How to Write Children's Fiction: Setting and Character

Session Two (of Three)

Batemans, Rudyard Kipling’s house in Sussex, where Puck of Pook’s Hill is set

Not enough emphasis, I think, is placed on setting in children’s fiction. Quite often it’s simply the setting that you will remember from a book that you loved as a child: the Forest Sauvage in The Sword in the Stone by T H White, for example. I remember, vividly, a mountain top covered in different colours of snow from a book I read when I was four or five; I couldn’t tell you now what the book was.

Setting, for this reason, must be attended to with extra special care. It is the base of your children’s story, from which all else springs. Thought about properly, it will provide both plot and character, and it should be linked directly to your source material.