Q: Who’s Your Hero? (A: Your Reader!)
Welcome to the first entry in a new blog series on writing books for children!
This series is part of a new e-course and group coaching program I am developing, as well as being fodder for a new book, so your comments here are most welcome and will help me shape the direction of all these offerings. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe to my mailing list (I promise, no green eggs and spam) so that I can let you know when the programs are launched.
And now to the first topic…
Q: Who’s Your Hero? (A: Your Reader!)
When my mother and I first started working on the Dumpy the Dump Truck series,
She reminded us that a rule of thumb, the central characters in childrens books should be of the same age and spirit as the child reading them. She suggested we convert the teenage character into a little boy the same age as our reader, and add a grandfather who could do the driving. Light bulb! Now we had a central character our readers could relate to, and a bonus extension of our theme of finding value in older things (or people), even after they seem to have outlived their usefulness.
What we’ve (hopefully) by now learned is that the heroes, or protagonists, of childrens books must be characters that young readers can identify with and relate to. The best way to achieve this when developing an idea is to imagine the specific child or children you are telling this story to. How old are they? What are their interests, concerns, hopes, fears? That’s your target audience… and that’s the age, physical and/or emotional, that your principal character should be.