One of the hardest things to do to boost your creativity–regardless of what project you’re working on–is to write for kids. While some may claim it’s easy, try stripping out all the prepositional phrases, verb clauses, pronouns, punctuation and still have a story.

Writing engaging children’s material–whether or not your goal is to get published–can be really hard work. There are a few, hidden benefits to writing children’s books. First, if done right, they may excellent family gifts. What better way to personalize your family’s memories than to have your son, niece, or granddaughter as the subject of a fairy tale? Second, it forces you to think more about the story and less about how you are writing it.

Whether you’re writing children’s books with the goal of being published in mind or not, it would also be a good idea to research some articles about writing children’s books. In this How To Write Children’s Books article, the author talks about what a gold mine is.

While writing children’s books is one thing–proceed with caution when you do have a book. Remember when I posted about how money flows to the writer? The same is true for children’s books only, when you do any online research you’ll find that there are more publishers and authors “claiming” to have that magical ticket to help you get rich. On the other hand this site, entitled The Purple Crayon, has a lot of content rich material and *bonus* it’s also a non-profit site.

The point here, is that writing children’s books may be an excellent way to streamline your plot regardless of whether or not you get published. If you’re writing a children’s book with the goal of getting “in print”–then I highly recommend you research what is selling and who you’ll sell your work to.