Tips on Writing Children's literature (1)

In spite of Baudelaire's dictum "genius is childhood recovered", children's literature has been labeled "sub-literature" for much of the Critics, and this curse sometimes accompanying women's literature, detectives’ stories, erotic tales, science fiction, wild westerns and novelettes. The very fact that there is a lot of bad literature in these paragraphs does not justify the overall assessment, because bad literature abounds in all genres, themes and countries.

When a literary text is good, is also good if it belongs to children's literature or metaphysics. The sake of explanation, paternalism and protectionism made much of the classic children's literature be dogmatized from its origins, but good authors (R. Dahl, G. Rodari, C. Nöstlinger, M. Ende, etc.) never fell into that trap. The authors considered “classics” of children's literature (Verne, Stevenson, Dickens, Carroll, Salgari...) wrote their stories and adventure novels aimed to all audiences, not just for children and youth. Only from the second half of the twentieth century, children's literature authors write fully aware that its readers are children.

Lately, there's a renewal of children's literature in the form of normal and everyday storytelling, like those that may be living any of their readers. Children's stories are not composed only of fairies, princes and stepmothers. Children, although adults seem to forget sometimes, are living in the real world where there are discussions, games, penalties, awards, injustices, friends, illness, anger and reconciliations. It is imilar to the adult world, yes, but the things that interest them and the conflicts that affect them are quite different.