WRITING FOR CHILDREN
IN A NUTSHELL
Keeping the wordcount down can serve your children’s writing in many different ways. Amy Sparkes looks at the benefits of keeping the kernels short and sweet.
Amy Sparkes
These days, everything is quite ‘micro’. Tweets have limited characters. Insta reels have limited lengths. TikToks use a small window. This need for conciseness in a time-pushed society can be a very good thing. If you use this mindset, it can help tighten up your writing and provide opportunities to communicate your project in key, concise, powerful moments. One way of doing this is to look at key aspects of your story and ask yourself, ‘what is this, in a nutshell?’ Here are some ways you can use nutshells.
Project logline
Condensing your children’s story into a five-line pitch or even a three-line pitch might feel like a big ask, but it’s also useful to practise getting your story down even more tightly: into a logline. Already used extensively in the screenwriting world, loglines are brilliant for getting your entire story across in a very tight word count of around 25-35 words.
Loglines can help you get the key information about your book down. If anything is missing or not sounding strong enough, it should be noticeable. You can also create loglines for your project before you even start writing. This can save a huge amount of time. As I write both screenplays and children’s books, I tend to use loglines a lot. When I come up with new ideas for a book, I tend to write a logline first as a starting point, to get down the key ingredients. This will often show me whether an idea has legs or not. If it doesn’t seem to quite work, I look at the weaker aspects in the logline and try and develop those further.
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