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It seems to be something which has fallen out of practice, but many fairy tales were originally written with horrible gruesome endings, mainly in order to scare children into good behavior. The original The Little Mermaid, for instance, would have emphasized the importance of being an obedient daughter and not accepting favors from shady characters. Several ...

mootinator makes a good point. But I can imagine a public that, while not interested in unfortunate endings per sé, might be interested in "neutral" endings, namely the skeptic community. Real life is not supposed to suck, neither is it supposed to be good to us, it's rather "indifferent" to our fortunes, although the word "indifferent" is a bit too ...

I can't give you the advice you want, but I will give your advice you need: The books you need to read are models, not how-to guides. Count me among those who, unlike the many you mention, do not highly regard any book that markets itself 'for dummies'. More specifically, the industry of teaching people how to write creative works is a parasitic and ...

I see two separate paths you can take: 1) You might have to back up and set down some rules for the writing before developing rules for the judging. For example, if one of your judging rules is "The story must have a beginning, middle, and end," but someone submits an amazing in medias res piece, is that going to be penalized for not meeting an arbitrary ...

Don't worry about it. Just balance out the darkness with some charm. If the young reader loves your characters and enjoys the tale, he or she will put up with anything. Look at J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Those are grim, grim books. Death is a prevalent theme from the outset. Fully one third of the books is about someone's dead parents, or how ...

You are on the right track. Your topic sounds promising, giving a starting sentence and a picture should help inexperienced (teenage) writers to start writing at least something. But to avoid writers block, you should give them a little choice (not too much, because that blocking again). If you give them three different topics, or three different pictures, ...

I think for a writing competition, you need a theme or focus, and maybe - for that age - some guidelines. Are you after an imaginative story, or a factual-type report of a fictional situation, or is there a setting it should take place in? You then have something against which you can judge them subjectively, as to how well they have interpreted the brief, ...

This page seems to suggest that books that teach contractions target children between the ages of 4-8, so it would depend on what age children you're targeting, it could be that the average 4 year old might not understand contractions however I would very surprised if an average 8 year old didn't understand them. Otherwise, they're proper grammar so if you ...

If you are writing in first person, the language used needs to be roughly mainstream consistent with the age, location, etc. of the narrative character. If the two are hugely out-of-sync, it can cause a lot of discord while being read because the "person" that is speaking is saying things and using words that are out of character, thus unexpected and often ...

An additional consideration may be whether you want your children's story to be stocked in school libraries. A colleague wrote a piece of Young Adult Fiction intended to encourage reluctant readers but found it was rejected by schools because of "the awful grammar"! It was not considered to be a redeeming feature that the main character's expression ...

Children have quite astonishing powers of linguistic acquisition - in other circumstances your son could be equally fluent in two or even three languages. Bear in mind this is your son, so you are a major source of his exposure to language, particularly in these very early years. To a considerable extent, you determine what level of language he becomes ...

One approach would be to record your story-telling sessions, particularly in a way that captures his reactions. You could then review those recordings to see what worked and what didn't (e.g. you had to repeat something in a different way). Reading comprehension is different from aural comprehension, but at least you know he'll know the words in one ...

The word count does not matter until it is good enough to engross the children into it and that the story is a right mix of its own ingredients makes it worth a read. Just research a bit with your neighborhood kids, or relatives having kids of that particular age group. If you have good network of friends, you might come up with helping hands for your ...

It also depends on the target age group. Conventional wisdom indicates that older children - say, preteens - can handle more complex and negative stories than small children. Hence why you get the newbery medal syndrome where the dog always dies at the end to teach children about death and moving on from tragedy.

Don't mistake "a happy ending" with "defeated the monster". Fairy stories of old had several goals, one of which was to show children that the monster can be dealt with. Note that that does not mean everything will turn out alright. Sometimes it's a choice between two terrible things, one of which is worse than the other. Modern fantasy works are spiritual ...