Writing for Children & Young Adults
(Writing for Children)
Children’s Writing is made up of twelve lessons, including three opportunities for you to gain written feedback on your writing from the course tutors, and participate in peer discussion. The course also includes various opportunities for you to try out a range of writing techniques and ideas.
From the day you enrol, you have up to six months to complete the course. We recommend spending a minimum of one week on each lesson.
Designed by Nike Bourke, this course helps you develop a working understanding of a range of different techniques specific to writing for children, the challenges of writing for different age groups, and the major genres of contemporary children’s fiction: fantasy, realism and non-fiction. Each lesson includes a range of classic and contemporary readings featuring different subjects and styles, a discussion of the techniques used by a variety of writers, and opportunities for you to experiment with your own writing.
Children’s Writing begins with an exploration of the history and development of children’s writing, including current influences and issues.
The second part of the course looks at technique. We’ll experiment with the all-important voice and character and learn how to tell a great story. The course also considers the importance of real and imagined settings: how to create vivid worlds, how to choose the right level of complexity for your readership.
In the third part of the course, we’ll explore the prominent genres in children’s fiction: fantasy, realism and non-fiction. We’ll start with the popular genres of fantasy and adventure, including the influence of folktales and mythology. Next, we’ll consider social realism; tackling the tough issues for children and teenagers, discovering ways to write issues-based fiction that isn’t preachy or boring. Finally, we’ll explore various forms of non-fiction writing for children, including textbooks and popular educational texts: from ABC to Art Appreciation, counting to counter-espionage.
We’ll explore the challenges and opportunities around writing series’ for children, and finish with a discussion of today’s children’s publishing market.
You don't need to have any prior experience or knowledge to enrol in this course, although you may find it helpful to have a play around in our introductory courses Playing with Prose or Playing With Poetry , or check out the free online Book Club in order to familiarise yourself with Olvar Wood onLine (OWL).
All of the courses in OWL are based on our philosophy that writers thrive through a mixed diet of reading, writing and thinking. If you’ve never thought about your writing practice that way before, or you’d like to learn more about how to integrate your writing, reading and thinking, you might find our Chapter One course Reading for Writers useful for opening up your practice, exploring ideas around inspiration, writers block, how to ‘read like a writer’ and so on.
If you’ve never written fiction before, you might also like to consider our Chapter Two course, Fiction, which explores the basics of writing prose fiction across a range of genres.
This course is comprised of 12 lessons.
- History of children’s literature
- On writing for children today
- Finding the right voice: character
- Making it exciting: plot, structure and story
- First writing task due
- Setting and description
- Picture books
- Young Adult & Crossover Fiction
- Second writing task due
- Fantasy and Adventure Narratives
- Realism: talking issues
- Non-Fiction for Young Readers
- Writing series fiction
- Children’s Publishing Market
- Final writing task due
Feedback
There are three feedback opportunities during this course. These are opportunities for you to submit pieces of your own writing for feedback both from your peers in the course, and from the course mentor. This feedback will be in the form of written notes and will be focused on helping you identify the strengths and weaknesses in your writing, and on ways to move your writing forward. Feedback may include, where appropriate and relevant, advice about further reading, strategies for improving the work, potential markets for publication, etc.
Writing Task One: Due Lesson Four
- Your first submission for feedback and discussion with your peers, up to a total of 5000 words, consists of text for a picture book, short story, or first chapter and synopsis for a novel length work.
Writing Task Two: Due Lesson Eight
- Your second submission for feedback and discussion with your peers consists of a short story or extract up to 5000 words in a different genre or age group than your first submission.
Writing Task Three: Due Lesson Twelve
- Your third submission for feedback and discussion with your peers, again up to 5000 words, can include revised earlier submissions, a continuation of an earlier project and/or a new chapter, picture book or short story.
There is no marks-based assessment in this course. This is partly because we believe that a focus on grades – on getting a good-enough grade, on writing something to please your teacher or peers – can block you from exploring your writing in an open, exploratory and experimental way. It can get you all tied up in knots worrying about grades, when what you could be focused on is the experience of learning something new, taking risks, and having fun.
In order to gain the most out of this course you will be asked to engage with a range of material, including picture books, chapter books and works of non-fiction. All of the required readings for this course are available through the online interface as downloadable PDFs, word documents or webpages.
The course tutors will also encourage you to read material outside the set readings, and will recommend works or authors in response to your interactions in the course.
It’s a good idea, if you’ve never used an online learning facility before, to check out our free online Book Club before you sign up for Children’s Writing. The Book Club will give you an opportunity to see what our online courses look and feel like, and how most of the interaction works.
OWL’s online courses work by inviting you to engage with your tutor, and with other writers enrolled in the course through a range of interfaces, including chat rooms, discussion forums, wikis, and standard, content-based webpages.
Throughout the site, you’ll find there is instant help available – usually indicated by a ?, which you can click to get more information. If you still can’t work out what to do, simply post a message in the ‘help!’ forum, or email your tutors.
Although the course is run online, we also ask you to work offline on your writing, using old-fashioned techniques like writing in a journal, stretching your imagination and reading, reading, reading.
To get the most out of this course, we recommend you set aside at least four hours for each lesson/week:
- one hour to read the online lesson material;
- one hour to think and dream and mess about with ideas;
- one hour for trying out the various writing techniques each lesson includes;
- one hour for posting your writing, providing feedback or commentary on other writer’s work, participating in discussion forums and chats, and so on.
We recommend that you allocate a bit of extra time the first week to familiarise yourself with the online learning forum.