Talk. Write. Show. Don't Preach! Writing for Young People

 

The first play I saw in a theater as a child had a princess in it. Much as I wanted to like it, I was soon bored. I had already been fascinated by movies like The Wizard of Oz, shown every year on Thanksgiving. Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West were far more fascinating.

Other movies, plays and stories drew me in with dinosaurs, ghosts, horses and adventures. I wasn’t a writer then, but I knew that certain stories were thrilling — and others, not so much.

Safe stories with plots that appeared to go wrong for a minute or two and then righted themselves, seemed fake in ways I couldn’t have explained at six or seven years old. I knew when something happened that seemed genuine — and that is always what I look for, since.

I've written a number of plays for children, and each theater has its own, fairly large audiences. Subjects ranged from historical to folk tale adaptations with hints of magic and fantasy to a young teen satire. I also wrote a three-book, middle-grade historical series about the Beat Generation in 1958.

I decided to set the Beat Street series in the 1950s because I thought Beats sparked what we later called the hippie era and a new way of looking at art. I didn’t always know I wanted to be an artist, but I had a feeling that artists were more like me than doctors, lawyers, or CEOs. And part of me knew that, as someone who loved making up stories, I was headed for a creative life.

Early on, I learned that telling a story to children is like telling any other story: we need to show, not tell; share, not preach, and most of all, create stories and plot lines to captivate readers and audiences, no matter how old or young they are. Yes, there are things we don't want to show to a three-year-old. At the same time, we don't want the three-year-old to be so bored she wanders off--or worse, falls asleep.

Read more here.