As anyone who has ever seen the movie Elf knows, coming up with an idea for a successful children’s book is no easy task. Fortunately for me, I’m on the brink of the next best-seller, and I owe it all to the hours I’ve spent reading to my eight month old.

In my studies, I have paid close attention to many of the great fictional accomplishments we all know and love, such as Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and The Gingerbread Man. We have also perused some lesser known books because they had attractive padded or shiny covers. (When you’re an infant, you get to judge a book by it’s cover, since that’s mostly what you taste when you put it in your mouth.) Overwhelmed by a sense of genius empowerment, I want to take a moment to share with anyone who is interested in tackling the feat of writing a children’s book, some of the amazing insights I have gleaned. For your convenience, I have turned them into a numbered, foolproof plan.

1. Kill the parents.

The Grimm Brothers and Disney know how to do it. If Cinderella had parents, the plot of a wicked stepmother would have been hard to sell. Snow White never would have adjusted to living with roommates if her parents were there to shelter her. It was easier for Hansel and Gretel to practice their wilderness survival skills, learn about witches, experience the dangers of processed sugar, and escape the Deluxe Stainless Steel Raging Fire Oven 2000 if their parents weren’t around telling them to stay close to home. Guardians hinder growth. Ditch them.

2. If possible, make your main character a bear.

Seeing as they are so cuddly and approachable in real life, bears make for much better main characters than their more violent alternatives, such as cats and rabbits. They are historically more successful, as well. The Berenstain Bears made it to the moon. Winnie the Pooh had plentiful friends and honey. But we all know what happened to the curious cat, and all rabbits are good for is allowing their pride to lose them races. Support the stuffed animal industry. Write about Teddy.

3. If bears don’t work, try dinosaurs.

These much more multicolored creatures have a lot to teach the children. At the very heart of their literary existence, dinosaurs inspire kids to abandon facts and look deeper at the world around them. I recently came across a book that spent the first ten cardboard pages explaining how cool it is that dinosaurs actually exist among us and do the things we do. The last page contained a surprising twist: Dinosaurs’ favorite thing to do is EAT KIDS LIKE YOU! They accompanied this message with a delightful image of a dinosaur with frighteningly small eyes and ominously large eating utensils. The multitasking creators of this book teach kids that while it is important to use our imaginations, we also cannot slip too far from the gruesome and dangerous world we live in, lest we get fangoriously devoured.

4. Avoid consequences.

As I’m sure every millennial parent knows, it is quite unwholesome to alert young children to the scary concept of “consequences.” Writers from before our enlightened time tried to pitch consequences to us as if they were the cornerstone of a moral platform, but we know this to be untrue. And so, we must turn away from stories like Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat In The Hat Comes Back,” in which an explosion of pink overruns the world simply because The Cat in the Hat decides to eat cake in the bathtub. To assume this is a bad choice limits children’s creativity.

Instead we should look to the more insightful story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Let’s recap.

After breaking and entering, Goldilocks, the hangriest main character of them all, ate a lot of someone else’s porridge to calm her rumbling tummy. After gorging herself, she knew she just had to sit down and rest (#firstworldfairytaleproblems). But as if her rap sheet wasn’t long enough already, she broke baby bear’s chair. (Sounds like a good conflict for a spinoff…see rule #2.) The next logical step? Take a nap in baby bear’s bed. The story ends with Goldilocks running away when the bears come home, and avoiding all responsibility for her theft and vandalism. What you don’t know, is that after running off, she met up with a sticky Little Red Riding Hood, fresh out of the wolf’s esophagus, to eat the spoils of Jack’s recently downed beanstalk. The morals: Bears won’t follow you if you eat/break/soil their belongings. There is always an ax-weilding lumberjack waiting to free you from the stranger you talked to in the forest. And you can steal from a giant as long as you’re ready to chop down the beanstalk while he is high enough up there to die from the fall.

5. There is an exception to every rule.

Just ask the gingerbread man. The day the lumberjack was out of town, our resident idiot pastry decided to ride on the nose of a fox. He got eaten because of his stupidity. If that doesn’t teach consequences, I don’t know what does. Stay in school, kids.

You see? It’s easy. I hope you can all put these rules to good use. Expect to see my latest work on the shelves soon. I’m thinking of calling it, “The Day the Orphan Koala Killed the T-Rex.” Should be brilliant.