Our youngest published authors are 7. You might expect to spend all your time teaching them. In practice, they keep teaching us, and what they teach is usually something adult writers have forgotten.
They start in the middle
A 7-year-old almost never opens with throat-clearing. Nivaan Gupta, who is 7, pours every storyline straight from imagination to page. No throat-clearing, no scene-setting paragraph that apologises for the story not having started yet. The adventure is just already happening.
Adult writers pay editors to cut the slow opening that a small child never writes in the first place.
They are not embarrassed by feeling
Young writers say what the story is about, plainly. Kindness. Bravery. A friend who came back. Seeratt Sharrma, who is 8, writes about kindness and magic without a trace of irony, and the stories are stronger for it.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, many writers learn to be cool, to hide the point under three layers of cleverness. Children have not learned that yet, and their stories land harder because of it.
They follow the idea, not the outline
Vanya Kapoor, who is 9, describes it well: once she starts a story, the ideas keep coming until it builds itself into something whole. That is a real method. It is closer to how the best fiction actually gets made than any rigid plan.
What we take from this
Our job is not to make children write like adults. Part of our job is to notice what they do naturally and protect it: the fast start, the honest feeling, the willingness to follow a story where it wants to go.
The best note we can give a young author is often no note at all. Sometimes the most useful thing an editor does is recognise when a child has already got it right, and leave it alone.