This is not new—this advice I give you. None of this stuff is new. Someone else said it somewhere and I glommed onto it and filed it away as useful.

Study the markets. We've all heard it. If you want to write for a magazine, then get several back issues and study the style and tone of the articles. Look at the ads. Figure out who the audience is and get a feel for what the editors are looking for.

I heard that for years and it never did me much good. I'd study magazines from front to back and side to side and every other way possible. I'd look at ads, read guidelines, and search out editor interviews. None of it gave me ideas for short stories or helped me figure out how to write them.

I loved the short stories I read in the magazines I studied and I found the nonfiction pieces enthralling, but I never managed to write or sell anything.

All that changed the day I decided to:

Focus on Doing One Thing Well

I started out with short-shorts. I gathered together a stack of Reader's Digest and I read hundreds of Life in These United States, Humor in Uniform, and All in a Day's Work pieces.

All those pieces shared some common ground and after a few hours of soaking them up, I had the length and the language and the timing down.

I wrote some of my own anecdotes. They are not hard to write and they are not hard to sell. (Well, they are hard to sell to Reader's Digest—they get thousands upon thousands of entries—but smaller magazines love humorous fillers.)

From fillers I moved on to short stories. I picked Highlights for Children and read all the short stories in twelve issues. I got a feel for the sentence structure, the language, and the rhythm of the stories. They bought the first story I sent to them.

I went on to novels. I've spent the last two years reading award-winning YA novels. I think my novels have improved hugely from the exercise.

So here is lesson two in the "How to Write Great Children's Books" series.

Copy Writers You Love

I mean literally copy them. Type the books into your computer. You will get a feel for pace and dialogue. You will see how the authors transition from scene to scene and how they manage to put cliffhangers at the end of chapters.

Ever wonder how many words should go on the pages of your picture books? It varies. Type in several and see how the writers you like balance the text from page to page. See how they repeat words and phrases throughout the story and then come up with twisty surprises at the end.

How about internal monologue? How much goes into MG (middle grade) novels? How much works for the YA (young adult) crowd? Again, it depends on the book and the character and the audience. Copy in your favorite author and see if what he did will work for your characters and your story.

The best thing about this exercise is it fires you up to write your own stuff. There is nothing like looking at great writing to make you long to create some of your own.

Try this and I bet you won't get three chapters in before you're dusting off your own WIP or starting a brand new masterpiece.