Write for Children

Andrew Melrose

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134529650
• Print ISBN:
  9781138143258
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Writing for children is not about writing little stories, it is about writing big stories, shorter. Children's literature is an art form in its own right, and this book is for everyone who wants not just to write for children, but to write well for them. This short guide to creative writing for children is based on the author's own successful MA course. Andrew Melrose provides guidance on every aspect of the process of writing for children. He stresses the importance of 'writing for' the child and not 'writing to or at' them. Literacy and learning depend on writing and reading and it is therefore the responsibility of the writer to understand who they are writing for. The book is divided into four sections which cover all aspects of the writing process. This book goes far beyond the 'how to' format to help writers learn the finely balanced craft of writing for children. It will be an indispensable handbook for aspiring and practising children's authors.

1 Crafting and the critically creative

Usually the easiest way into any book is to start at the beginning, but when you are writing for children you have to know where the beginning is–and it is not always where you think. Let me make a start, then, by advising you of the very first thing you need to think about before you begin writing for children. It is very simple and straightforward: If you think writing for children is just practice for writing for grown-ups, think again. Remember this: it is important!

Writing for any audience is about respecting that audience.

Writing for a child can’t begin from the premise that it demands less skill than writing for an adult because the truth is that it simply doesn’t. Nor should it be used simply as practice while your adult magnum opus is germinating.

All readers, children included, should have the quality of writing they deserve. It is entirely appropriate that we give them the best we have. Added to which, writers cannot assume they are giving children what they want without knowing what they need. This is crucial.

The splendid Italian writer Italo Calvino (1986: 85) once wrote: ‘Literature is not school. Literature must presuppose a public that is more cultured, and more cultured than the writer himself. Whether or not such a public exists is unimportant.’ I fully endorse this and it applies to children too. Don’t be fooled into thinking children are second-rate repositories for second-rate stories. Children need the best and it behoves you to give them it. Children are also very astute judges. They are just as critical of books as are their adult counterparts. They can spot a fraud a mile away. But ask yourself this: why would anyone want to give them less than their best, and perhaps just as crucially, do they know what that is? And to this we might add, is your best good enough and do you know what your best is? This book is designed to help you tease this out.

That’s not to say you can’t write for both adults and children. Anne Fine and Penelope Lively manage this very well, as do many others, but they do so with respect for all of their audiences. One is not subordinate to the other.

However,

writing for children requires more skill than writing for adults.

Master the craft of writing for children and you will be able to write for anyone. This may seem a little contentious, and I know many, perhaps those working at the cutting edge of literature, might well disagree (although I suspect Salman Rushdie is very proud of Haroun and the Sea of Stories). But I truly believe there is much more to this statement than just a pithy slogan. It is something that gets to the very core of writing. Throughout this book we will be considering the precision required when writing for children. If you pay attention to all of the issues I raise in this book and apply them to all your writing with vigilance, you will at least be setting yourself a good precedent. But this book is only an aid to help you write better, to help you to craft the critically creative. No one can write for you.

Everyone who can write can be a writer, but the secret to writing well is getting the right words in the right order.

I run a Masters programme in writing for children¹ and every year, in my introduction to new students, I tell them this secret. Imparting the secret isn’t too hard. Indeed, it seems so perfectly obvious that you might think there is no point in reading on. But to expect anyone to get it right immediately would be a bit like asking me to play a Rachmaninov piano concerto after learning only the rudiments of that fine instrument (I could probably play all the notes, and even some extra ones, though not necessarily in the right order–and for those of you old enough to remember, the Morecambe and Wise gag with André Previn immediately springs to mind). The writing has to be crafted skilfully into an intelligible narrative.

Writing is a craft!

In the same way that one has to learn to play and practise the piano before reaching any stage of competency, a writer has to learn the rudiments and practise their craft.

The purpose of this book, then, is to address the very issue of craft. As Seamus Heaney (1979: 47) once wrote, ‘Craft is the skill of making… Learning the craft is learning to turn the windlass at the well.’ When T.S. Eliot dedicated The Wasteland to Ezra Pound, it was to il miglior fabbro–which can be loosely translated as ‘the better craftsman’. Indeed the philosopher Walter Benjamin described the storyteller as the craftsman who stamps his own style on to the telling of the story. Even on the printed page the palimpsest trace of the craftsman comes through to reveal himself or herself.

Providing you have a story to tell (after all, what is the purpose of writing for anyone if not to tell a story?)² this book is about helping you to craft the right words in the right order, with the specific aim of being able to address children. Creative writing involves mastering the craft of writing, so that you learn the necessary skills to write intentionally.

Nevertheless, like all books, this one has to be more than a simple ‘how to do it’ if it is to be worth reading at all. It follows that if a book on myths is itself a kind of myth, as Claude Lévi-Strauss once said, likewise a book on craft is itself a craft. This book on the craft of writing for children is written in order to help us identify, observe and address the links between critic and author. It is to help us discern the difference between storytelling and telling stories; the difference between the authentic and inauthentic, where half a story can tell the bigger lie and a whole story is not necessarily wholesome. This means we also have to be able to address wider issues like understanding stereotypes, reading subtextual meaning, and becoming aware of the historical, aesthetic and cultural significance of what we write. Thus, each section will have a critical perspective based on research. And if you found this paragraph a little opaque, don’t worry about that; everything will become clearer. Because while these issues are not easy, there is a simple way of telling them and you should not be fazed by highfalutin rhetoric that often masquerades as scholarship. There is no need to be afraid of erudition, but it should not come at the expense of clarity of thought and expression. This book is written for you and I will be addressing you directly.

