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A student of mine recently thanked me for reminding her that query letters are most impactful when they’re short and to the point. A published writer, she said she’d strayed from the KISS method of querying (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

The more I thought about this, the more I realized it applied to all aspects of writing children’s book fiction. When dealing with kids one-on-one, we adults often give them information on a need-to-know basis. When asked, “Why do I have to change my socks every day?” we could go into detail about germs or proper hygiene, but instead answer, “Because you’re starting to stink.” It gets the point across with the fewest possible words. And that age-old parental justification –”Because I said so”–sometimes is the only reason needed.

So why do we get so complex when writing for children? Why do our picture book plots span several weeks and contain characters with huge extended families and numerous friends? Why do our magazine articles attempt to cram a subject’s entire life into 800 words? Kids are masters of cutting through the nonsense and getting right to the point. Here are some ways we can learn from our audience:

* Cut back on adjectives and adverbs. If your nouns and verbs are strong, you won’t need to add additional words to describe them. “He trudged up the hill” says the exact thing as “He walked slowly and steadily up the hill, placing his feet heavily with each step”, only more directly. Rather than describing a house as huge, grand, or enormous, let your character do it with one word: Jason gazed at Grandma’s house. “It’s a castle,” he thought. A single, well-chosen noun paints a picture in your reader’s mind better than several general adjectives.

* Write your plot direction in one sentence. In our Children’s Authors’ Bootcamp workshops, Linda Arms White and I teach writing a story line as a tool for plotting (This a story about __________, who wants more than anything to ________, but can’t because ____________.) This story line identifies the main character, his/her greatest goal, and what’s preventing the character from achieving that goal. Regardless of the length of your story, the age group, or whether you have subplots and chapters, the story line works to keep the action of your plot on track. The key: Keep it to one sentence (there’s no wiggle room on this one).

What if you’re not writing about your character achieving his greatest goal, or its flip side, your character avoiding facing his greatest fear? A plot about something your character sort of wants isn’t good enough. A conflict involving a minor annoyance isn’t as compelling as a life- changing event. Perhaps your character is up against so many obstacles that the reader can’t figure out which one is the most important. As the author, you need to boil your story down to the one aspect of your character’s life that’s going to take center stage for the remainder of the book. Remember, you’re not writing about your character’s entire existence, just the period of time encapsulated in your story. One goal shines above the rest. All subplots and secondary characters serve as stepping stones toward that goal. Some lead your character in the right direction, some take detours, but all ultimately end up in the same place.

* Give your reader only the information he required right now. Don’t throw in details about a character unless it’s directly related to the current action of the story. This often happens with secondary characters, who suddenly develop a phobia or acquire an annoying sibling in the middle of a scene. Such dangling attributes feel contrived and only raise distracting questions in the reader’s mind. The same goes for a character’s life before the story began. We generally don’t need to know the past of every person who appears in the book. Reveal as much information as the reader must have to understand what’s happening at each point of the plot, and cut the rest.

* Use the “need-to-know” philosophy with query letters. When composing a query letter or cover letter to an editor, include only the information an editor needs to judge whether he or she may be interested in reading your manuscript. Your motivation for writing the story doesn’t matter; your ability to summarize the plot in a few sentences does. Your experience as a parent or grandparent doesn’t guarantee you’ll write a strong article; your adherence to the magazine’s word limit shows you’ve done your research. Editors are busy people who love short letters with lots of white space. Respect the simplicity of presenting your work with minimal buildup and letting your manuscript speak for itself.

Above all, keep your message clear and age-appropriate. A picture book about poverty is too broad and abstract for a six-year-old to understand, but a story about a child who is embarrassed because she gets free lunch at school is more specific. Whatever age you’re writing for, use one well- defined character to represent the bigger issue. Smaller, intimate stories are more relevant to the reader. Nonfiction that shows the reader how the topic relates to his life, or focuses on one aspect of a subject, makes a greater impact. And remember, if you want your manuscript to sell, start with a KISS.

