The Audience
I found it was one thing to have a story in my head it was another to understand who would be interested in hearing or reading it. And, how would I be able to write it in such a way that the target audience would consume the story. This brought home some of the main challenges for me:
I turned to my daughters who were 6 and 9 at the time and I asked them. While they nodded that they enjoyed the story (I think the 9 year olds more out of a sense of duty to their dad) I still felt it was a younger children’s book. It was my 6 year old Hannah who said to write it like it was for her. Which was where I should have centered some time back, as it was her encouragement that led to me writing this into a book in the first place from a story I made up for her. She was in fact my first audience and she could read the rough notes I had written. So that is when it was settled that it would be for parents of four year olds to read with their children and for 6/7 year olds to self-read.
But how to make it readable? Well this was a process of trial and error. Having read many a story for this age group to my children over the years I figured this should be a free kick. That may have been the case had it been a chapter book or a book with few pictures, but it became apparent that I had forgotten that in writing this book I had to consider the picture angle. After all a picture book, needs pictures and using the old adage that a picture paints a thousand words, I really needed to think how my words would complement the pictures and vice versa. This suddenly became a tougher proposition.
My initial draft was too long and still wasn’t considering the fact the pictures do a lot of the story telling. I had to keep reminding myself that I did not need to go into great detail as to what was happening in the room or outside the window. That was where the three domains had to come together to tell the whole story. Those domains being the words, the pictures and the reader’s imagination. If I wrote too much it would be too busy on the page and given the age of the reader attention may wane. If the pictures were too detailed coupled with too many words then the imagination was not needed as much and attention may wane. So I again turned to my in house target audience, six year old Hannah, and tried the variations of the story out on her, watching for visual cues with regards her attention, interest (or waning) and where the story appeared to resonate with her.
And then it came down to word choice. I needed to use words that were not too long or overly descriptive, but not too plain or common or garden variety. At the end of the day half of the audience was being read the book by their parents so I at least need them to want to pick it up again. For this advice I turned to my local book shops and our own bookshelves for inspiration. Spending some time on bookshop floors or conveniently provided couches to see how the likes of Pamela Allen, Mem Fox and Graeme Base solve this problem. While I wasn’t looking to use the same words or formats it provided some direction in terms of sentence length, structure and types of words that seem to resonate. And this really talked to the problem of how a six year old thinks when reading.
I found it was one thing to have a story in my head it was another to understand who would be interested in hearing or reading it. And, how would I be able to write it in such a way that the target audience would consume the story. This brought home some of the main challenges for me:
- Identifying the target audience
- How could I translate the story in such a way that it reached this audience
- Identifying how that audience would best consume the story
- How does a four to six year old think?
I turned to my daughters who were 6 and 9 at the time and I asked them. While they nodded that they enjoyed the story (I think the 9 year olds more out of a sense of duty to their dad) I still felt it was a younger children’s book. It was my 6 year old Hannah who said to write it like it was for her. Which was where I should have centered some time back, as it was her encouragement that led to me writing this into a book in the first place from a story I made up for her. She was in fact my first audience and she could read the rough notes I had written. So that is when it was settled that it would be for parents of four year olds to read with their children and for 6/7 year olds to self-read.
But how to make it readable? Well this was a process of trial and error. Having read many a story for this age group to my children over the years I figured this should be a free kick. That may have been the case had it been a chapter book or a book with few pictures, but it became apparent that I had forgotten that in writing this book I had to consider the picture angle. After all a picture book, needs pictures and using the old adage that a picture paints a thousand words, I really needed to think how my words would complement the pictures and vice versa. This suddenly became a tougher proposition.
My initial draft was too long and still wasn’t considering the fact the pictures do a lot of the story telling. I had to keep reminding myself that I did not need to go into great detail as to what was happening in the room or outside the window. That was where the three domains had to come together to tell the whole story. Those domains being the words, the pictures and the reader’s imagination. If I wrote too much it would be too busy on the page and given the age of the reader attention may wane. If the pictures were too detailed coupled with too many words then the imagination was not needed as much and attention may wane. So I again turned to my in house target audience, six year old Hannah, and tried the variations of the story out on her, watching for visual cues with regards her attention, interest (or waning) and where the story appeared to resonate with her.
And then it came down to word choice. I needed to use words that were not too long or overly descriptive, but not too plain or common or garden variety. At the end of the day half of the audience was being read the book by their parents so I at least need them to want to pick it up again. For this advice I turned to my local book shops and our own bookshelves for inspiration. Spending some time on bookshop floors or conveniently provided couches to see how the likes of Pamela Allen, Mem Fox and Graeme Base solve this problem. While I wasn’t looking to use the same words or formats it provided some direction in terms of sentence length, structure and types of words that seem to resonate. And this really talked to the problem of how a six year old thinks when reading.