Kidlit Haha Week Day #4: WRITING AND EDITING HUMOR with Claire Tattersfield

It was Shakespeare who said “If humor be the food of love, laugh on.” 

Okay, so he didn’t actually say that or write that, and I’m not sure if “laugh” is on the long list of words he added to the dictionary, but there are so many, and I’m just gullible enough that if you told me he invented the word laughter I might believe you. It takes a true creative (or psychopath, depending on how you look at it) to add a “G” and an “H” to a word and make them both silent. That isn’t to argue that Shakespeare didn’t write some of the funniest works that came out of the 15th century, we know he did. It was at a Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing that I laughed so hard I damaged the cartilage in my ribcage when I was 15.

Writing and editing humor is interesting because you have to think about who your audience is when writing humor than any other medium. Sure, if you’re writing a Glee x VeggieTales x Saw fanfiction, you just about know which 24-year-old rediscovering their youth will stumble upon it, but when writing humor, you have to truly visualize who will be doing the giggling.

For a long time, my specialty lay in college humor–I ran my college’s satire newspaper, and so my niche jokes had to be relatable specifically to 18-22 year old skiers in northern Vermont, but when I started writing for children, I had to visualize a different audience. Although when I started writing for children, I basically just wrote satirical articles for my newspaper, then went through and removed all the dirty words and references to Bernie Sanders. Turns out college students and toddlers have more or less the exact same sense of humor (farts).

Brittany did not ask me to post on her blog to talk about nightmarish fanfiction or Billy Shakespeare (sorry, Brittany, but you should’ve seen this coming!) She asked if I could speak about the things I look for when acquiring picture books and how that in turn inspires what I write.

I think a lot of agents have gotten a firm impression of the kind of books that I go for, given that many of the submission emails I get read like:

“Hi, Claire.

This is the weirdest book I’ve ever come across in my entire life. It made my daughter laugh so hard she threw up her grape uncrustable, and the cat has been cowering under the water heater for 3 days. That’s why this is an exclusive submi–”

I have been told that “acquiring books on vibe alone” is both not an acceptable answer and patently untrue, but I do have to say that a lot of acquiring is gut instinct! Editors can often tell based on the description from the agent, if it’s going to be something they’d like to acquire!

I remember when Brittany’s agent, Stefanie, sent me her debut, It Started with a P (on shelves April 2025!) She said that it was funny (check), had wordplay (check), light potty humor (BIG check), and took place in a kingdom (check). The only thing it was missing was telling me where Kate Middleton really is! And then, of course, the manuscript was hilarious and had so much heart. 

Other things I look for in a fresh manuscript read is originality. Is it a fresh idea? Has it been done before? If it’s a familiar idea, does it have a fresh take? If the text is simple, does it convey a lot of meaning? Did I laugh out loud while reading it?

When I first read Lauren Glattly’s Proper Badger Would Never (on shelves April 2nd!) I laughed so hard I choked on the pickle I was eating at the time. I learned a valuable lesson that day: do not pickle and read (Nancy Reagan would be so proud).

Does it utilize simple humor devices well? I love repetition as a humor device, and if a book utilizes excellent repetition, I’ll probably love it. I like for even the goofiest of picture books to have a clear plot, so I also look for a beginning, middle, and an end.

For comedic timing, I also think it’s best for there to be a heartfelt moment at the climax of the book, which makes the final punchline even stronger. All of these contribute to the rich tapestry that is a children’s book.

When editing a picture book, the main thing I do is look for what the book already does well and encourage the author to do more of that. When I was working with Lauren on Proper Badger, I asked her to remove some of the framing she provided at the beginning of the book to make room for more moments of Badger ruining a party. And boy, did she deliver! That book should be required reading for every classroom in the country. 

I’d been editing picture books for about a year when I decided to take a whack at writing them myself. I’m not sure if y’all know this, but it turns out writing picture books is really hard! Why don’t they put that on the pamphlets? But I did turn some of my editorial instincts inward to try and awaken the author inside myself. That was hard too! But I knew that once I figured out my own strengths as a writer, I could nurture those instincts I already had.

I love picture books with a lot of chaos, and immediately all of the books I tried to write were EXTREMELY chaotic. Every manuscript I wrote for like a month ended in flames. Literally. But I found that I could trick myself into forgetting that I was the author of a manuscript if I took a step back from it. It was easiest to edit myself if I could delude myself into thinking that someone else had written it. Like a baby, I would lose my sense of object permanence if I took a step back for a while.

That’s probably my biggest piece of writing advice. If you are stuck, if you can’t figure out where to go next–leave the manuscript alone for however long it takes for you to loosen your grip on it. I have ADHD, so for me, that was luckily about one week. I’m basically just like Percy Jackson: wielding my disability as a superpower. Except he saves the world from the evil titan lord Kronos, and I write books for toddlers about pigs ruining Valentine’s Day and somehow think my life is harder than his.

I’ll close on a few last pieces of advice. You can only make a first impression once, so make sure that your manuscript is the best you can make it before you show it to an agent or editor. Know your strengths and play to them. Lastly: when in doubt, farts are pretty much always funny. 

Look for Brittany’s book next year! It’s illustrated by the absolutely incredible Andrew Joyner. They are a force to be reckoned with.

Over and out!

Claire Tattersfield an assistant editor at Viking Children’s Books and Flamingo Books at Penguin Young Readers. After finishing college as editor-in-chief of her school’s satire paper, she found that her skills in writing short form satire translated phenomenally to writing picture books, and that is how Cupig was made. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.