Finding the State of Mind that Makes for Good Writing
Added 2024-08-15 05:45:19 +0000 UTCChildren are the purest readers you’ll ever have. When they respond to a piece of writing, it’s with absolute delight… or abject boredom. They require a lot of your characters, so you have to develop them well and have a strong sense of who they are. Children don’t care how smart you sound, and if your literary devices aren’t effective, they won’t pat you on the back for trying. They’re highly responsive to rhythm and rhyme, but only if you’ve handled them well. They don’t know big words, so you can’t rely on them to overcome your weaknesses.
When you write for kids, the work works, or it doesn’t work. You don’t get points for intellectualising. If the toddler waddles to the other side of the room and starts playing with a train in the middle of your reading, that’s it. The work has failed, usually because it lacked density. Children require depth over complexity, and it takes a lot of work to learn the difference.
For those reasons, writing for kids can put you in touch with the point of writing. It can divorce you from the bullshit. (Bullshit is a real literary term. I promise.) It can remind you of the state of mind that makes for good writing.
For the next two days, we’re going to be writing for children. There will be one exercise for prose writers and one for poets. You can write both or write two of either.
Poet’s exercise: Write your own nursery rhyme.
Prose writers’ exercise: Write a story for a four or five-year-old. (The Cat in the Hat is a story for this age group)
