Children’s Books – categorizing by age group

This is an information sheet about children’s books which I wrote for the writing group I belong to, intended as an overview for the non-specialist. However, someone else asked me for this information, so here it is, for public consumption.

These categories are of necessity overlapping. Children have very different experiences of learning to read. Their ‘reading age’ may be far above or below their emotional maturity. I’ve divided them up the way you’d be most likely to see them divided in a bookshop or library. Publishers would break these categories into lots of subcategories.

Picture Books

• Some are suitable for children to read alone

• Most designed for an adult and child to share

• Importance of illustration and design; most of the best picture books are co-authored by a writer and illustrator who work closely together

• Many have rhyming texts with plenty of repetition

• There is often a playful use of language which might seem difficult for children to comprehend word for word

• The pictures can usually tell the story by themselves – or expand on the text

• Generally only a few sentences per page; some are wordless

• May contain difficult ideas which adults need to discuss or present to young children, e.g. death, new sibling, potty-training, bullying

• Not necessarily a ‘story’; could be a nonsense rhyme, descriptive or simply words.

Early Readers

• Approx 6 up

• Designed for children beginning to read on their own

• Sentences are very simple, with just one idea per sentence

• In these books the text carries the story rather than the pictures

• Many books in this range form part of a series

• At the younger end, these books have 100 to 2,500 words and each page will have a picture.

• Progresses to books of 3,000 to 15,000 words, divided into short chapters with a picture on most spreads

Middle Grade

• Age 8 to 12

• Word count generally no more than 45,000 words, though fantasy titles may be much longer

• These are the books that are most likely to spring to mind when you think of children’s books

• Generally plot- rather than character-led

• Unusual to have a first-person narrator

• The language varies more than in books for younger readers, but is likely to be simpler in structure and vocabulary than a young adult book

• Feature adventures, comedy, fun

• Unlikely to contain romance, swearing, drugs

• Many of these books feature a child protagonist, but you also find books about adults or animals

• Parents are often absent in these books

• Endings are usually happy

• May feature a series of adventures of a character, so that each chapter is a short story in itself and the book has no overall narrative arc

Young Adult

• Age 12 and up

• Word count generally no more than 70,000 words, but some genres can be much longer

• Tend to focus more on characters and their problems

• Tend to have deeper points of view (often first person) and be more emotional

• May contain material which is considered unsuitable for younger children (drugs, sex) or wouldn’t interest them (romance) or is upsetting

• The language in these books will be as complex as that of an adult novel

• These novels almost exclusively feature a teenage protagonist

Five hundred words a day

That’s my new year’s resolution. Five hundred words a day – just look how they mount up if you repeat them and spell out the numbers!

Why?

I am a writer. A writer of lots of published non-fiction, a couple of self-published novels and a whole heap more fiction in various stages of completion waiting its turn in the wings. The fiction-writing is relatively new for me. Well, I say new, but actually I’ve always written fiction in a vague, pleasing myself and never getting anything really finished kind of way. It’s only been in the last five or six years that I’ve turned to it with any seriousness. And as such, I’m still finding my way, working out what it is that works for me. And the main thing I’ve found it that discipline and a certain amount of pressure is key to getting the pictures in my brain connected into some kind of story on the page.

So far, my strategy has been to pick a period of time, say two months, and set myself a target number of words a day so that I end up with something like a book at the end of that time. It works pretty well – as a lot of people realise when they do NaNoWriMo, if you force your head into the creative process like that and don’t get too bogged down on correcting and editing as you go, the ideas really flow.

The trouble is, if I set a big target (I went for 1,250 words the first time and 1,500 the second), the day I don’t manage it – because my brain’s not functioning or I have to travel or look after someone or look after myself – the next day’s target becomes impossible. Also, the planning has to be very, very tight before I start. I don’t mean that I need to know exactly what happens in each chapter, but that I need a strict outline, including a timeframe, or else I find that about halfway through I’m not sure what day of the week it is and events are piling up against each other in an unlikely fashion.

And during the time when I’m not writing to a target I hardly write a word. I save it all up until the next time I think I’ve got a big chunk of time to spare to throw myself into it. Of course I’m doing other things: editing what I’ve written, editing other people’s work, planning the next book, infernal, eternal bloody marketing. But the writing, the bit I love best, gets pushed to the side.

(Hey, over 400 words already…)

What?

So this year I’m setting myself a target of writing five hundred words a day, every day of the year. That’s 182,500 words in a year – no 183,000 because it’s a leap year. That’s potentially three 60,000 word novels!

But I’m not expecting to end up with three novels this time next year. Of course, it’s tempting to start right in with something new, but that’s not really the point. The point is to develop good, regular writing habits. That includes making sure everything gets finished and taking some time to have a stab at those ideas that float around and never get pinned down. I’m not even expecting it all to be fiction. This blog’s my first five hundred.

How?

I can write five hundred words in half an hour generally. It might take an hour if I haven’t given myself enough time to think before I start writing. To be honest, the trouble with trying to write 1,500 a day was that often after about the first five hundred, the words stopped coming by themselves and so the pace slowed. Writing five hundred words should be possible in pretty much any circumstances.

I’ve written a list which I will add to as the year goes on, a list of all the things I want to work on so I can’t possibly sit down and say I have nothing to write about. There’s so much! – not only the book I’m currently writing, but also the one that’s been swimming around in my head for a year, the sequel to the one I’m trying to sell at the moment which is missing its last chapter, the Nesbitesque story I’ve been writing for my daughters for several years, blogs, reviews, writing exercises and a new non-fiction project.

