How Do I Write Comedy For Children's Television?

It can be be difficult writing for children's television. Perhaps the best thing to do is to look at existing children's programmes and note down all the elements that they contain. Obviously, if your writing for children, then you need to stick to themes which children will find funny and appealing, and if you take a look at existing programmes then you will be able to get an idea of what to aim for.

Try writing down some of your ideas. Produce some scripts and characters and write a small sketch. When you've finished coming up with ideas, test them out on children and see how they react as this will help you to decide whether or not you are going in the right direction.

The Children's Writers' and Artists' Yearbook contains some useful information on this type of writing.

I am very difficult to write children's stories. You might have a storyline in mind, that's a great beginning, but then you have to think about the content and wording that you are going to use. This has to be simple words, and it has to be in their language.

Sentences have to be short, but in such an order that they can grasp the information from them. Such as "who said red?" "Did you say red" "No, I said green".

Their attention spans can be very limited, so a story needs to be short for them, and is usually very fast for us, as we've been taught all of this already.

The content has to be innocent and appealing to the eyes, i.e. the pictures can't scare them. Unless you are writing about certain characters that coincide with certain events, such as Halloween, or trolls and whatnot.

These are usually directed towards older children that have learned what these things are. In closing, they should be fun, and they should leave a moral or value to the story, and have a positive impact with their memories. Hope this helps.

The above suggestions are fine for very young children.

For a reading-age audience (US 2nd/3rd grade) it has been advised to ignore "conventional wisdom" and focus group studies of what the modern child wants. I think the best advice to give when writing for this age group is to personally recapture what you liked and enjoyed at that age, the kinds of things you would want to read about and watch.