by Laura Backes, Publisher, Children's Book Insider, Newsletter for Children's Writers

Suppose you've just gone through a divorce and lost custody of your kids. Or a loved one has recently died of cancer. Or you struggled in school as a child because you have dyslexia.

Many writers turn difficult periods in their lives into books for children, hoping to help young readers through similar painful experiences. Here are some tips to keep in mind when creating and selling books based on real-life events:

Remember that you're writing a children's book, not a personal essay intended to purge your soul from a painful memory. Children want to read about how they feel. Many writers create a child character and tell story through that character's eyes. Don't write in first person if "I" is you, adult author. Instead of explaining how bad you feel that your kids no longer live with you, show how a five-year-old character feels about only getting to see Daddy every other weekend.

Books for younger children (up to age eight) centering around a personal crisis are generally most effective if author uses a fictional vehicle for imparting information. If you want to stick closer to nonfiction, make sure book focuses on child in center of event, and is told in a narrative format with a beginning, middle and end. Older children can handle more traditional self-help books, with each chapter concentrating on a specific aspect of problem. However, interspersing advice with personal anecdotes from other children who have gone through same thing will make information more appealing and relevant to readers.

It's Saturday afternoon. Your partner has taken kids to park. You have a whole hour to write. Instead of which, you sit, staring out window like Rodin's Thinker in jeans and a yellow sweatshirt. Why aren't you writing? A tiny item called Perfection Syndrome. You want whatever you write in this precious hour to be perfect.

During week, you had a stream of plausible ideas. You wrote three ideas in your notebook: an article about children's first words (your six month old said 'truck'), an essay about male vanity, and a short story about a blonde with tattooed arms and a poodle.

Just now, none of those ideas seems right. You've only got an hour, so you want perfect idea, one that will justify sixty minutes you're about to spend on it. Instead, you do nothing.

Perfection Syndrome can destroy your writing career. It's a killer, because if you don't recognise it for what it is, it leads to apathy. The gap between what's in your head and what manifests on page is so wide that you may give up writing for days or weeks.

I understand Perfection Syndrome, because it's something I battle every day. The words on screen or page never measure up to words in my head. I start typing, and after a sentence or two, stop. The words "this is garbage" light up like neon in my skull, my stomach clenches, and I feel as if a ten ton weight had dropped onto my body. It's not as if I'm a new writer. I've been writing for over 20 years. Intellectually, I understand that it's important to get words onto screen --- any words. You can fix whatever you write. Emotionally, I want first draft to be perfect. I've accepted that perfectionism is part of my personality, and without a personality transplant, I'm never going to get rid of it, so all I can do is out-write it.

Yes, out-write it. A practice that's helped is Julia Cameron's Morning Pages method, which is detailed in her books: The Artist's Way, and Vein of Gold. The first thing I do each morning is write three pages in longhand. This primes pump, and if I accomplish Morning Pages, I know that I can count on a productive writing day, and Perfection Syndrome is beaten for this 24 hours at least.