How to write a children’s story (with a child)

To recap for anyone joining at this point, I’m half an author and half a stay-at-home dad, and now it’s the summer holidays, I shift into looking after the children mode full time. Last summer I found that quite difficult, as I’m really enjoying the whole business of creating books at the moment. So this summer, while I can’t realistically do much on the grown up books, I had the idea to write and produce a proper children’s story with Alba, my six year old (there was no plan for who was going to look after the four year old while this was happening, second child syndrome and all that.)

Alba came up with a title on her own – The Dog that Mooed and the Cow that Woofd – which I thought was marvellous, and that became the starting point.

The first task then was to expand the title into an actual story. As I’ve been learning and writing novels I’ve read several books on what stories actually are, when you boil them right down, and what elements they have to include to be satisfying – the science of story if you like. Prior to writing I never really noticed any of this, I’m not sure I’d have fully accepted it either. But I’m beginning to grasp it a bit better now, and mostly agree with it. The books and theories don’t all agree with each other completely, but the core elements are usually said to include:

1. A need or want. The main character has to want something, or go somewhere, or do something. And it has to be incredibly important to them. This is what the story is about – the character either getting what they want, or maybe not getting it. Everyone knows how the more interesting characters are flawed in some way, this serves two purposes, to make them seem human, but also to make us (the reader) doubt whether they can achieve their goal.
2. Obstacles. Things that authors put in the way of their characters so that it seems they cannot get what they want. Ideally the obstacles should get progressively harder as the story goes, so that it appears to the reader they might never get it and the tension is increased. And diving a bit deeper, the obstacles should ideally present unique challenges to the main character because of their flaws or eccentricities.
3. An all-is-lost moment. A climax where it seems that the character has failed/been caught/lost everything and there is nothing anyone can do about it. The quest is failed
4. A resolution. Ideally an ingenious one, that only the character’s with their unique skills (that flaw) plus what they have learnt along the way by overcoming the obstacles, can be put to use, resolving the situation.
5. A restoration where the status quo is put back, but with the character having succeeded in their mission. (status quo plus)

That’s quite a lot to put in a kid’s book! In fact it’s pretty hard to put it in any book.

Anyway. With all this in mind, Alba got started with some serious research. We sat down to re-read, for the thousandth time, some of her (and my) favourite stories. These include: Anything and everything by Julia Donaldson, but particularly, The Gruffalo and Zog. The Little Bear Stories, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, The Dog who could Dig and a few others.

The funny thing is, when you look at them carefully, they all do fit almost exactly to the pattern. There’s some additions too:

1. Children’s books often include a moral message (and the better ones do it subtly), so that evil is punished and doesn’t win (I should learn from this with my adult fiction).
2. Little people, or little things, are cleverer than big people or the big things. In the Gruffalo, the tiny little mouse outsmarts a fox, an owl and a snake by inventing a made up monster called a Gruffalo. And when one of those actually appears too, he outsmarts that as well.
3. Absurdity often makes an appearance in kid’s books. The digging dog pulls out a whole tube train in search of his bone. Obviously it cannot happen, but how many times have the children pointed this out to me? They haven’t (yet I think of it every time I read it). On the contrary, it’s clear to see on their faces how much the idea simply entertains them.

So how to take all this fascinating research, and turn a title into a story?

It turns out that coffee, a French campsite in the pouring rain, and perseverance, play a large part here. As I said above, we’re on holiday, and at first the weather really helped (The long hot spell we’ve had came to an end and we’re now used to the patter patter of rain on the tent roof – don’t feel sorry though, it’s hot again now and there’s moules frites for dinner.)

I won’t pretend that the story that came out was all Alba’s work, but by keeping the above in mind, we were able to sit down (over several sessions because Alba’s attention span is about 45 minutes at best) and create the ‘what happened and who it happened too’. When Alba veered wildly from the story structure above, I tried to suggest something that brought it back, and most of the time she accepted this, and elaborated on it. When she didn’t we tried to run with it (and actually wrote an entire second story without doing any of the above ‘thinking’ at all). Some of the better ideas did come from her – the idea has mixed up animals (as the title suggests) and she loved coming up with examples – a frog mixed up with a dog, a bat mixed up with a cat. At one point she memorably came up with ‘a beaver mixed up with a golden retriever’). For anyone actually worried about the little one, he made up some good examples too.

So the story we came up with is:

The main character is a six-year-old girl called Lola Jones (name plucked at random from Alba’s mind!)

