What was that? You can’t think of anything to write a story about?  Look around you – open your eyes!  Listen to snippets of people’s conversations!  Here’s a few suggestions:

Maybe you are a nurse or doctor – what happened to one of your patients?  If you are a wife and mother, do you say “I haven’t done anything interesting lately”?  Ask yourself how you cope with your children, their school playground fights, and how did you stop your kids wanting to kill one another?  How is it that your husband has survived his stressful job year-on-year?

The point is that you can actually create a story for your children’s book from just about anything!  Listen to the gossip around you… “Jess has been having an affair with her best friend’s husband,” Tracey said.  That’s the making of a story.  What, when, why, where and how did she cheat on her friend? What was it that made her be unfaithful at all?  Perhaps it was lack of money, work pressures, maybe even some suspicion that the husband was already being unfaithful.

Once you’ve got some answers to those questions, get rolling with the next ones: where did they live?  In which town or city? Or even, which country?  What was it that the husband did for a living?

Was the affair the wife’s fault? Did she leave her man feeling neglected or even no longer needed, by spending too much time with the kids?  Once you’ve figured this out, put some obstacles in their way to prevent them from reconciling their marriage.

Now that you have that resolved, perhaps create an illness, so that he or she feels sorry for the other.  This is fiction after all, so you can make anything up for your children’s book!  As long as you create suspense, drama and indeed action, then you will keep the reader interested.  Hold their attention, or they will put the book down with even a second thought.

If you still are finding it difficult to think to something to write about, you may begin to think you have writer’s block.  In that case, try grabbing a dictionary, opening it at random, close your eyes an stab your finger on to the page.  Write the word down, even if you don’t know its meaning. Repeat this 10 or 12 times and build a list of words.  When you don’t know their meanings, look at the description in the dictionary or get a thesaurus to find a similar word with the same meaning.

Now start writing some sentences, each with a different word, until you make it in to a gripping short story.  You never know, it may turn in to a novel!

Learning

Read, read, and read some more.  The more that you read, the more you will learn.  Read a short story, see how they have been written.  Pick one, and then replace the plots with your own plot, or drama.  Keep practicing this until you have an entirely different story.

Having done this, start from the middle of your story as though it was the beginning, and rearrange the whole thing.  Try starting your children’s book with action.  Show this action happening, don’t just tell it.

Use your Five Senses

Go outside, smell the fresh air.  Smell the scent of the flowers.  Hear the ocean roar with each wave on to the sand.  The wind in the trees.  The cars on the road.  Touch the softness of silk and satin.  Taste the flavours of everything that touches your lips.

Look for colour in your scenes – “The blue sky disappearing behind the grey rolling clouds”, “the yellow tulips waving in the breeze”.

To begin with, start by writing your children’s book with something you know about.  Do you have pets?  Do you have any medical problems that went wrong?  A swimming disaster; an amazing holiday with the best destinations…

Find ideas for your stories from everyday happenings.  Look around you, listen to what’s going on, and read how others do it.  Before long you will be writing your own stories.

Children’s Short Stories

Try making up stories to tell children.  Then write down the ones they liked the most.  Ask them to join in by adding their own little suggestions.  This can seriously help you when writing your children’s book.

Writing for children can be difficult.  You need to use words of different lengths for the different ages of child. A five year old won’t understand longer words, but a 15 year old won’t be entertained by baby talk.  Think about who you are writing for and get it right.

Conclusion

Find ideas for your children’s book from everyday things that happen around you.  Always look around you, and listen to the World around you, read what other people are doing and how they do it.  This will lead you to your own great story or thrilling novel.

Keep a notepad with you at all times.  You never know when a great little idea will pop into your head – you don’t want to lose it!  You’ll never remember it in a week or two if you don’t write it down.

Most of all, learn to write, write, and write even more.  You can write your children’s book.

Dispelling Myths About Writing Children’s Books and A Little Word About Confidence.
Tips to think about when Writing for Children.

For some good initial research when writing children’s books, you should start by visiting some large bookstores. Take your notebook and a pen. Copy the Tables of Contents of books that treat similar subject matters that your book does. You will want to make your book significantly different from other books which cover similar things as yours. If the book is exactly the same as other books on the topic no publisher will be interested in buying it. However, you shouldn’t be discouraged if there are many books covering the area in which you intend to cover. Lots of books mean that this area is popular – this can be handy when writing children’s books. For example, publishers bring out dozens of diet books for adults each year, so there is plenty of room for other authors too.

Aim for at least three to five points of difference. This doesn’t mean that you have to come up with all new information. In fact, presenting completely new information can be impossible if you are writing non-fiction. It’s about how you present the material when writing children’s books that counts. If you can show readers a new way to understand a subject, you’re in with a hot-seller on your hands.

Amazon.com

Amazon should be your next port of call. Type the subject of your book into the search query box and you’ll get a list of all the books which touch on this subject area. Printing out this list will be useful as having it handy help you when the time comes to pick a title. Read descriptions and all the reviews of any books which sound as if they might be similar to yours. This is quick and relatively easy research for writing children’s books.

What have you discovered about the market for writing children’s books?

If you have finished surveying the market place as it stands for your idea, you may find it mighty helpful to write a brief report on what you have discovered about the children’s book market. This report is purely for your own use. Do this right away while everything is still as fresh as a daisy in your mind. It’s important to do this, because when you talk to your editor or agent you will want to have all the information on the market situation handy. Your report doesn’t have to be long. Just a page will do.

So, when writing children’s books, be sure to know what is out there and how you may be able to slot in alongside what exists.

You may want to use fictitious names to protect people’s privacy. You will definitely need to use fictitious names if you can’t contact people to ask them for permission to use a story or if you think there’s a change that people will be able to recognize themselves from a story you tell that might put them in a bad light.

However, you should definitely take into consideration your own past experiences, when writing a children’s book.

Let’s dispel a few myths.

Myth One: Writing children’s books takes a special talent.

It takes persistence. That is the key. There are as many different kinds of writers as there are people in the world. Some are young, some are elderly, many are in-between. You don’t need any special talent to write books nor do you need to be highly educated. Many successful writers have never completed high school. If you can write well enough to write a letter, you can write a book, and certainly try writing children’s books.

Myth Two: Writers starve in garrets.

Many professional writers make incomes that would make doctors and lawyers envious. Most make reasonable incomes. If you decide to make a career of writing non-fiction books for example, the major benefit is that if you choose your book’s topic with extra care, your book can stay in print for many years. For each year that your book is in print, you get two royalty checks. Let’s say that you write two books a year for five years. At the end of the five years, if your books all stay in print, you’ll be getting ten royalty checks a year. These ongoing royalties are your nest-eggs, your profitable investments in your future.

Myth Three: It’s hard to sell a book.

As long as you research the market for each book before you write as much as a single word, it’s easy to sell a book. Publishers need competent, reliable writers who can produce good books regularly. This myth got started because… well let’s be blunt here, 99 per cent of submissions to editors and publishers are not publishable.

Myth Four: You need to know someone to get a book published

You need to write a good book to get published. That really is all you need to know. If you have a contact in publishing, by all means use that contact. However, it’s not necessary. Publishing is a big business and publishers need good books.

The bottom line?

If you really want to start writing children’s book, you just have to get on and try it.