Crowvus Book Blog

  Happy Monday and welcome back to our Middle Grade Monday series: genres! Today, I'll be sharing a couple of hints and tips for writing science fiction for children. I'm not a sci-fi author, so I'll be addressing this mostly in terms of being a primary teacher. When teaching about genres to children, it is often a struggle to explain the difference between fantasy and science fiction and, in fact, these two genres often get muddled together in awards and libraries etc. The explanation I landed on was to say that fantasy was things that cannot happen. Science fiction, on the other hand, is things that cannot happen... yet! That all important word at the end leads to my first tip. 1) Science fiction needs to be believable. You need to convince your middle grade reader that it could actually happen, perhaps to them! You do this by explaining anything that may seem magical or far fetched. This, in turn, leads onto the next tip... 2) A knowledge of science really helps! When do...

Middle Grade Genres: An Introduction Image by eightonesix on Freepik I used to think that middle grade was a genre in itself, partly due to the number of awards and competitions that have all the genres known to man for adult books, and only one category for middle grade. Middle Grade, however, is simply a suggested age range, much like the suggested ages on board games. The genre list is the same for children as it is for adults, although adapted to make it suitable. One genre that you won’t find in middle grade is Romance. For obvious reasons! That doesn’t mean, however, that romance is banned in middle grade, and I’ll be covering this more in February, for Valentine’s Day. It just means that it will be a very minor subplot. Every month throughout 2025,  I’ll be looking at different genres for middle grade. No, I’ve not covered everything because the possibilities are endless! This genre series will run on the second Monday of each month... The Schedule 10/2/25    ...