How to find the process that works for you
You have an idea for a children’s book story, you sit down at your computer (or pen and paper, if you’re old school), but where do you start? It’s vastly different for each person. Some writers plan obsessively before they type a word, mapping every beat and plot point before anything resembling a story exists on the page. Others dive straight in with nothing but a character or a situation, and find out what happens next by writing it. Most of us probably end up somewhere in between, and perhaps even in a different place on the spectrum for each book they write.
It’s the plotter versus pantser conversation, and obviously there’s no right answer – anything that gets your story written works. But it might be good to understand the difference, and experiment with the options.
The plotter
A plotter maps out the story before writing it, whether that’s a full chapter outline, a beat sheet, a spread map, or simply a list of what happens and in what order. The point is knowing where you’re going.
This has real practical advantages. You’re less likely to write yourself into a corner or spend weeks on a direction that ultimately doesn’t work. The downside is that over-planning might make the writing feel mechanical, as though the story is simply executing instructions rather than discovering itself. Characters sometimes need to go somewhere the outline didn’t anticipate, and forcing them back onto the prescribed track rarely produces the most interesting result.
The pantser
Pantsing – writing by the seat of your pants – means starting with very little and finding the story as you go. A character, a situation, a first line. Whatever comes next, you find by writing toward it.
The upside is a kind of energy that planned writing doesn’t always have. Discovery writing can produce something genuinely surprising and alive, because you don’t know what’s going to happen next and that uncertainty keeps the work interesting. The downside, particularly for longer work, is the risk of structural chaos. You might get stuck in a storyline that doesn’t work, and it can be tricky to go back and fix it. There’s a certain risk involved in not knowing where you’re going.
The hybrid
Most writers probably do something in between, somewhere along the plotter-pantser spectrum. A common version is to know where you’re starting and where you’re ending, but leave the middle open to discovery. Another is the “headlights” approach, where you can only see as far ahead as your headlights reach, but you trust that you’ll make the whole journey that way, seeing each section clearly enough as you arrive at it.
Ways of writing children’s books
Picture books
With a picture book running to around 500 words, the plotter/pantser distinction takes on a slightly different meaning, as there isn’t a huge amount to plan either way. You’re not outlining chapters or mapping a three-act structure across tens of thousands of words. The scale is different.
What the brevity does mean, though, is that the story has to be tight. Every element needs to deserve its place, every spread needs to do something, and there’s very little room for anything that doesn’t contribute. Because of this, it can be worth mapping out your spreads before you start writing, jotting down what happens on each of the 12 double-page spreads that make up a standard picture book. It doesn’t need to be detailed; a sentence per spread is enough. If you can’t fill all 12 with distinct, necessary story beats, that’s useful information before you’ve committed words to the page.
A complete guide to writing a picture book
Middle grade and YA
Longer fiction gives you considerably more room to discover the story as you write it, but structural problems in a 40,000-word novel are much more expensive to fix than in a 500-word picture book. Knowing your overall story arc (often with three acts) in advance gives you enough of a skeleton to write freely within each act without losing the overall shape of the story. At the same time, there’s plenty of room for writing by the seat of your pants and letting your characters run with the story.
How to write a middle grade novel
Series fiction
If you’re writing a series, some advance planning is particularly important. A decision you make in book one that contradicts what you need in book three is a significant problem to unpick, and much easier to avoid if you’ve thought ahead. You don’t need a complete series bible before you start, but knowing your main character’s arc across the whole series will save a great deal of pain in later drafts.
Finding what works for you
You might not know what works for you until you sit down and try it. Most likely, your ideal way of working fits somewhere in between plotter and pantser, and it’s worth playing around with it. And importantly, pay attention to which approach you actually enjoy working in – because the process you can sustain over the length of a project is more useful than the theoretically optimal one that makes you miserable by chapter three.
Further reading: