Creating Characters for Children’s Magazines

Most short stories for young people have one main character, the protagonist. Longer forms, such as novels, can handle two main characters and sometime when an author is attempting to capture an old-fashioned voice (in a novel), you’ll even find the story jumps from head to head of many characters. However, it takes room to make those things work and magazines stories are short and tight – which is why you see single main characters in almost all magazine stories.

So are generic characters with no real personality. Writing a character, especially a protagonist, is a bit like taking on an acting role. Let’s talk about how to flesh out your characters for each reading age group.

Listener Question of the Week

Kimberley Moran asks:

How do you know when you’ve hit the right audience age range? Do you need to have kids in that age group or just read a lot of books targeted to that age?

Listen to the answer in the podcast!