Writing Children's Books For Dummies. Peter Economy
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FIGURE 3-24: YA novels in the addiction, abuse, and mental illness genre.
Readers can find YA books about abuse harrowing and frightening, and the books’ protagonists find it all the more so. Some great books dealing with abuse include Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson (Square Fish), a multi-award-winning book about a girl who’s abused at a high school party; Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher (Razorbill), about a boy who gets a series of tapes from a friend about why she committed suicide two weeks before; and Boy Toy, by Barry Lyga (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), about a boy and the teacher who molested him.
The diseases that fall under the umbrella of mental illness involve tens of millions of children. You probably know a young person who has a mental illness. An author can explore any of these diseases creatively: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), eating disorders, self-harm, and more. YA novels and this genre are a nearly perfect combination. Writers who have the diseases write to inform and get across messages, and protagonists who have the diseases get through their lives with varying degrees of success.
YA novels about mental illness cover a broad range of specifics. Check out Jennifer Niven’s All the Bright Places (Ember), about a pair of broken teenagers who contemplate suicide; My Heart and Other Black Holes, by Jasmine Warga (Balzer + Bray), about a girl who makes a suicide pact with a boy; and Before You Break, by Kyla Stone (Paper Moon Press), which deals with themes of suicide, mental illness, and abuse.
Keeping Them Laughing with Humor
Who doesn’t like to laugh, giggle, smirk, chuckle, chortle, guffaw, or get a little silly on occasion? No one we know. And if you want to get a laugh out of your child (or yourself, for that matter), read them a humorous book. (See Figure 3-25 for two really funny board books.) Although some children’s book genres tend to come and go, every shelf always has a place for a book that’s funny. The following sections guide you through some of the most common subgenres in the universe of humorous books.
From Night Animals, by Gianna Marino. Reprinted by permission. © 2017 Gianna Marino. From Night Animals Need Sleep Too, by Gianna Marino. Reprinted by permission. © 2020 Gianna Marino.
FIGURE 3-25: A couple of especially funny boardbooks.
Quirky characters
Some children’s book characters, including people, animals, and other kinds of beings, act in odd, unexpected ways that fall outside the norm of our everyday experience. They might, for example, put their thumb in their mouth, blow hard, inflate like a balloon, and then float away with the wind. Or maybe a donkey talks and says funny things, or a dog goes to school. Whatever the case, quirky characters can really spice up your children’s book. Any Dr. Seuss book is chock-full of quirky characters, such as a talking cat with a hat, a fox that wears socks, and something called a Grinch that stole Christmas.
Parody, satire, and jokes
A parody is a humorous imitation of an existing work. For example, Goodnight Goon: A Petrifying Parody, by Michael Rex (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers), is a parody of the popular children’s book Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown (HarperCollins).
Satire pokes fun (sometimes gently, sometimes aggressively) at people, organizations, society, and more in a humorous way. Shrek! by William Steig (Square Fish), satirizes fairy tales and became a hit DreamWorks animated film.
Jokes are stories — often short — that end with an unexpected twist or punchline. The Big Book of Silly Jokes for Kids, by Carole P. Roman (Rockridge Press), contains more than 800 jokes for children ages 6 to 12.
Slapstick and gross
Pratfalls, pies in the face, slipping on banana peels, and other physical mishaps are the bread and butter of slapstick comedy, which is built on a solid foundation of anticipation, timing, and repetition.
And we all know gross when we see (or read) it. Dog Breath: The Horrible Trouble with Hally Tosis, by Dav Pilkey (Scholastic, Inc.), tells the story of a family dog who has bad breath that saves the day. And Gomer the Gassy Goat: A Fart-Filled Tale, by Hayley Rose (Flowered Press), is about (big surprise!) a goat that likes to fart.
Dark humor
Dark humor takes on painful, morbid, depressing, or rude topics in a funny way. All My Friends Are Dead, by Avery Monson and Jory John (Chronicle Books), is about a dinosaur whose fellow dinosaurs have all gone extinct. And I’d Really Like to Eat a Child, by Sylviane Donnio (Dragonfly Books), explores the dilemma of a crocodile who wants to step up his eating game from boring bananas to a real, live child.
Wordplay
Kids love to have fun with words, engaging in wordplay, which we explore in detail in Chapter 12. Whether its alliteration, assonance, parallelism, refrain, polyptoton, metaphor, simile, anthropomorphism, personification, or just making up your own words, you can engage in this form of humor in an almost endless number of ways. Most of us likely have the familiar refrain from Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham (Beginner Books/Random House) embedded in our brains from a very early age: “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.”
GETTING ADVICE ON GENRE WRITING FOR CHILDREN
If you want to know what it takes to stand out, listen to Doug Whiteman, former president of Penguin Books for Young Readers. Having been in the publishing business for over three decades, Doug started out as a book sales rep and worked his way to the top. Several years ago, he formed his own literary agency, The Whiteman Agency. Here’s his take on being successful in genre writing:
Does a writer need to understand the conventions of a children’s book genre and stick to what the readers expect? “That’s a really good question because we have different filters we’re selling to, each of which has its own expectations. Our accounts and their buyers certainly expect things to fit into traditional molds, as do many parents and librarians. And many times, I’ve seen books stopped cold if they couldn’t be easily classified in a traditional way. Having said that, kids themselves are looking for the truly unique and original. So the best answer to your question is: Understand the conventions and know we will have to package and position your book in a relatively traditional way in order to get past the filters, but give us some sneaky originality inside the covers to captivate the kids.”
At the largest publishing companies what kinds of children’s books are always hot? “It seems to me that we’re becoming increasingly cyclical, so there’s very little that’s always hot. Picture books, for example, seem to go into downturns every ten years or so. Series books are less cyclical than they used to be. And nothing is more cyclical than licensed publishing, which goes up and down like a roller coaster every few years. Probably the steadiest category is fantasy; everyone likes to think that Harry Potter made fantasy into a bestselling genre, but the truth is that people like Philip Pullman and Brian Jacques were selling huge numbers long before J. K. Rowling came along.”
What kinds of books are most always not hot? “Picture books with long texts, expensive books based on holidays that can’t command high price points (like Halloween),