When the Plot Thickens: Writing the Textured Children’s Novel in an Era of Corporate Taste

Noah Weisz illuminates techniques writers can use to thicken their stories’ textures and build more impactful novels without falling afoul of industry constraints.

Abstract

Amidst today’s competitive children’s publishing market, craft principles can be difficult to disentangle from well-intentioned tips on how to secure a literary agent or create a marketable book. Agents’ own “corporate taste” (a term coined by scholar Laura B. McGrath) influences what gets written and published, bending children’s literature toward stories with a fast-paced, straightforward, easily pitchable plot. Yet much of what makes a great novel for children lies in everything left out of the pitch – in the textural material that lends a novel not narrative energy but the layered richness of lived experience. This article explores this tension by examining Rebecca Stead’s bestselling, Newbery Medal-winning middle-grade novel When You Reach Me (2009). Gripping, hooky and short, it satisfies key tenets of market-based craft advice yet actually spends over half its pages on subplots. By investigating how this book integrates suspense and quick pacing with the enriching qualities of texture, this article seeks to illuminate techniques writers can use to thicken their stories’ textures and build more impactful novels without falling afoul of industry constraints.