Writing Children's Books For Dummies by Lisa Rojany Buccieri

Author:Lisa Rojany Buccieri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

Turning to the outrageous and the gross

Would it surprise you to learn that kids love ideas and concepts that are either outrageous, gross, or both at the same time? Well, it’s true. A number of books — including Oh, Yuck: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty by Joy Masoff (Workman) and Grossology by Sylvia Branzei and Jack Keely (Price Stern Sloan) — have tackled a wide variety of formerly taboo topics, much to the delight of young readers everywhere. Some of these topics include

Barf, burps, boogers, poop, and farts

Internal animal parts: eyeballs, hearts, and brains

Acne or other itchy red spots

Leeches and worms

These topics tap deeply into the spirit of young people for the following reasons:

Kids haven’t yet been fully conditioned to pretend that these everyday things and events don’t exist.

These topics get a rise out of adults whenever they’re mentioned.

They’re just plain fun to read about.

If your story merits their inclusion, then by all means don’t hesitate.

Adults continue to debate about whether using gross and outrageous topics and words is bad form or whether they should be acknowledged and celebrated. The message from kids, however, remains loud and clear: Bring it on!

The Mojo of Good Writing: Voice, Style, and Tone

After you figure out how to set your scenes (see Chapter 10), write scintillating dialogue (see Chapter 9), and inject so much humor that even you can’t stop laughing (see the earlier “Using Humor to Your Advantage” section), you still need to be aware of a few more aspects of good writing. And these are the ones that, unfortunately for writers everywhere, nearly defy instruction.

For example, when you read a particular author and are drawn in by everything you’re reading, so much so that you savor every last page and hate for the book to end, then you have fallen for the writer’s mojo (magic). Instantly addicted, you search frantically for other books by the same author. You even order her books in advance so that you can get them the second they’re released. That is falling prey to mojo. And as you know in your every cell, every nerve ending, mojo is pretty heady stuff.

So where can you get some? Well, we don’t know any dealers, and wouldn’t pass them on if we did, so you’re just going to have to develop your own mojo as a writer, just as your favorite writers have, and they do it with three things, which they keep consistent throughout a story:

Voice: The communicative and cumulative effect created by the author’s way of writing. The best books are always written with a voice that’s strong enough to make the protagonist — and the book as a whole — memorable.

Style: The panache with which the writer manipulates the conventions of modern language. In other words, style is the way the author adds his own particular twist to diction (word choice), dialogue, sentence structure, phrasing, and other aspects of the language. Like trends in fashion, style can be sparing and minimalist, outrageous and flowery, terse and evocative, or crisp and formal.

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