Follow This Checklist to Revise Your Middle-Grade Novel
Award-winning author Huda Al-Marashi created a checklist to revise your middle-grade novel that she learned the hard way.
When I decided to take a stab at a middle-grade novel after a decade of writing creative nonfiction, I found it liberating. Normally I’d pull a story out of the realm of things that have already happened, but here was the opportunity to craft something around what I wanted to say most to a young reader. And it was going to be so much easier. The word count was practically half of an adult book!
A year later, I had a draft in hand of Hail Mariam, a novel based on my own experience being the only Muslim girl in my Catholic middle school. I took it to workshops, revised, and eventually started my new agent hunt.
That’s when I learned that shorter does not equal easier.
Even though I had a lot of enthusiastic requests to see the full manuscript, a rejection invariably followed. Thankfully my mentors, critique partners, and even some of these rejections showed me that there were certain key elements to middle-grade fiction that I was still missing.
It’s those key elements that I’ve compiled here into this handy checklist. While it took me several more revisions to finally land an agent and a two-beak deal, I hope these tips will bring you to an even faster “yes” in middle-grade fiction.
Keep your main character’s voice young throughout the book
When drafting Hail Mariam, I had no problem hooking my readers with an age-appropriate, engaging voice in my early chapters, but I wasn’t carrying that voice all the way through. As we neared the later chapters where my main character’s worldview was changing, I was aging up her voice, too. In later revisions, I made sure to rework places where my main character sounded more like adult me rather than a 12-year-old.
Lean into the fun
Even when grappling with the most serious topics, there’s always room for some levity and humor in middle-grade fiction. In her feedback, the agent who eventually signed me said I should give myself permission to be funny. It was exactly the push I needed to develop the light-hearted moments in my book. I had so much I wanted to say that I had lost sight of how I was saying it.
Give your secondary characters their own lives
When I look back at my earlier drafts, I’m embarrassed by how flat my secondary characters read. I understood that I needed to create dynamic side characters. That’s advice I might have easily offered a colleague, but when it came to my own story, I was so focused on figuring out my main character’s journey that my side characters had become one-dimensional sidekicks.
Let the kids solve their own problems
In everyday life, grown-ups are often the ones solving problems for children, and since I was writing contemporary realistic fiction, I did the same. In my early drafts, teachers and parents doled out advice and guidance, but it wasn’t working on the page. Middle-grade fiction is where we empower kids to solve the problems around them. It’s where we model a sense of agency and inspire children to take action. In later drafts, I got the adults out of my main character’s way, and it immediately improved the pacing of the book. No one wants to read about a passive character, listening to what they’re told, when they can read about a main character who is figuring out the world and creating change.
Stop protecting your main character
In my early drafts, every time I created an obstacle for my main character, I resolved it by the end of the chapter. I struggled to let my character stay hurt. Even when a feedback partner would point it out, I’d revise and repeat the same mistake. I had to undergo a revision with the express purpose of making trouble for my main character before I finally hit the right balance. What if I made her fights with her friends last longer? Or if I made her try for an opportunity and not get it? What if I let her experience heartbreak and disappointment? Pushing myself to answer these questions as I revised increased the stakes of my entire manuscript.
You can tell a story that teaches kids something, but don't preach to them on the page
My mentor, author Hena Khan, once told me, “Kids don’t want to be lectured, and they can tell when you’re trying to sneak in a lesson.” On another revision, I combed through my manuscript looking for instances where I thought I had been subtly slipping in information and cut them out. The result was a tighter manuscript. The realizations were still there, embedded in my character’s personal growth, but with a much lighter touch.
Check out Huda Al-Marashi's Hail Mariam here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
