The Only Craft Book You’ll Need for YA and MG

The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein is a master class in middle grade and YA novels. Klein is a publishing veteran and is currently an editor at Lee and Low Books.

The Magic Words is easy to read and chock full of examples and exercises. Because the exercises are often meant to be performed using your own book, it’s best to pick up this book with a draft of your novel in hand. If you don’t have a draft, you can sometimes do the exercises using another book, perhaps one you admire.

Chapters are organized by concepts. For example, there are chapters on premise, flow, characters, plot, voice, and openings. One of the real strengths of this book is the constant use of examples, sometimes from books Klein herself has edited and sometimes from titles that most readers will be familiar with, like Harry Potter.

I really appreciated the whole new vocabulary I gained from this book. For example, a writer has a point in mind when they write a book: it’s an idea that they want to get across, the purpose behind their book, and their own personal why. Klein divides the execution of this point into three parts: an experiential point, an emotional point, and a thematic point. The experiential point is what the writer wants the reader to feel. The emotional point is what the characters learn emotionally throughout the novel, and the thematic point is the larger philosophical subject of the book. She then uses The Fault in Our Stars to illustrate these concepts. Finally, she asks you to think about the points in your own novel.

The Magic Words also has checklists to use on your own manuscript, including a fantastic plot checklist and a character checklist.

In addition to exercises and checklists, there are real-time critiques. For example, on pages 297–318, Klein annotates the first scene of a YA novel, explaining what went right or wrong in each sentence. Then, Kass Morgan rewrites the scene, and Klein reannotates, picking apart the how and why of the vast improvement, so that writers can apply those techniques themselves. The exercise in this chapter is (you guessed it!) to re-write the material yourself, before you read the Kass Morgan rewrite.

If you write middle grade or YA fiction, and you don’t have a copy of this book, then what are you doing? Get on it!

If you’ve used this book, let me know what was most beneficial to you personally. And if you have other resources for YA and middle grade, let us know!