Recommended Writing Guides

The Best General Guides to Writing for Children

Thanks to the absolutely brilliant 'Read Liverpool Online Library', I could enjoy (and learn a lot from) the following books:

Absolutely crammed full of good, practical advice as well as plenty of idea examples to help give you a kick start. Cleaver covers all the fundamentals of children's story writing from setting, character and plot to structure and content.

There are endless vocabulary suggestions while there's also quite a comprehensive section on getting published, too. The layout of this guide is concise yet very informative and if this isn't enough for you, there's relevant further reading recommendations in each section of the book as well.

Coppard and Newbery co-wrote this book to great effect, covering just about every aspect of writing that any new children's author would need to know. They speak of their own experiences whilst also drawing on that of other esteemed writers.

It is a well structured and quite comprehensive guide and -along with the other books featured in this post - stands head and shoulders above similar 'guides' I have come across. If you need more than this as a general guide then you will probably need to read a number of books covering the specific content subjects.

Reading this guide from cover to cover is as rewarding as any online course I have seen and it even sets you tasks to help with your ideas and structure.

Some writers refer to this book almost like an aspiring writer's bible and having had a good look through it I can begin to see why.

Full of good advice from authors who have 'been there, done that' - such as JK Rowling and Eion Colfer - it also contains comprehensive listings of publishers and what they publish. I found this dedicated children's writers' edition to be much more useful and inspiring than the general 2015 yearbook which I also recently borrowed from the elibrary.

If you know of any other useful guides to writing for children please share them in the comments box. Also please refer to the 'Writing Guide' page on this blog for more useful hints and tips...