Writing for Kids Isn't Child's Play

I started playing with one of my lightly used domains tonight: Goobaga.com. Goobaga was supposed to be a cool sounding and brandable name that I could use for a blog, a product, or anything else that tickled my fancy.

Today Goobaga has become a repository for bedtime stories that I am going to start writing for my four year old son, Collin.

You'd think writing for a kid could be the easiest thing in the world. You'd be half right. While it's easy to dumb down any English sentence, how do you do it in a way that keeps the child's interest?

In "Mario Meets the Princess", I was faced with multiple lines of dialogue between Mario and the Princess. In an "adult" story, you break up the back-and-forth monotony by cracking out a thesaurus for use with your verbs, and interjecting descriptions of demeanor, environment, and ambiance. With a children's story, if you pull that out you'll confuse them to the point where they'll forget what the two characters are talking about.

In "Mario Saves the Toadstool People", I didn't have to spend any time introducing characters since it was already someone my son knew very well: Mario. This allowed me to jump right into the action. One minute Mario's fixing a clogged pipe, the next minute he's kicking turtle shells and listening to Toadstool people sing.

The common goal between writing for adults and writing for children is keeping the reader's attention.

With adults this is done by answering the "what happens next" question with enough interesting detail to paint a clear picture of the situation at hand and engage the reader to ask the same question again.

With children this is accomplished by answering the question quickly and simply with enough action to have them turn the page and have the "what happens next" question answered before they even have a chance to ask.

Boy do I need practice at that.

Mario, Goomba, and Paratroopa are trademarked and copyrighted images of Nintendo.