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People long have speculated about the origin of the name of the whale in Melville’s famous novel “Moby Dick.” Much is known about the name, but not everything. In 1839 an article was published in the New York Knickerbocker Magazine, which inspired the creation of the novel Moby Dick. The article was entitled “Mocha Dick: or The White Whale of the Pacific.” This giant white killer sperm whale had been seen around the Island of Mocha, and was famous for its violent attacks on ships and their crew. Finally, the whale was captured. The addition of the name Dick to the whales appellation was a common naming practice, as noted by Melville in Chapter 45 of Moby Dick.

All of the above is pr
esented by J. Madden on his Moby Dick web site. Mr. Madden goes on to puzzle about how and why Melville transformed the name Mocha Dick to Moby Dick, and points out that despite various literary guesses, no one really knows for certain, why Melville altered the name as he did. However, Mr. Madden describes one theory by writer Harold Beaver who believed that Moby Dick was a combination of the names Mocha Dick and Toby Dick. Toby Dick, he suggests, is based on the name of Melville’s friend and fellow whaling companion, Richard (Dick) Tobias Greene.

Beaver’s theory is plausible although improvable. Therefore, it makes sense to consider other possible origin of the name as well.

One interesting theory concerning the origin of the name Moby is based on the similarity between the name “Moby” and Moabite, a tribe of pagan people who lived East of the Jordan River, and bore some historical relationship to King Ahab of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. King Ahab, was also the name of the protagonist in Moby Dick. Not only did the main character have the name Ahab, but like Ahab, he was warned by a prophetic figure about the tragic outcome of his quest. Ahab, in the Bible, was warned by the prophet Micaiah, about the fatal consequences of his battle at Ramot Gilead, and Ahab the captain was warned by two prophetic crew members, Pip and Gabriel about the ill consequences of his vengeful quest to kill the white whale. Both King Ahab and the prophet Ahab, also surrounded themselves with false prophets, who painted pictures of success in their respective missions.

Literature is never identical to life, and so while Captain Ahab died fighting the whale, King Ahab, never fought with the Moabites, a people his father had subjugated. However, the Bible states that Moab successfully rebelled against Israel, after the death of Ahab, much as Moby Dick swam away free after the death of Captain Ahab.

Is there more to the resemblance than mere historical happenstance? Their might be. While the Moabites, never, as it were, bit off the leg of King Ahab, they had to an extent bit off the leg of the Israelites, in that they caused them to fall into adultery, shortly before their entrance into the Holy Land. They were rescued by the famous Priest Pinchus, who thrust a spear into the belly of a Prince of Israel, while he was copulating with a Princess of Moab. In one second, Pinchas speared a Moabite, and the “dick” of his fellow Israelite gone astray.

Like the earlier Israelites, King Ahab, was also lead astray by a pagan woman, his wife Jezabel, a practitioner of idolatrous Baal worship. Perhaps to make up for his sins at the home front, King Ahab, joined forces with the King of Judah, to the South, and embarked on a series of military adventures against the unruly Pagan tribes east of the Jordan river. His final, fatal quest, was against the Aremnians, a tribe that had conquered land from the Nebutians to the South.

If the Israelites, and the King of Judah to the South, were forever warring against the surrounding pagan cultures, who were always threatening to bring them down, humble Ishmael, the ancestors of the modern Arab and Muslim, is seen as a more successful, character in Moby Dick. Perhaps, Melville admired the Muslim’s stern way of dealing with paganism. While this is only speculation, it is known that during Melville’s visit to Palestine in 1856, his experience of the bleak and downtrodden Jerusalem, a far cry from the modern city, only served to confirm his belief in the bankruptcy of the Judeo Christian tradition.

If there is truth in this Biblical origin of the name of Moby Dick, then I believe that Melville, may have been impressed with the moral lesson in the story of King Ahab. The King made a career of trying to live down the mistake he made marrying Jezebel. Perhaps like the earlier King Solomon, he felt he could conquer and subdue the pagan inclinations in his wife. But history, bears out, that in the end, the ill luck which came from taking Jezebel’s advice, brought Ahab fatal luck on the battlefield.

The moral lessons in the life of Ahab, and ill fated consequences of his mistakes on the home front, playing out over a number of years, were the kind of fuel that would have fanned a flame in the imagination of the 19th century novelist. As we see in Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, novelists of that time, were not only interested in portraying sinful behavior, (as in the Scarlet Letter), they were also interested in documenting the power psychological implications of their protagonists’ sinful actions

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