"Real kids get told what to do, how to do it, and what not to do all the time. Parents, teachers, older siblings, coaches, music instructors – kids have to listen to adults blathering all the livelong day. Think of a child you know and start enumerating how many adults/authority figures that child interacts with on a daily or weekly basis. Sure, a lot of this instruction from one’s elders is necessary in real life, but it doesn’t make for good literature, not for a young reader, and not if you are the adult reading to a youngster. Ugh. It gets old fast. Give kids a break!"Resisting the urge to insert a wise older adult into stories for kids seems to be difficult for a lot of my writing students and freelance clients. I think this is because as adults ourselves, we are hard-wired with a strong instinct to protect the children under our care—even the fictional ones. But as writers we have to step back; we have to set the young heroes and heroines of our books free and allow them to take wrong turns down dark and even dangerous alleys. Because this is what makes stories interesting, whether that means scary, dramatic, funny, or sad.
I wish Mary had written this article a long time ago, so I could have been recommending it to my students for the past fifteen years! But I'm glad it's there now. Take a look at the entire article, and also at Mary's other columns about the crazy craft of writing for kids while you're there. She manages to dispense a lot of wisdom in a candy-coated wrapping of zany humor.
