Writing a Novel Series for Kids, Part 1
When you were a kid, what series of novels did you read and enjoy?
Two of the series that stick out in my memory are Nancy Drew mysteries and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books.
I was introduced to Nancy Drew when a maternal aunt handed me a stack of blue-back hard cover books that she thought I might like. There was no dust jacket, no cover art that I recall. The books were obviously old (I think they were probably some of the originals from the 1930s and 1940s).
I was 8 or 9 and loved reading about a girl with so much power to do things on her own. I was already independently minded. Nancy’s adventures confirmed that was a good thing.
Another thing that appealed to me about Nancy Drew is that there were so many different adventures to read, at least 50 in the late 1970s when I was reading them. That meant I had a reliable source of enjoyable reading material.
As an adult, I learned how that series was written, and that there was not a real person named Carolyn Keene writing them. They were produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which had also created the Hardy Boys series. The novels were ghost written and used a formula. Even as a kid I noticed how Nancy was always introduced in a similar way from book to book—especially her Titian hair.
None of that detracted from my enjoyment of Nancy’s adventures, but I also was never engaged enough to reread any of the books in that series. I just consumed them one by one, like potato chips.
I had a completely different reaction to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books.
In the 1970s my family and I regularly watched Little House on the Prairie each week on TV. My paternal grandmother must have discovered that I enjoyed that show, because for Christmas the year I was 8, she gave me a paperback copy of Little House on the Prairie. (It looked just like the cover in the image above.)
Until then, I’d had no idea the TV show was based on a book for kids. And then to discover the book itself was part of a series? Oh, happy day!
In Little House, Laura’s family makes a cross-country move from southwestern Wisconsin to Kansas. My family moved cross country rather frequently. When I first started reading Wilder’s series, we’d moved from Iowa to Oklahoma and back a couple of times and within both states several times.
Several months later, as I was beginning fourth grade, we moved to Wyoming for the first time. So you could say that I related to Laura and her family’s situation.
Through the rest of third grade and most of fourth grade, I read the whole series 8 or 9 times.
There must have been something comforting about reading of Laura’s experiences as she moved long distances with her family. She experienced new places—Kansas and later South Dakota—that were so different from her early childhood in Wisconsin.
Laura’s adventure of crossing the Mississippi before the ice broke up and then driving a wagon all the way to Kansas helped prepare me for living in such a different environment as Wyoming’s Rocky Mountains.
Laura and Nancy were characters I could rely on, characters I wanted to spend time with.
How do you create characters that will make readers want to keep coming back for more stories about them? Next time I’ll explore the qualities of series characters from much more recent kids’ novels.
In the meantime, what recent series for kids or adults do you like to read?