When, in the aftermath of the Boston bombings, I heard that a young child was among the victims, it hurt.  When I heard a name and an age, it hurt more.  But nothing could prepare me for the picture.

You know the one.  That beautiful child, Martin Richard, proudly holding the sign he made that now tells the entire world "No More Hurting People.  Peace."

It broke my heart.  I'm certain you felt the same way.

As the shock, the sorrow and the anger abated a bit, I realized something:

This is why we write for children.

There is a world filled with Martins waiting to be touched with our words.  For them, the thought of a world without hate, without violence, without senseless killing isn't an abstract notion for "some time way in the future".  It's real.  And there's no reason we shouldn't have it right now.

For goodness sake, someone has to tell them they're right, and the adults they see on the news are the ones who are crazy.

Families need to tell them that.  Teachers have to tell them that. And, I know in my heart, children's writers need to tell them that.

I know we all tend to obsess over rejection letters, and getting our apps published and having Facebookers "like" our pages.  And yes, those things are important.  But maybe it's time to take a step back and remember why we're really doing all this.

It's Martin.  And kids just like him.

Carry on this beautiful young man's message, and help his words reach other children across the globe.

Because that's why we do this.

I have tremendous respect for editors at children's book publishers.  It's a grueling job to wade through a pile of manuscripts looking for that elusive gem. And it can't be much fun seeing the same mistakes made again and again by aspiring writers. I know lots of editors who would love to issue proclamations such as, "Don't even think about sending me your work until you understand the difference between 'your' and 'you're'." But editors are, by and large, very nice people who wouldn't dream of being so rude. So I'll do the job for them. Here are seven things that, I'm willing to bet, editors at children's book publishers would wish more writers knew:

1) Please learn to punctuate. A misplaced comma or two won't prevent you from getting published (children's book publishers do have people on staff who correct those things), but if your manuscript is riddled with typos, it gives a bad first impression. To me, the most egregious offense is poor punctuation. It's easy to gloss over a misspelled word when reading a manuscript for the first time, but inappropriate semicolons or dialogue with all the quotation marks in the wrong place ruins the flow of the story. If you're not absolutely sure of your punctuation skills, have someone else proof your manuscript before you send it out.

2) Don't rhyme unless you have to. Many authors think picture books equal rhyming stories. The problem is that most people can't write very well in rhyme. The rhyming format should be the last thing you think about— first comes the character development, then the plot, then the pacing and tightly-written text. If all that's in place, then you can overlay the rhyme, without adding any extra, unnecessary details to the story. Only tell a story in rhyme if it's absolutely the best way— the only way— it can be told.

3) Only develop ideas worth a publisher's investment. Did you know it costs a major children's book publisher over $100,000 to get a picture book from manuscript to the book store? Is your idea worth that much of a risk? Novels cost less to produce (no color illustrations) but the market is smaller. Books that are simply cute, sweet, informative, or teach an important lesson don't do enough to justify the publisher's financial risk. Manuscripts need to do more than one thing. So develop ideas that are funny and teach science concepts, or are multicultural, entertaining, and illustrate an important life lesson without preaching to the reader.

4) Pay attention to established age groups and word counts. Once you're famous, you can break all the rules you want. In the meantime, you need to write within established guidelines so editors can visualize exactly where your book would fit on their list, and (more importantly) how their sales reps would pitch it to a book store. Don't submit a 3000 word picture book for ages 3-6. It simply won't fit into 32 pages with illustrations. Don't write a 15-chapter easy reader. Most second graders will be intimidated by a book that long. Be creative with your story, not its format.

5) If you're writing for older readers, understand the distinction between middle grade and young adult. Read several novels for ages 8-12, and for ages 12 and up, so you can begin to see the difference in characters and conflicts for the two age groups. Very often beginning writers think they're writing YA, but they've actually created a middle grade novel with 15-year-old characters. And do incorporate subplots into your story. These books need to have several layers— some emotional, some action-driven— that all work together to build the plot.

