Well, here we are. The third and final installation of my series on the basics of children’s writing, and how they affect your business. So far we’ve gone over the rule of three, showing not telling, hooking your audience and remembering your points of view. If you haven’t read them, go back and do it now, then come back. I’ll wait.
Back? Good!
Today, for our last section, you and I will talk about the importance of revising and editing your work, why you need to know your audience, and why you should never, ever talk down when you’re writing.
Revise & Edit
This is more of a general writing rule, but I’m going to include it anyway. No one writes a perfect children’s book the first time around. In fact, the first drafts of any work are often pretty ropey. Instead, what makes a good children’s book is a mixture of 2 things – good ideas and ruthless editing. If you want to write a successful children’s book, you need to be prepared to put a lot of time and effort in revising, changing and editing your story. In fact, only around 30% of a writer’s time is spent on the first draft. The other 70% is spent editing and refining. That could be anything from tweaking the tone of voice to completely changing a character (for example, from a boy to a girl) or even removing a character altogether. By the end of the process, your story will look drastically different, but it will also be a more refined and polished story that will be more appealing to the children reading it.
All of that? Copy and paste it for business writing, and then just replace ‘children’ with ‘business’. The actual writing is important, but the editing is what takes OK writing to truly great, blow your socks off writing.
Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience is a crucial part of creating a successful children’s book. Not only do you need to understand exactly what age range you are writing for and what they need, but in children’s writing you also need to think about secondary audiences – aka the parents.
In business, you’re also writing for a wide audience, as well as for secondary audiences, but possibly not in the way you think. For example, say your ideal client is a business owner at a medium sized business. That’s the primary audience you want to reach. But these people are often busy, and while they may make the decisions, they’re not the ones doing all of the research for solutions. That would be their secretaries, their VAs or their heads of department. They are your secondary audience – the people you have to get past to get to the primary audience. So your writing needs to impress them, too.
Don’t Talk Down
Another common mistake first time children’s authors make is talking down to their readers. You might not do this intentionally, but often in the first attempts at writing for this new audience, you might find yourself dumbing things down or talking in a much more babyish way than you normally would.
And children can tell.
The thing is, many children like to feel more grown up than they really are. They like to try and talk like adults, act like adults and read books that make them feel like a grown up. So while you do need to keep an eye on the language you’re using with them, that doesn’t mean you need to adopt a condescending tone either. For the record – adults don’t like being talked down to either – and we all have been. So just think back to the conversation with your boss, or even your own parents, where the way they spoke to you made you feel small and stupid. That’s the feeling we’re trying to avoid.
Kids are a lot smarter than we think, and we should treat them that way.
In business? Well, who actually enjoys being talked down to? You might need to simplify things to explain them, but that doesn’t mean you need to talk down to your readers while you do it.
And that, as they say, is a wrap! This has been a (slightly edited) chapter from my upcoming book, and something of a taster. I wanted to show you just how relevant children writing is to business writing, and why it’s important never to look down on children’s writing (or writers) just because it’s for children. After all, children are the world’s harshest critics – if you can impress them, you can impress anyone!
Want to know how I pull all of this into business writing? Give me a bell, you know where to find me.