subject: Learn To Write Main Characters Children Will Love! [print this page] Good children's books are stories that are purposely written for children and have main characters who are also children. That's why children love them and can relate to them. But authors need to learn to write effectively to create story characters that are believable, authentic, and lovable. You want to create characters children can relate to and understand. These characters must seem real or at least as real as they are intended to be. Children are very smart and amazingly observant, and they won't be fooled or entertained-by a poorly developed character, mainly the main character. To improve you chances of writing main characters that children will love, learn to write specifically for children.
There are several different subcategories of children's books, so it's somewhat difficult to tell you how to write about perfect characters for all these subcategories in just a line or two. For instance, picture books and children's easy readers and chapter books for beginning readers generally have few words and lots of illustrations. Character development in these stories is not just about what the characters do and say, but also about what they look like.
However, the illustrations used for your stories like this may be totally out of your control because they are created by an illustrator who is not necessarily collaborating with you, but may simply be taking direction from an editor. Unless you are both the story's writer and illustrator, you may have very little to say about the illustrations that will accompany your text. As a rule, the fewer words in a children's book, the fewer words you should use to provide description. You just don't have that many words to spare! So you're going to have to rely on the illustrator's good judgment to decide if the character will have red, black, blonde, or brown hair, for instance, unless it is critical to the storyline. In situations where a physical detail describing the character's appearance must be verbalized-for instance, if the story is about a child who is teased because she has a large birthmark on her face-somewhere you will need to include enough of a description that the readers know this fact about the character and her appearance. Beyond that, you should simply limit physical descriptions altogether.
You see, with just a few words at your disposal with which to tell your story, you simply can't afford to waste them giving nonessential physical descriptions. And in truth, you need to learn to write a lot more about a person's character than physical attributes or description. So that is where you want to concentrate your writing. You want to show the reader the main character's character rather than telling them about it. And the best way to do this is to apportion the majority of the words you are allotted for your children's story to dialogue and action.
Written descriptions are often unnecessary to the creation and development of a well thought out and believable character. Story characters are about much more than just the color of their skin or hair or their height or weight or any other physical characteristic that can be described. Learn to write good dialogue and a story based on action, this is the key to developing good main characters. That's because so much of our character becomes evident and is showcased through our words, our thoughts, and our actions. No one has to tell a child that the main character in a story is mean when that child says mean things to other kids, thinks mean things about other kids, and acts mean to them, too. The character's personality comes through loud and clear by showing, not telling.
"Show, don't tell" is the spirit of great writing-and this applies to stories for readers of all ages, not just children's books. However, in children's books where the author must learn to write a story and develop the main character with so few words to work with, it becomes even more critical.
