Job One When Writing for Children

I've had two lives in publishing since I began my career a decade + ago. The majority of my career to start was spent in adult publishing. I published memoirs, biographies, literary fiction, thrillers, romance and mysteries. I had a lot of fun and learned a great deal from my authors. But I began my professional life out of college as a teacher, and it's my teaching career that actually led me to publishing. I wanted to be publish books the kids I taught would love and would spark their love of reading.  As a high school English teacher, I knew first hand that while I was wild for Of Mice and Men my sixteen-year-old students weren't so much. They were reading and loving The Coldest Winter Ever and a lot of "street" lit and adult romance. They weren't really reading books actually published for their age range. Some of it was that kids naturally read up, but most of the issue was that they weren't aware of YA lit because, at least in the schools in which I taught, the focus was all on curriculum reading, so there wasn't anyone specific, a librarian or teacher, specifically recommending YA lit to them.

Long a closeted YA/kid lit reader, I then took it upon myself to recommend books I liked to my kids. Books by authors like Jacqueline Woodson,  Walter Dean Myers, Virginia Euwer Wolff, Terry Trueman and Laurie Halse Anderson. I wanted to provide them with some variety in content and perspectives, something different from what they were regularly reading outside the classroom if they were reading outside the classroom at all. I watched them (even my "reluctant" readers) devour the books and develop a different way to engage and talk about literature (as if what they read in the pages of these books was really personally relevant to them and the way they lived their lives) that they then brought to our classroom conversations about everything from James Baldwin to William Shakespeare. It was an exciting time for me as a teacher--to have my students compare character motivations in The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien to character motivations in Monster by Walter Dean Myers. But as they continued reading and investigating books specifically for their age range on their own, they started to bemoan the lack of books that featured characters that looked like them (I taught in school districts whose student populations were largely African American, Latino and even Cape Verdean when I taught in Boston). I agreed.

During my last years of teaching, I was already back in grad school pursuing my MFA. And right around the
time my students at that time were noticing the lack of diversity in teen books, I discovered publishing in a random book publishing course I took as part of prerequisites for my fiction workshops. Prior to taking this publishing course I'd truly believed books were gifts from god placed on bookstore shelves especially for me. I never dreamed there was a whole industry responsible for the care and making of books. I caught the publishing bug immediately, and I knew what I was going to do. I was going to publish those books my students deemed missing.

And I'm happy to have done a lot of that in my career and will hopefully do lots more. But it wasn't until I switched fully to the children's books side of the industry that I was able to make what initially led me to publishing my primary focus. Because of my adult publishing life, I still have lots of "adult" friends and contacts: agents, writers, other editors. And when I switched to the children's market, I thought in many ways I was saying goodbye to the adult side of the industry and the many people I'd met and worked with because of how separate the adult and children's divisions are. I could not have predicted the turn in the market wherein YA now dominates and children's books is making, in many cases, much more money than adult books.

What this means in practical terms is that people associated with the adult part of the industry have now very suddenly and very seriously turned their attention to children's books. Agents who had previously only represented adult books are now sending YA and other children's submissions my way. Authors who had previously only written adult books are now turning to the children's market to revive or extend their audience. There is a great deal of interesting interest in what I do day-to-day in the children's book world from people who previously never gave children's books a second thought. I think it's wonderful.

But the question I get from my adult colleagues who are wading into the kiddie pool, is what is safe to write about for the children's market. This is a tricky question to answer, especially with the bad rap teen books often get for being too dark, but ultimately, after giving these colleagues a long list of suggested reading to catch up, my answer is there is nothing that's not safe to write about for children as long as it's honest. On my own list, I have published a middle grade novel about albino killings in Tanzania, which on the face of it doesn't seem like middle grade fair, but it's honestly written and from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old boy. This is an issue that affects children in Tanzania just as well as adults. Why wouldn't or shouldn't a child have a perspective on a hard issue? I have also published books where children have lost parents, suffered abuse and had sex. Again, all written honestly and from a genuine child or teen perspective. Whenever you start thinking in order to write children's books that you have to water it down, you're not writing honestly and you're not writing anything they'd be interested in reading. So if you're interested in writing for children, go out and read and then read some more. And when you do finally put pen to paper, don't dwell on the age you're writing for, but instead dwell on how honest whatever you are writing is. Readers are readers no matter their age. We're all looking for something honest. That's what moves us.