6) If your story is very personal and specific to your life/family, consider self-publishing. For your life to be interesting to a wide audience, you must be willing to sacrifice the facts when necessary to make good fiction. The incidents need a universal theme that's relevant to many children. If you have your heart set on writing a book about all the funny, mischievous things your kids and pets did when they were little, and you don't want to alter any events to create a solid, unique plot, then self-publish a few copies at your local copy shop (or an online site like CreateSpace) and give them to family members at the next reunion. Your book will be treasured by the people who will appreciate it the most.

7) Don't think you can abandon logic just because you're writing for children. Several years ago, I worked with a writer who was creating a middle grade fantasy set in the distant past, and yet one of his characters had a few modern-day items in his bedroom. I explained that, even though the book was fantasy, 21st century devices couldn't exist if he clearly stated the story happened long ago. "Kids aren't going to care," was his response. But they will. Even picture book readers will wonder why your spider character carries a life-sized baseball in his pocket. And then your credibility as an author is shot. If you maintain logic in the details, you can get away with a far greater suspension of disbelief in the story. And a story that's a delight to believe is what editors at children's book publishers wish for most of all.

So how much of this colorful verbiage should you use in your writing? Slang immediately dates a book, but that's not necessarily bad. Certain words are closely identified with different eras of American history, so slang can place the story quickly into a specific decade. The way a character talks provides a window for the reader into that character's personality, as well as his age and social class. And since slang originates from the youth culture of the time, the words themselves help portray the prevailing attitudes of teens and young adults. Finally, slang can be fun and interesting to read.

Most slang should be confined to characters' dialogue. If the story is told in first person, slang can be sprinkled sparingly throughout the narrative. Use slang when it's necessary to help define a character or show how one character stands out from the rest. Some slang grew out of subcultures, such as the Beat counterculture of the 1950's or the hip-hop culture of the 1980's and 1990's. Specific jargon helped identify members of these groups and alert the members to the presence of outsiders. Other slang is tied to occupations. If your character is a 1934 soda jerk he might respond to the order of "frankfurter with ketchup and a chocolate malt with egg to go" by shouting, "Hemorrhage a Coney Island chicken, twist it, choke it, and make it cackle on wheels" into the kitchen. Such language gives the reader a glimpse into a world that no longer exists.

But be careful not to go overboard. Writing communicates ideas, so you don't want the meaning of the story to get buried under curious figures of speech. In the above example, it may be more important to convey the wisecracking attitude of the soda jerk (and show how he creatively alleviated the boredom of his job) than for the reader to understand exactly what the customer ordered. However, if a pivotal plot point in your 1950's era novel occurs when the main character realizes her best friend is lying, don't have her reveal this to the reader with, "She's lighting up the tilt sign." Slang, along with other traits like clothing and hair style, should be used to add depth to a character and detail to a setting, not to tell the story. Above all, keep your audience in mind.

Having lived through the 1980's, we understand that "I am SO sure!" means just the opposite, but your readers (who weren't even born when Valley Girls hit the scene) might not get the sarcasm. Their only point of reference is the slang of today, so anything from an earlier decade needs to be defined by the surrounding dialogue, gestures or attitude of the speaker, or the reactions of other characters. A "deadly" car in the late 1970's could be awesome or a pile of junk (the word had two meanings). If your reader sees a Porsche drive up before the character nods appreciatively and drawls, "Look at that deadly load!", the dialogue will be easily understood.

This article excerpted from Children's Book Insider, The Newsletter for Children's Writers.  Visit now for more info and a special offer.

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For writing tips and more information about writing for children, visit The CBI Clubhouse – Home of the Fightin’ Bookworms!

Note: This rant is almost assuredly not about you, dear reader.  It's about a small percentage of folks who are really getting under my skin.  But even if you're not in that group, please read on — just don't take it personally! 

If you spend a fair amount of time online, perhaps you've noticed it:

People are becoming ruder.  And angrier.  And more entitled. 

Really, I'm simply amazed at some of what appears in my e-mail inbox.  Folks with whom I've never corresponded are sending me demanding messages such as "SEND ME THE EBOOK!!!!" and "I WANT TO GET PUBLISHED. TELL ME WHAT TO DO!"

People (non-customers) send us long, detailed questions out of the blue and expect immediate responses.  If they don't get one, we often receive an abusive message as a follow up.

