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Avi’s 2025 Summer Blog Series

Dan Gutman

From Avi: As I have for the last three sum­mers, (sum­mer of 2024, sum­mer of 2023, sum­mer of 2022) I’ve invit­ed 13 admired authors to write for my blog for the next three months. I hope you’ll tune in each Tues­day to see who answered this year’s ques­tion, which we hope pro­vides you with inspi­ra­tion. And by the end of the sum­mer, you’ll have new authors to follow!

What’s your favorite strategy for encouraging young people to read?
roller coaster

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.
  7. 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.

  8. 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.

Particulars

Dan’s newest book, avail­able 9/2/25!

New York Times best-sell­ing and award-win­ning author Dan Gut­man has writ­ten more than 190 books for read­ers from kinder­garten through mid­dle school. Dan’s My Weird School series includes 100+ titles, and has sold more than 35 mil­lion copies glob­al­ly over the past 20 years. Dan also is the author of the best-sell­ing Genius Files series, the Base­ball Card Adven­ture series, and many more. When he’s not writ­ing books, Dan loves to ride his bike, play pick­le­ball, throw Fris­bees, and explore New York City where he lives with his wife Nina.

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