Tag Archives: popular fiction for children

What makes J K Rowling’s Harry Potter so successful?

Copyright © 2013 Jerry Dunne We’ll look at Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first book in the series, which set the pace and standard for the others to follow. Certainly the book’s success partly reflects readers’ love of … Continue reading

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Tolkien’s the Hobbit shows what is meant by original genre fiction.

Copyright © 2012 Jerry Dunne Derivative fiction is fiction that in content and style reads very similar to other such types of stories. Nothing about it really sticks out. An original story will have something that makes it different, even … Continue reading

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Who decides what makes a great children’s story?

Copyright © 2011 Jerry Dunne Ultimately, it is the child reader and not the adult who decides what makes a great children’s story. This makes logical sense because without children you could not have a children’s story and without a … Continue reading

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Give child readers what they want to read, not what you want them to read

Copyright © 2011 Jerry Dunne The beginner writer of children’s fiction can run quickly into difficulties if they insist on applying their own tastes and desires to the genre. You cannot write for children some of the types of stories … Continue reading

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The trickiness of writing the children’s short story (for the middle reader)

Copyright © 2014 Jerry Dunne Short story writing is a hard discipline just like all the other fiction crafts. But I suggest here that it is trickier to master more so than a novel, though it is much shorter than … Continue reading

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