Guest Post: Eric Pinder on The X Files: Why Alphabet Books Are Not as Easy as ABC

Photograph by Katie KosterBy Eric Pinder
for Cynthia Leitich Smith's Cynsations

A teacher once learned the hard way not to tell his college class to write a children’s book without specifying a genre and topic. He anticipated a wonderful mix of fractured fairy tales, rhyming romps, and heroes’ journeys.

A week later, almost the entire the class turned in alphabet books instead.

“It looked easy,” they explained.

The teacher, of course, was me, and I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Alphabet books...