As I work for the company Eduland (and it is my current full time job) I wanted to make my blog post this week about writing for a young audience. A fan on Twitter kindly requested this and I thought it to be a great topic for my blog. As I write at least one story a week for children for my job, I can definitely see why it might be challenging for some people to write for a young audience. I am used to writing for 18+ with my terribly horrifying horror novels and my thriller novels that keep people guessing. But switching to children's books has proven to be a challenge for me, one that I strangely picked up quite quickly. But people often question what the appropriate way to write is when you are writing for a younger audience. So this blog post will explore this question and present tips on how to write for a younger audience.
What are the limitations?
With any writing, there is always limitations. But of course writing for an adult audience means that you can include anything you want. From gruesome scenes with blood and guts to explicit sexual content, anything is on the cards. With younger audiences (under 18) you don't have many options. But you need to make sure that your content isn't too childlike. Yes, they are still classed as children and teenagers but do not assume that because they are young they know nothing. People of that age have the capacity to understand themes and subjects just as well as adults. They are very open minded (most of the time) and they understand most difficult subjects. Stories with difficult topics may even be more beneficial to a younger audience as it will learn them more than us adults.
There is also of course language limitations. People under the age of 18 do not always know big fancy words yet (or they refuse to learn them!). Either way, putting a bunch of unknown words in the place of more simple describing words will put a younger audience off. Some of them do not have the patience to stumble around words that they don't understand, so it could easily put them off the whole story. The same way that using overly complicated sentence structures can put them off as well. You want to inspire young minds, not put them off reading all together because they believe all books in the world are overly complicated. Try to use as many short sentences as possible with simple to slightly complicated words. You want to keep them intrigued but you don't want to put them off reading any further or make them feel dumb for not understanding certain words.
Example of how to write for a younger audience:
Stories for younger audiences need to have storylines that are exciting and keep them hooked. But to do that well, you need to have the correct language and subject for the reading age as stated above. Below is an example of a sentence. I have made both of them up. It is about a young woman who is wearing posh clothing and her eyes are the centre of attention to all:
How it may be described in an 18+ novel:
"The adolescent mademoiselle was exquisitely dressed with latchet and tussore. Her eyes were like elliptical diamonds of luminescence and endearment."
How I would suggest it should be described in a novel for young people:
"The young woman was beautifully dressed with lace and silk. Her eyes were like oval diamonds of glitter and love." The strange thing is that both of these sentences mean EXACTLY THE SAME THING! Except the first is written with high level vocabulary and the second is in language that everyone can understand. Of course, I am not saying that all novels for people over 18 should be written with this type of language because in my experience, you are much likely to gain more readers if you write for the general reader. Using basic language will work for any age. I know people who are a lot older than me and prefer basic language when reading. Nobody likes constantly getting out the thesaurus when they are trying to enjoy a book. But this is just one example of how your vocabulary should reflect on your audience. The description is still there so you do not have to cut out all of your description and make your story boring just because it is for young people. Whether you are writing for children, teenagers or young adults, the description is still one of the most important parts as it is what keeps people interested.
I personally like to be somewhere in between the two examples. I like to use more complicated words but not as frequently as in all in one sentence as the example shows. But the example was just to portray the differences in age reading. Some younger people may even find the second example difficult to read, so if possible depending on the actual age of your audience, keep your language as simple as possible. That doesn't mean use 'big' instead of 'enormous'. Or 'pretty' instead of 'beautiful'. It means if you cannot imagine a young person using the word in their everyday language, then to play it safe it is best not to include it. As I write children's stories for readers aged between 10 and 15, I make sure I use small sentences but also make the plot exciting. It is very different to when I am writing my own novels and I am allowed as many long sentences and lengthy descriptions as I like. If you are ever unclear about what to include for a children's book or even any writing for children, then it is probably best that you should do a small survey. Get a few children to try to read it and see how they cope with it. It will give you a general idea about whether it is too difficult or not.
That is my advice to anyone else out there who finds themselves writing for children. The writing I do is for educational purposes which makes it all the more pressurising! But of course I do get to know that my storylines are teaching the next generation something useful which is great. If you have any more questions about writing for a younger audience that I haven't answered on here already, then please feel free to leave a comment and I will answer your questions. Other than that stay tuned for my next blog update and happy writing!
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