And then there's the magic words that many people seem to be using as a justification for curt, nicety-free missives:

"Sent via my iPhone"

Look, I've been doing this a long time, and I've got a pretty thick skin.  So I raise this not to prevent my feelings from being hurt, but rather as a cautionary message about how *not* to sabotage your writing career.

As a 21st century author, your ability to communicate is paramount to your success.  Editors, agents, bloggers, book reviewers, distributors, promotional partners and readers are just some of the people who are important to your career.  For goodness sake, treat them with more respect than "Here's my new book. Write a review!".

Here then, are my tips to help you be seen as a courteous author worthy of consideration:

• "Dear", "Thank you", "Please" and "Sincerely/All the Best/Yours Truly" aren't archaic leftovers from the distant past.  They're still as important as ever.  Use them. Please.
  

• Composing a message from your phone or tablet is not an excuse for overly-direct curtness.  If you have a business message to send, wait until you have the time to write it properly.

• If you're contacting someone for the first time, make the effort to introduce yourself, and clearly state the purpose of your message.

• If someone doesn't get right back to you, don't fire off an angry e-mail accusing them of ignoring you.  Perhaps the message got lost.  Maybe they're on vacation.  Perhaps they're ill.  Calmly send another friendly message restating your request or comment.

• Remember that you're dealing with human beings.  In our case, every piece of e-mail is read either by me or by Laura.  We don't have a building full of underlings to take care of that for us.  When you send us kind words (and many of you do — thank you!), it feels great.  When you're rude or angry, it stings.   Treat me with respect — I think  I've earned at least that.

The vast majority of you are nothing but gracious in your communications with us.  That bodes well for your future success.  Keep at it, and gently work to correct those who aren't minding your manners.

For the few of you who may have let your etiquette slip, please take heed of the points I've laid out, and make a resolution to make the online world just a little bit more courteous.

That's it — venting over!      Onward….

It's the story of a forlorn puppeteer played by John Cusack, who works as a file clerk on floor seven and a half of a Manhattan office building. When he steps off the elevator he has to bend over, because the ceiling is only about five feet high. None of the characters seem to notice–this is their everyday world, and they go about their jobs no differently than if they could stand upright. But to the audience, the visual device of a building with half a storey signals there is something slightly off-kilter about this particular universe. And once we enter, it's perfectly logical that the puppeteer will eventually find a metaphysical portal into the brain of actor John Malkovich.

Writers of fantasy and science fiction have long known that the success of their stories largely depends on how much imagination and detail they invest in their settings. Readers willingly suspend their disbelief and enter a world of magic, time travel and talking animals because that world clearly exists independently of our own. But why can't more everyday, earthly stories do the same thing? A tweak of the environment can spin an ordinary plot in an unexpected direction.

The trick is to create a place that's just a bit off-center, so the reader knows it's the real world, only a tad exaggerated. It's like viewing your story through a funhouse mirror–some elements being wider and rounder than in real life, others elongated and skinny. And because the characters know only this universe, none ever question its shape.When the architect built Wayside School, the setting of Louis Sachar's middle grade collection Sideways Stories from Wayside School, he made a mistake: instead of the classrooms sitting side by side, the building is 30 storeys high with one room on each floor (he said he was sorry). Do you think in such a school that children might be turned into apples and sleeping in class would be considered educational? Of course! Skewing the environment of your story doesn't have to turn it in a wacky direction. You can go sinister instead.

The entire town of Waymer, the setting of Jerry Spinelli's middle grade novel Wringer, turns out for the annual weeklong Family Fest, culminating with the pigeon shoot fund-raiser. Sound too Norman Rockwellian for your taste? We're not talking clay pigeons here. The townsfolk shoot live birds, and the clincher is that all the 10-year-old boys are drafted as "wringers" to break the necks of the wounded pigeons. Palmer is about to turn 10, and though all his friends are eagerly anticipating this year's shoot, Palmer's dreading it. Once the reader gets over the shock that the people of Waymer actually condone this ritual, we can't wait to see how Palmer handles his fate. Spinelli gives a dark undertone to what could have been a predictable, preachy story about peer pressure, and throws plenty of humorous surprises into the mix.

