Help! Where do I start?
I belong to several facebook groups for authors who already write for - or more frequently WANT to write for - children. As you might expect, many of the ‘newbies’ are asking for help and advice.
The most frequent requests I see are usually something along the lines of ‘Help! I have a great idea for a children’s book. Where do I start?’ And if I’m honest, these kind of posts drives me nuts!
Now before you come for me, please let me say up front that I have always been generous with advice to newbies, because I WAS one, once! I benefited greatly from wonderful, talented writers giving of their time and expertise when I was starting out, and I resolved because of that to ‘pass it forward’ to others in my turn. (I know for a fact that there are folks who’ve been published or who were placed in competitions because of help I’d been able to give them.) However…
There are certain things about these generic, open-ended requests that really annoy me.
They are lazy. I almost feel as though the person making the query is saying ‘I’ve got an idea, tell me what to do with it - TELL ME EVERYTHING - to make it into a successful book.’ At least be prepared to do some of the work! Do some research about the children’s market, actually capture the idea in the form of words and/or pictures, demonstrate to me that you have done more than simply have an idea. You could make a start by reading through the comments that have been left on the countless other ‘Help, I’ve got an idea posts’ which came before yours - I can guarantee they’ll all give you similar advice. If you have specific questions after doing all of that, fire away. Note I said ‘specific’. Get on and actually DO something, rather than ask everyone else what to do with your idea.
For those commenting on these posts (and yes, I do comment. Usually along the lines of ‘write something first’), there seems to be an assumption a lot of the time that ‘idea for a children’s book’ automatically translates into being a picture book. IT DOESN’T! The original poster gave no indication that they had given any thought to developing their idea, so why assume it has to be a picture book? What about chapbooks? Novels? Comics? ‘Children’ as a label includes a wide age range - even YA if an adult is considered to be 18+ years. Different ages need different kinds of reading material, so why do so few newbies assume they have to start at the ‘young end’ and work their way up? Again, do your research, have a think about who you want your story to be read by, and work on that assumption when you begin to write.
So…even though these kind of posts annoy me, and there is soooo much information that could be provided about the ‘writing a book and getting it published’ process, what advice would I actually give to a complete newbie who asks this question of me? Well, I guess in a nutshell:
‘Write. Capture your idea and put the words down on a page. Your idea has to become a story to become a book - and the only way to get to that point is to WRITE.’
(And, as a shameless plug, if you want more advice on how to go about writing that story, why not buy my book ‘Squidge’s Guide to Super Stories and How to Become a Better Writer’? It was written exactly for the kind of folk who ask ‘how do I start?’)