She lives next door to a strange, walled off farm. The want, the thing she has to do, is to find out about what is happening the other side of the wall.

She breaks through the wall, and discovers a world of mixed up animals.Because she’s a nice girl she’s nice to them, and they’re not happy being mixed up.

The escalation of danger is that she gets captured by a scary scientist/farmer, and it looks as if she will be mixed up herself.

But because she’s a nice girl, and was nice to the animals before she got caught, they prefer to help her, rather than the scientist that mixes them up.

So she’s able to rescue herself, and restore the world.

It’s surprising how long it took to come up with this, just five sentences! (And worrying how sparse it looks, when put like that.)

We then had a go at writing the story. I have to admit that Alba got quite bored doing this. So I gave her the useful task of counting how many words there are on every page of the Julia Donaldson book Room on the Broom, and putting it in a spreadsheet so we had a guide for how many words per page we should be writing. Alba loves counting almost as much as I don’t, so we were both happy. And it gave me some time to come up with this:

The Dog that Mooed and the Cow that Woofd. (working title)

Lola Jones is five years old and she won’t eat her greens. She doesn’t much like broccoli, nor artichokes nor beans.
The only things that she will eat are things that she should not. She lives on sweets and cakes and bakes and these she eats a lot.
Her poor parents are in despair. They try to teach her right. But every single dinner time just turns into a fight.
“You need to eat your greens,” they say, “or you won’t grow up right!”
—-
Next door to their small country house, there stretches a high wall. Though no one knows what lays beyond, the signs aren’t good at all.
They warn people to not get near, and everyone agrees. There’s funny things, beyond that wall, among the tall green trees.
Her parents make her promise, to stay far, far away,
But sometimes children (as you know) don’t listen to what the grown ups say.
One night, when they’ve both gone to bed, she packs her favourite bag, with sticky sweets and plates of cakes, determined to investigate…
—-
The next day when Lola wakes, she doesn’t go to school,
Instead she drags her trampoline, right up against that wall.
She climbs on top, begins to bounce, but even though she tries, it’s just no good, she jumps too low, the wall is just too tall.
But then she takes a biscuit break. Then cakes and sweeties too. And with a great big sugar high, she bounces right into the sky.
And when she lands (with quite a bump) the place in which she falls, is like nowhere she’s ever seen – the wrong side of the wall…

There’s more, in fact the whole story is ‘written’ but I don’t want to give it all away here. It took a while and a few passes to get all the rhymes sounding nice, but which also tell the story we wanted to tell (it’s very tempting to go off on tangents that convenient rhymes suggest, and I guess it takes a bit of discipline to set those aside and keep looking for one that tells your story. Maybe that’s discipline that comes from taking wrong turns on adult books and losing several months as a result!

Testing
We’re here on the campsite with some friends, who also have children, so Alba and I have been able to test the story. And while I’m not 100% convinced that’s a foolproof method of being sure the story works, they do seem to like it. We are going to leave it for a while and come back to it, and see if we, and they, still like it. The good thing about a children’s book (800 words) as opposed to an adults book (100,000 words) is it takes a lot less time to actually get the words down, and change, if need be. Anyway, here’s a post read-through selfie to prove they like it – do those smiles look genuine?!

Illustrations

When I posted news of this project, quite a few people suggested that we should get Alba herself to draw the illustrations (and by the way, a huge thank you once again to everyone for taking the time to leave so many lovely comments, we did enjoy reading through them together). I must admit this hadn’t really occurred to me. I’m not a very good artist, and I have a bit of childlike fascination with people who can draw or paint, so I was quite excited about the opportunity to work with someone who can draw. However, I do take the point, it would be wonderful for Alba to look at the book and see so clearly her work in it. So we’ve come up with a compromise. We are going to use an illustrator (because frankly, Alba’s drawings are much like most other six year olds – not easily recognisable when she deviates from the standard, obvious items like houses or clouds). But we’re also going to include some of Alba’s drawings in there, including handing over a page at the front and the back entirely to her (I’ve learnt they’re called endpapers) for drawing whatever her six-year-old mind deems appropriate.

So that the next stage – to ‘rest’ the story for a while and contact a few illustrators and get some samples of how they might illustrate our idea, and (gulp), get some price quotes…

And now that the sun’s back, to enjoy a bit of holiday too.

Hope you’re enjoying the summer wherever you are!