I tell them this — If you read some­thing you’re inter­est­ed in, you’ll get inter­est­ed in reading.

When I was a kid, I hat­ed to read. I thought it was bor­ing and hard to do. Then, when I was about ten, I became a base­ball fan. Sud­den­ly I want­ed to know every­thing about base­ball, so I had to read about it. So I tell kids there’s some­thing out there that you’re inter­est­ed in. Maybe it’s sports, or cars, or air­planes, or what­ev­er. There are books on that sub­ject. Lots of them. You should check them out.

Because I was a reluc­tant read­er myself, I relate to those kids and I know what they like to read and what they don’t like to read. I boil it down to sev­en secrets to writ­ing sto­ries that kids will want to read …

1. GET TO THE POINT. Hook the read­er on the first page. Bet­ter yet, on the first sentence.
2. NO PADDING. Delete extra words. They only con­fuse read­ers. If there’s a para­graph, sen­tence, scene, or char­ac­ter that isn’t impor­tant to the sto­ry, get rid of it.
3. USE THE BARE MINIMUM OF DESCRIPTION. Cut unnec­es­sary adjec­tives. Don’t tell read­ers what the weath­er is like, what kind of clothes peo­ple wear, or what their face looks like. Who cares? It doesn’t mat­ter. Let the read­er use his or her imagination.
4. EACH CHAPTER SHOULD BE A STANDALONE STORY with a begin­ning, a mid­dle, and an end. And the end­ing of each chap­ter should make the read­er want to know what hap­pens next.
5. MAKE IT FLOW. The text should flow effort­less­ly from one word to the next, one sen­tence into the next, one para­graph to the next, and so on. The read­er should nev­er have to read some­thing twice to under­stand what I’m saying.
6. TAKE READERS ON A ROLLER COASTER RIDE. Give them some­thing excit­ing, then calm them down a lit­tle. Then give them some­thing else that’s excit­ing. Keep doing that. Peo­ple crave nov­el­ty. If a roller coast­er didn’t go up and down, it would be just a bor­ing train ride.

At the end of a roller coast­er, it takes you back to where you start­ed. I think peo­ple like sto­ries that come full cir­cle. There’s some­thing sat­is­fy­ing when you get tak­en on a jour­ney and then back home on the last page. It’s like base­ball. The batter’s goal is to make it all the way around the bases until he ends up back where he started—scoring a run at home plate.

7. GIVE THEM A SURPRISE ENDING. It doesn’t have to be hap­py. It just has to be sat­is­fy­ing in some way and pro­vide closure.

 To sum up, I try to write sto­ries that I would like to read myself, and I fig­ure kids will want to read sto­ries like that too.

Also, I have the brain of an eight-year-old, so that helps.