I recently took Marjetta Geerling’s SCBWI Workshop, How to Appeal to Children and Adults When Writing Children’s Books, and can't wait to share the fantastic info with you!
Children are like us, but inexperienced. You don’t dumb down or talk down to them. Never condescend, oversimplify, think the audience is ignorant, or take conscious superiority. Kids immediately realize this! Children and teachers don’t want a book that screams ‘here’s something you should know.’
When you write a children’s book, you must first appeal to an adult audience. Children won’t be the first people to read your book. There are often over ten layers of adult readers…critique groups or writing mentors, agents, editors, marketing people, art directors—and this is all before the book goes into print! Then, there are reviewers, award committees, booksellers, and then parents, teachers, and librarians that we hope will be so excited by the books we write, they’ll want to share it with all the children in their lives.
Many writers think they need to find a way to get by the ‘gatekeepers’ but in reality, they’re just as much a part of the children’s literature audience as the children themselves. Think about this…if a child falls in love with a book and asks to hear it every single night—who is doing the reading?
How do we appeal to children and engage our adult audience at the same time? Marjetta read the book PARTS by Ted Arnold. I have to admit that I smiled the second I saw it. My daughters and I absolutely LOVED that book, even after reading it together a zillion times. In fact…I still have most of it memorized!
I remember the humor and fun illustrations the most. It takes a few reads to get past the humor so we can analyze it and see all the brilliant layers. It has some amazing lessons about life for kids and adults…in a way that doesn’t feel preachy at all.
· When digging deeper, you can see that both children and adults can relate to the theme—nervousness. It definitely has un
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