Writing children’s books is not only about composing engaging tales intended for young comprehension but also about bringing every positive change to the growing mind.
Inspiring children to be good, caring, compassionate, and empathic is a big and important mission.
With the right guides and your talent before anything else, you can make a story that will make a difference.
Here are some essential tips on how to write and publish children’s book, achieving the goal to make a good influence on our new generations.
1. How to Achieve Empathy
Children are very imaginative beings, and their understanding of the world is, in that sense, different from others. They can easily put themselves in another one’s shoes and relate to someone’s life, problems, emotions, and state.
If you create a story that involves real feelings like happiness, sadness, loneliness, anger, and similar, children will most likely try to relate and understand those emotions, and that is empathy itself.
It is also great to put your characters in real-life situations and problems. Then, they can see how those problems are getting solved and what they can learn from the character’s errors or good acts.
2. Create Characters that Kids Can Connect With
Creating a character that children can relate to, strive/aspire to be. It’s not just about making the hero sympathetic or the hero being the strongest, or the cleverest, out of them all.
Creating a character that children can actually relate to is not just about making him likable or a superhero, the strongest or the smartest one. It is about showing his emotions and all his vulnerabilities. That will make children understand him fully and understand his role in the story.
He can face some issues about poverty, bullying, and fears, but his emotions in challenging those problems are crucial. Even more important is how he will feel after making a good choice or decision.
You should think of these three questions as an author:
- What emotional challenges will my character have in a story?
- How can children relate to them?
- What will they learn from that story?
3. Tangle Should Involve Compassion
Think about what your tangle in a story will be about. Involve compassion as an essential part and lecture in the way that a child who is reading a book sees a good impact of being compassionate for a good outcome.
For example, if one character is facing bullying, show how lack of understanding from friends around affects him and then how, with someone’s help and support, he will fight against it.
Another good example would be when two characters are angry with each other because of misunderstanding, and they are sad because they are good friends and now they don’t speak to each other.
After struggling to end the fight, they talk, and with understanding and empathy, they realize that the reason why they are mad is a misunderstanding. In that way, children will learn about the importance of communication instead of judgment.
4. Illustrations Can Enhance Emotional Connection
Illustrations are very important for achieving a connection between readers and characters. They should be very clear in representing emotions and the mood of the story.
Your choice of colors that you’ll be using in your book, as well as the style/tone of the illustrations are important as they can affect the child on an emotional level.
For children who still don’t have good reading skills illustrations are crucial to understand the story and connect emotionally with character.
You should talk to the illustrator about making the story even easier to understand and to make sure that they understand how to reflect character emotions on paper.
5. How to Publish Your Story
Writing your story is the first and the most important step. The next is bringing your story to life – publishing it.
In the traditional way, you should find a literary agent and submit your manuscript to a publisher, but that will not leave you much space for further creativity in the process or your author rights.
Self-publishing offers you more control.
There are platforms that provide you with resources on how to publish a children’s book, find the right illustrator, and reach the right audience with good marketing strategies.
6. Knowledge on Compassion and Empathy
As for the children, they’ve (unfortunately, but most likely) grown accustomed to the hostile world replete with immoral exposure mostly propagated by social media and the news (since most news is negative).
Leveraging lessons on caring, love and compassion are of great importance. These approaches will assist kids in becoming the kind of people who will not shy away from doing good.
The central aim is not only to pass the time with children before the ‘bad days’ but to assist the kids in realizing the best version of themselves in the days to come.
Conclusion
Think about what you want to achieve before you start writing and how children will relate to that. The message of your story should be a good lesson for them.
Follow these 6 steps for creating a compelling story that will keep little one’s involved in your world of imagination with compassion and empathy.
Choose wisely how you’re going to publish and promote your book to reach the right audience and, in the end, to make a good impact to our new generations.