Avi’s 2025 Summer Blog Series
Bruce Coville
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?
Start Where the Readers Are
Whatever your aspirations for a book or story are, it will not have any effect if you can’t get kids to read it! To make that happen, you need to start where the readers are, not where you want them to end up.
To put it another way, if you are standing on top of the mountain of good taste and shouting down to the kids at the bottom who are racing around and having a good time, simply calling, “Come on up, the view is inspiring” is not going to have any effect. To draw in the reader, you have to start at the bottom of the mountain and give them a reason to join you on the journey up.
One of the best ways to do this is to begin with something that will evoke a laugh. Kids love to laugh. So if you can get a chuckle on the first page, or even better, with the first line, you’ve set the hook.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Jennifer Murdley’s Toad is about a girl who is homely. Yeah, yeah — grown-ups like to say “All children are beautiful.” Sadly, kids know that this is a lie … and the ones who know it best are the ones that don’t match our culture’s standard image of pretty. So the story is about a girl who feels the pain of knowing she is not beautiful.
Tell that to a kid and see how far you get.
But here’s the first line: “If Jennifer Murdley hadn’t been forced to wear her bother’s underpants to school that day, the whole thing might never have happened.”
This announces that there is some fun in store. (Words like fart, booger, naked, and underwear are catnip for young readers.) For the child reading the story, any “lesson” is ancillary to the main reason for reading the book, which is to have a good time.
Here’s another one: The Dragonslayers is a book that deals with female empowerment, and also with the destructive peer pressure exerted on boys to not try too hard, or be too good, for fear of being called out as a geek or a brown-noser. But there’s no hint of that in the opening line, “Do you have the lizard snot?”
If you start where the kids are and let them know up front that there’s a good time to be had, then they will happily follow you as you lead them up the mountain to see the wider and grander view.
Particulars
I’ve been writing stories for kids for over 40 years. In that time I’ve published over 100 books, including My Teacher is an Alien, Into the Land of Unicorns, and Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher. Take a flight over to Bruce Coville’s website. There are books, audio books, television shows, and more to explore.
5 thoughts on “2025 Summer Blog Series: Bruce Coville”
I remember you giving a talk, Bruce, at Michigan’s SCBWI about 20 years ago. Jennifer Murdley was in that talk! I also remember sitting with you over lunch and how kind you were to me. Thanks for treating an aspiring writer with interest and respect. It made a lasting impression.
Bruce Coville is truly a gifted writer for kids. It was a huge highlight for me to have met him and to have received some personal insights on writing a great story for kids. He’s one of the best!
Thank you for highlighting Bruce Coville! I love his books, his Full Cast recordings and his website with suggestions for teachers, librarians, and writers of all ages!
Bruce always writes very readable stories. And yes, some of them are quite serious, but there are plenty of laughs along the way.
Much like older readers, catch us with something interesting and fun. <3
At 76, I still love well-written works for young ages. 😉