I’ve got a spreadsheet too. I love a spreadsheet!

Will five hundred words be enough?

Probably not – I’m over seven hundred already here! But five hundred is an achievable target. Of course there’ll be days when I do more than that, and there’ll be days when I write five hundred new words and delete three thousand old ones. That’s what writing’s like.

But the joy of it is, even when I’m busy doing non-writing things, or in the complex throes of edits and rewrites, I get to spend thirty minutes or so every day engaged in that glorious pleasure of spinning ideas into fresh words.

A writer's pep-talk

Think of this as a pep-talk.

It’s a pep-talk for me really, but feel free to take advantage of it.

Sometimes writing comes easy. Sometimes you hit your word count target in less than half the time it normally takes and feel like you can carry on at that rate for hours. There’s hardly a pause in your typing, no going back to perfect the awkward sentence – no need.

But then, there are the times when writing is like wading through treacle. Each word is hard-won. There are so many clumsy sentences that you have to go back and reword. You’re afraid to leave the keyboard because anything, anything will distract you enough to keep you from coming back. And yet you would really, really like to abandon your work, right this minute because it’s too hard and it’s rubbish and who do you think you are writing novels anyway?

This is where the pep-talk comes in.

They could be rubbish, those few words you managed to squeeze out today. You might have to delete them all. But it could be that writing them made you discover what you don’t need to say, or what you don’t want to say. Or maybe you can use those words somewhere else. Perhaps, when you come back to them, those words you deem to be rubbish now won’t seem so bad. A tweak here and there will sort them out. Maybe something you’ve written, some sentence, some phrase, is perfect.

After all, when you come to reread the whole of what you’ve written, it’s generally impossible to tell which bits flew from your fingers and which bits you sweated over. So maybe, when you think you’re stuck, you’re not really stuck at all. You’re just slow. Don’t worry about it. Just plug away.

Today was a slow day for me. It’s the final chapter, so everything matters so much. The rate I’m going, it’ll take me a week to write the necessary two and a half thousand (ish) words. But I’ll get there, even if it’s three words written and two deleted. I’ve written the last sentence already, and it looks pretty good to me.

A teller of tales

My dad was a teller of tales. He knew that the truth, the actual facts about anything, needed honing and shuffling about to make a story. He loved an audience. He’d sit at the head of the table when we had visitors and tell the same old stories, the ones that made Mum and me roll our eyes, because we’d heard them so many times, and because we were almost always the stooges. And sometimes Dad would slip in something new, and you’d listen as he told it, thinking ‘what’s this, I haven’t heard this one,’ and in the end it would turn out to be a joke embroidered with reality to keep you listening.

He was much in demand to give speeches at conferences. If his performance was anything like the speech he gave at my wedding, he deserved his reputation. Imagine the perfect father-of-the-bride speech. You get the silly stories and the little digs: at me, at my new husband. You get the references that take in every group in the room, so that we’re all in it together. You get his pride and his good wishes. I’ve got his speech on video somewhere, and now that he’s gone I’d like to find it, to watch him in full flow, notes he scarcely looks at in one hand, gesturing with the other, looking around to involve everyone in the room.

I get being a reader from my mum. She’s a book-a-day type reader. I’ll never keep up with that, but it was she who nurtured my love of books and my constant need for new and involving stories. Dad was never a reader. Reading fiction simply wasn't his thing. But I think perhaps I get being a storyteller from him. Certainly I feel I'm having a Dad moment when I’m telling my children about something that’s happened and I find I’m framing and adjusting the facts so that there’s a satisfying punchline. And when I'm writing and I realise that I’ve woven into my entirely fictional narrative some real event or experience which has been crying out to become part of a story, maybe that instinct comes from Dad too.

Thanks Dad. Miss you.

The Curse of the TBR* Pile

 The pile of books beside my bed is growing. There are the ones I bought for my new reading project (the one I haven't started yet). There's the bunch my sister-in-law lent me the last time I was there (six months ago). There are the freebies. There are the books other writers have lent me because I've just got to read them. There are the writing guides and reference books I'm currently browsing when I can't get my head into fiction. Oh, and there are the books I've bought myself because not only can I not pass a bookshop without going in, I pretty much can't pass a bookshop without buying at least three books (four always seems to be overdoing it, though, when I have my daughters with me, we generally come out with four, theoretically one each, but we will all read each other's).

The TBR pile is a beast. It makes me feel guilty when I buy new books and they skip the queue. Some books are never going to make it off the pile. I feel guilty about them too. Occasionally I slip the odd one into my husband's pile, which feels slightly less like I'm rejecting it.

You'd think having a great stack of books to read would be a joyous thing, but somehow it's not. It's off-putting. Like having a vast heap of food on your plate. You'd probably eat more if you started with a small helping and then took more. So maybe what I need to do is to rethink my TBR pile. maybe I should put them on a shelf somewhere, not too far away from where they are now, but far enough that they don't feel like they're nagging at me. Maybe then they'll look at appealing as they did when I bought them or was given them. Maybe then I'll browse through them for the next thing to read with more thrill than at present.

There's only one problem...

 .... no spare bookshelves.

*To Be Read (but surely you already knew that)