How Writing for Kids Made Me Better at Communicating with Adults

🐢 Hello, thank you for reading A Helpful Thing! This is the SECOND edition, so be sure to read until the end for an interesting story involving the number 2! 🐢.

Ok, so one thing I do is write for children (and as a matter of fact yes, you CAN buy my book, thanks cutie!). In doing so, I’ve learned some lessons that made me better at communicating with adults. Here we go:

Don’t tell anything you can show.

In the first pass of my manuscript, I wrote that the main character Ms. Bangle had sunflowers on her socks. That text was immediately removed by my incredible editor (Hi Liz!) in favor of a beautiful illustration of Ms. Bangle in her sunflower socks by illustrator K-Fai Steele.

Can I tell you something? Well, too bad, I’m gonna! In my 20+ readings of this book to kids, I always ask them what they notice about Ms. Bangle and they always say the sunflower socks. In this case, it was unnecessary for me to tell them about the socks, the image is far more compelling. Really think about using images, illustrations, charts, etc where you can. Especially if you have any reason to use this image in particular:

I mean…what the hell is this?? A guy “sneaking up” on his colleague with a paper fish?? I don’t know but I assume it would be a major crowd pleaser! If you have any ideas on how you could use this absolutely insane image, I beg you:

Don’t be afraid to use some light trickery.

Notice I said light. Do NOT lie to a bunch of people about stocks or something. I will be totally bullshit if I learned you did that.

This lesson came from my amazing agent (Kirsten, sup??). She explained that while my idea for a walrus who broke the mayor’s teapot was fun, the kids needed to learn something from the book and weren’t eagerly going to sit down to read a book titled How to Share, so I would need to trick them into learning something by making it fun. In other words, take people on a journey and surprise them with where they end up!

If you can make adults forget, even for a moment, that they are listening to a presentation about strategic goals for Q2, I promise, by the time you bring them back to this topic, they will be even more receptive to it.

Need help with this? I will definitely talk more about it here, but if you’re in need of urgent assistance don’t hesitate to reach out: cara@caradevins.com.

DO Keep it short!

So I know everyone always says that about everything, but kids really say it when they straight up walk away while you’re reading and start playing with a tuna can they found in recycling that they clearly find much more interesting.

AS PROMISED…something fun involving the number 2: Rare or special-edition $2 bills can be worth a lot of money. In 2017, a $2 bill sold for $1.2 million at auction!

OK BYE AND THANKS 👋🏻 👋🏻 👋🏻 👋🏻!