The best authors absolutely inhabit the world they've created. So do their characters. Though they may look like us and have problems similar to ours, these people aren't exactly real. Think of the crime noir films such as L.A. Confidential, The Grifters or Double Indemnity. The hard-boiled, cynical characters speak with a cryptic toughness that would be laughable in any other setting, but absolutely fits their shady, often sleazy environment. The Peanuts comic strips made kids and their pets the center of the universe, with adults regulated to speaking incomprehensibly from outside the frame. The characters took on the qualities of the absent adults–Charlie Brown worried, Lucy was his sadistic therapist, Snoopy wrote bad novels. All of these characters need their environment to survive. That's why sitcom spinoffs rarely work–take Kramer out of the Seinfeld world, and he evaporates.?

So your job this month is to watch movies, cartoons and television. Read comic strips. Find examples where the writers started out with the everyday, and then added a twist to make the ordinary world extraordinary. How does this new world affect the characters who inhabit it? Think about how Louis Sachar used this technique in his novel Holes, Laura Joffe Numeroff in her picture book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, or Dr. Seuss in The Cat in the Hat. Look at the illustrations for William Steig's Pete's a Pizza and Spinky Sulks. The pictures appear to simultaneously be modern and nostalgic, speaking to both kids and their parents. Then take your ordinary setting and add a detail or two that tips it a few degrees from the norm. Finally (this is the hardest part), don't explain the change to the reader. The place, the tone, the reality you've established simply is. Allow your characters to evolve from this world, and see what happens.?

Every innovative writing technique needs a name, so I'm calling this the Waffle. Polly Horvath, the master of believably eccentric tales, set her Newbery Honor novel Everything on a Waffle in the Canadian town of Coal Harbor (a real place), in a restaurant called The Girl on the Red Swing where everything–lasagne, fish, even waffles–is served on a waffle (she made that part up). This one detail establishes the folksy, quirky tone of the book. Eleven-year-old Primrose Sharp, whose parents were lost at sea, fits right in to the restaurant, even after her guinea pig catches on fire from standing too close to the oven. So don't be afraid to serve up a Waffle now and then. Try topping it with meatloaf. You never know–you might develop a taste for it.

Judy Blume on writing from the heart (August 1990): What happened when I first started–as in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, which is the first book that was really mine–is I was just telling the stories that I knew. I knew what it was like to be in sixth grade, and to be in Margaret's body, because that was my body. Slow growing, slow to develop….So that's what I wrote about, because it wasn't there for me when I was young. I didn't know if anyone would publish it, but it was from the heart. The only thing that works with writing is that you care so passionately about it yourself, that you make someone else care passionately about it. Books that are written to order are awful. It can't work. Children will see through that and they won't read it.

Barbara Seuling on common mistakes (December 1994): The main character is a big one. So often beginning writers will use boy and girl twins as the main character, or use more than one main character, such as a pair of boys going off to have an adventure and you can't pick out which one is the hero of the story. There should be one viewpoint to the book, and this rule hasn't changed since children's books first began. You can occasionally get away with it if you shift the focus to another character when you start a new chapter, but you have to do this very carefully. Point of view is another one. I always feel you should know how to use point of view so you can break the rules.

There are a lot of cases where the rules of point of view are broken very successfully, such as in Charlotte's Web. You can bend the rules but you have to be as good as E.B. White to do it. There are two ways to approach talking animal characters. The big differentiation depends on the story. Either the animals have to truly be animals, or they are really kids that happen to look like animals. If you're writing a story that just needs a substitute child, then you can decide if it's a soft furry animal or a funny-looking animal. It's funny to see a pig in children's clothes, but they always have some pig-like characteristic, such as a large appetite. If you're writing that kind of story, then it's fine to have the animal act like humans.

In a book like Charlotte's Web the animals were very true to their natures, and it was important that they were. Even Templeton the rat was not a sympathetic character. In a story where you're getting close to the animal world, you need to keep animals as true to their natural selves as possible. What you don't want is the animals doing animal-like things part of the time when it's convenient to the story, but then at other times have hands or stand upright to talk to each other. That never works.

To read these — and many  more — CBI interviews in their entirety, check out In Their Own Words: The Best of CBI's Interviews

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