talk about. 

Middle grade and YA books are written for middle grade and YA readers, which means 10-14 and 14-20 respectively. People both older and younger might read them and love them (or hate them) but that’s the audience. This concept is often shrugged off with the phrase “the age of the protagonist.” As in: “the age of the protagonist determines whether it’s YA or middle grade or adult.”

But to me, this is everything. 

In order to write for children, you have to be pretty damned good at remembering what it’s like to be a child. And I don’t mean remembering what happened during your childhood, seen through an adult eye that comprehends the motivations of parents, teachers, siblings, neighbors, city planners—in fact, comprehends the mere existence, and reasoning behind the existence, of something like city planners.

I have been asked many times how I can write children so well, despite not being a parent myself. This question always makes me uncomfortable, because I’m never sure if I really do write children well, but also because I remember so fucking clearly being a kid, and being so fucking certain that my parents understood me least of anyone on planet earth.

In order to write for kids, you have to remember, not what it was like to be a kid, but what it felt like to be a kid. 

Adults tend to look back on childhood, even less-than=spectacular childhoods, with a vaseline filter on the lens. After all, there was no worry about bills or politics or the economy or the oncoming rush of automation, no checking of your credit rating or daily calories or crushing sense of responsibility for everything around you. There were summers off and homework that seems trivial now, bikes and long stretches of sidewalk, enough time to read books and play games, enough energy to spend all day just playing and enough hope to think you could be anything in the future. Time seemed to go slower, because it seems to go faster now. 

Seems nice, from the heights. 

But that’s not what childhood was like. 

Childhood was hard, and it sucked a lot of the time, and fucking everything was new and confusing and upsetting, and you never got to do or eat or have what you wanted when you wanted it (unless you were a very wealthy child, in which case, how nice for you), the rules seemed arbitrary and unfair, homework felt like horrifying oppression, time spent playing games and reading uninterrupted had to be bought with chores and good behavior, you actually totally could hear your parents fighting even though they thought you couldn’t, and every goddamned day was another unfamiliar thing you had to pretend you understood because all the other kids seemed to get it no problem. Every feeling and situation was the first time you felt just exactly that way or did just exactly that thing, and it was overwhelming. People often make fun of adolescents and teens for acting like they’re the first ones to ever fall in love or get their heart broken—but it’s the first time it’s ever happened to them and authentically it feels like the end of the entire universe. Homework feels like a real and crushing civil rights issue because for a kid, it absolutely is. They’re not joking. Their world is as real and full of peril as ours. 

Children aren’t just smaller adults, and writing them that way is usually a mistake. But children think they’re just smaller adults. One of the great common emotional experiences of childhood, no matter class, race, gender, sexuality, geography, is a sense of colossal injustice. Because the world is unjust, but we get used to it and get jaded. They discover injustice a little bit at a time—being forced to share a toy or go to bed when you don’t want to or play with a neighbor kid you don’t like. And each one of those feels so damned raw and bright and sour, the biggest scandal ever to occur in the history of the world, and that feeling is real and genuine and piercing. It’s not less valid than adult injustices. A parent being too busy to play feels like the death of joy and hope. A parent hitting a child? Even lightly? Is like the heat-death of the universe. But everyone bafflingly acts like most of this stuff is no big deal, when to a kid, it’s every deal, and there’s literally nothing they can do to change their situation. All the good stuff feels just as new and powerful, and you have absolutely no self control in terms of trying to make it happen again if it felt good the first time, because nothing in your experience has taught you about drawbacks.

This is part of why kids love watching the same movies over and over again. It felt good the first time, then it feels good to know what’s going to happen before it happens, that feels like control, and they chase those twin good feelings through a thousand rewatchings.

You are stymied as a child—for your own good, often, yes, but fuck you, dad, it doesn’t feel good at all! It’s hard to remember when life as a grown up is hard and we just want to be kids again, but when you’re a kid, you can’t bloody wait to grow up. From a child’s perspective, adults have it great. Being an adult is the best. You get to do whatever you want. It’s a literal Fairyland of excitingly inexplicable things, cars and jobs and parties and makeup and money and kissing and fucking awesome shoes. Kids don’t understand much of it, but it looks great. And once you grow up, you are definitely gonna get to play all the video games you want.

And this is what you need to remember to write children and teens. This is the perspective you have you root yourself in. The reason dystopias are so perennially popular among teens is that they accurately descibe the world according to a teenager. They’re documentaries. A high school student’s day is regimented by the Powers That Be. They’re sorted into groups according to their skills, commanded to wake, work, and sleep on someone else’s schedule, subject to bullies and worse, unable to control the shapes of their lives, frequently told not to love who they love and forced to hide their real selves. There’s that injustice again. It’s everywhere. 

Childhood, everyone’s childhood, is a first contact situation. We were all aliens at some point, exploring a new and dangerous world. To write a young character, you can’t see youth with grown up eyes. You have to see it as alien and frightening and exhilarating and fascinating as you did before you forgot that you came from somewhere else, and once upon a time, this life might as well have been Jupiter for all you were equipped to survive it. That is the point of view that children’s fiction brings—treating all of life, even outside science fiction and fantasy—as first contact. It’s why adults like it, too, because we remember things feeling that way, and it still rings true. To write from the point of view of a child takes unflinching care with your own memories, it takes talking to kids around you and taking them seriously, understanding that they are completely serious about liking turtles, and you’re a dick if you laugh because turtles are serious goddamned business.

Children are not just the larval stage. They are everything an adult is without the protective coating of experience to help them get through a moment in this hostile environment. This is the key to writing young characters that children want to read. That will make kids clutch your books to their chests and cry even when they’re not such little kids anymore. Because someone took them seriously. Treat your young characters as you would have wanted to be treated when you were a child and everyone kept talking over you and stepping on your toes and telling you you’d understand when you were older and taking away your dessert before you were done.

Treat them with gravity, because that is what it takes to land on a strange new world and make a home there.