8 Ways to Harness Inner Childlike Wonder to Write for Kids
By: Donna Galanti
Tags: Writers On Writing, Writing Tips, Writing, Writing Life, Writers Block

8 Ways to Harness Inner Childlike Wonder to Write for Kids

Childlike wonder. What was yours as a kid? I walked along rock walls under the stars at night. Climbed trees to sing songs to the woods. And hid away in rose bush caves with a notepad to write my stories — all the while believing that magic existed.

What evokes childlike wonder? And as adults writing for children, how can we recapture that?

Regaining a childlike sense of wonder isn’t about returning to a childlike state, it’s about letting yourself be awed by the little things in your grownup life. The mundane every day is what can dull our wonder. And just because those little things happen every day doesn’t mean they aren’t miraculous.

But keeping your childlike wonder can be difficult when grownup duties mount. One winter day as I tried to write, I watched two kids sled. Their laughter and joy snapped me out of my trapped trance. I remembered being ten years old and how a whole day of sledding was magical.

And I realized now that in order to do my job well as a children’s author, and to find joy in it, I needed to rekindle my kid wonder again. How can we keep that kind of wonder with us?

My wonder list:

Re-visit pictures of yourselves as a kid. Daydream about what you were doing in those photos. What were you excited about? Did you write diaries as a child or teen? Go back and read them to inspire that voice of youth in your own writing. Look at the world from a different perspective. Like the snow. I went out in it and made a snow angel and looked up at the sky. Something I hadn’t done in years. Create a new bucket list together with your kids or grandkids. What do they dream of doing that you could do with them? Read stories by your own children, or grandchildren, to see how they view the world in their words. Revive memories of being the age of your characters. Draw a map of the neighborhood you grew up in. Remember what you saw, what you felt, and how you reacted to events there and write them down. Act out a scene in your book, or any book, with dramatic flair. Face a childhood fear (mine was going down in our dark 200-year-old cellar where I had been sure dead bodies were buried in the dark hole in the wall).

In doing these things myself, I remembered how awesome it was to be a kid again and lost in the moment. And that every day as a kid was about being swept up in the magical moments. And I could once again be lost in the wonder — and the small things.

How do you harness your childlike wonder?

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Donna Galanti is an author of kid and grownup adventures, speaker, and online course creator for writers on craft, marketing & brand. She’s also a contributing editor for International Thriller Writers the Big Thrill magazine and a fiction contest judge at NYC Midnight. Donna loves to present as a guest author at schools and teach at writing conferences on marketing and craft. She’s lived from England as a child, to Hawaii as a U.S. Navy photographer, and has since settled in an old farmhouse in Pennsylvania with lots of nooks and crannies (and a ghost or two). Donna is represented by Liza Royce Agency. You can connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.