Writing for Children Is Harder than It Seems

Sally Lloyd Jones is one of my favorite children’s book authors, mainly because she wrote the Jesus Storybook Bible, which creatively tells the big stories of the Bible while pointing each to Jesus. I highly recommended it an review here and I had the opportunity to interview Sally here.

Recently she shared a guest-post on Ed Stetzer’s blog where she wrote about the challenge of writing for children. I thought it was keen insight on what many think is an easy thing to do:

People have approached me, holding up one of my children’s books, flicking through it backwards–awful for a writer because it implies the order of the words don’t matter–and cheerfully announcing, “I’m going to do one. I mean. REALLY. How hard can it be?”

How many of us would dream of going up to a surgeon and saying, “I’m going to do an Angioplasty. I mean. REALLY. How hard can it be?”

That people feel free to say this about children’s books tells you a lot–not so much about what they think of children’s book writers. That’s not important. It tells you what they think of children.

The whole post is worth reading here: Ed Stetzer – Thursday is for Thinkers: Sally Lloyd-Jones.