It's the ONLY thing!

Writing for children ....... "It's the ONLY thing!"

While we take a hiatus from our blog, I focus on the reasons we choose to write for children and feel like Water Rat said so famously in the classic, WIND IN THE WILLOWS, when describing  boating to Mole,  "It's the ONLY thing!" For us, writing for children is the ONLY thing.

In his children's book of 1908, Kenneth Grahame creates an enchanting new world for the child reader with wonderful language ("Never in his life had he ( Mole) seen a river before...this sleek,sinuous, full bodied animal, chasing and chuckling....with a gurgle...and a laugh....Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated...he trotted as one trots, when very small...") . Here Grahame creates the picture of a lively running river, a new and intriguing experience for his character, and endears his character, Mole, to the small child reader who is also "very small."

In his classic, Grahame creates a new place for children, with well developed characters that children embrace for their familiarity and bond with as friends, brings a story of simple but exciting adventure and carries the reader out into the environment of the nature filled river world and woods.

When Grahame as an older man met with Ernest Shepard who was illustrating the first edition of the book with pictures, he spoke of his characters, Mole, Rat, Toad and Badger. He said, Please treat them kindly. They're my friends.

If we can create well crafted characters that are our friends and become friends of children and bring them to the readers in a unique and familiar setting so children relate to them and remember them with pleasure or use them to understand experiences of their expanding world, it will be the ONLY thing.