To write well for children requires such a fine attention to detail that it’s crucial to know for whom you are writing. I call it writing the height. Only adults write for children and this in itself is fraught with difficulties. Time and again I tell my students that when they are writing for children they have to try to gauge the height they are writing for, then aim to maintain it. If the average height of an eight-year-old child is a little more than a metre, then you have to write at that height. You have to try to see the world from that height.

But I don’t mean physically. I mean write the height in terms of development and experience. You have to try to write the world from a POV (point of view) that an eight-year-old child will recognise. All the intellectualising in the world will not replace that basic need. But it is not easy. When trying to visualise the world from a metaphorically childlike, although not childish, view, you are presented with another problem. In her book on Peter Pan, Jacqueline Rose addressed this issue:

Children’s fiction is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot be written (that would be nonsense), but in that it hangs on an impossibility, one which rarely speaks. This is the impossible relation between adult and child… Children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the space in between.

(Rose 1994: 1–2)

This space is one of experience. The gap is between the child and the author or parent’s experience, between the experience of authority and the child’s inexperience. It is the writer’s job to try to close the gap. How can this be achieved? Well, knowing about it helps, but there is more to it. Rightly, in my view, the children’s psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes that:

Children unavoidably treat their parents as though they were the experts on life… but children make demands on adults which adults don’t know what to do with… once they [children] learn to talk they create, and suffer, a certain unease about what they can do with words. Paradoxically, it is the adult’s own currency–words–that reveal to them the limit of adult authority… Adults can nurture children… but they do not have the answers… what they can do is tell children stories about the connections.

(Phillips 1995: 1–2)

This idea of nurture is a persuasive one which writers for children must be aware of. For example, an issue like age matters in terms of the reader’s experience. A child who has not lived very long cannot have the same ‘historical horizon’ or the same developed sense of reflection and anticipation as someone older.

Nevertheless, just as height doesn’t equate with experience and development, age and reading age are not necessarily the same. They are only benchmarks. An example I used recently still holds true:

a fourteen-year-old boy with the reading ability of, say, a nine-year-old [not all that uncommon] will not want a nine-year-old child’s story, when what he is already interested in is football, computers and masturbation. Just as a thirteen-year-old girl who is interested in belly-button piercing is hardly going to be stimulated by a book targeted at nine- to thirteen-year-olds when she is already passionate about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

(Melrose 2001: 14)

If you have little contact with children yourself, speak to those who have regular contact, teachers and parents, for example, and they will tell you this is not a fiction or a worst-case scenario. The biggest problem with literacy is keeping the reader (even the good reader³) interested in reading. Thus, you have to write for them.

Writing the height, then, is about awareness of child development. It is about knowing for whom you are writing. That’s not to say your story should be shackled into a constraining straitjacket. The story has to be able to breathe its own life, but you have to be aware of who your reader is. If I am repeating this it is because it needs to be stressed. There is no point in being the best tailor in the world if no one can wear the suit you have so carefully and exquisitely stitched together.

Clearly, though, writing for children makes other demands on authors. The genre is fraught with things you need to know and we will go through all of these.

The children’s literature critic and writer Peter Hunt–if you have done any critical reading on children’s literature you are sure to have come across his name and I recommend you read some of his work–found out to his cost that a controlled ‘novel-writing’ exercise, ignoring certain rules and bucking trends, led him to write a novel of his own choosing but one which also presented problems. He did his research and, based on his critical work, he was sure his novel was appropriate for the audience being addressed, telling them things they needed to know. But however carefully thought out and well intentioned the writing was, it did not necessarily mean the end result was generally acceptable to a publisher. Despite his extensive effort, Peter Hunt goes on to reveal that he rewrote the whole 75,000-word novel on the say so of his publisher.⁴ Despite his careful marshalling of his text, his admission of defeat is entirely appropriate when faced with the critique of his editor. And you, too, must decide on this issue. How much are you prepared to rewrite, edit, scrap, on the advice of a third party? I once wrote a wonderful market scene: it had the rich smell of spikenards, herbs and spices from the Orient, sweet Cretan honey, ripe pineapples, grapes and oranges, fat juicy olives, garlic, bell peppers and tomatoes. My editor at that time, Ruth McCurry at Cassell, suggested we change the scene to ‘clucking chickens’! And she was right, too.

The phrase ‘generally acceptable’ above, though, is a loaded one. Robert Leeson in an analogy between the writer and the storyteller, tells us that in the process of storytelling, ‘you match story to audience, as far as you can’ (Leeson 1985: 161) The caveat ‘as far as you can’ reveals indeterminate parameters. Peter Hunt’s novel did what he wanted it to do and said what he wanted to say but, in his publisher’s estimation, not necessarily what its readers would want to read. In a publishing industry-led world, certain unwritten rules for the writer exist to address this very issue. I will discuss as many as I know, as far as I can. I don’t know everything (no one can) and the rules are unwritten, fluid and different for different publishers, writers, agents and so on. Other issues and ideas will similarly be addressed throughout the book. Through studying writing for children and critiquing work written for children, the unwritten rule book will be scrutinised.

While all rules are there to be broken, and the first fifty or so pages of J.K. Rowling’s now legendary Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone breaks a number of them (thank goodness), knowing how and why the rules have been broken can be approached with knowledge rather than through serendipitous writing. Paul Klee only drew a line and took it for a walk after he had learned and understood his craft. Although, that’s not to say serendipity has no part to play in the creative process. How often have all of us found our story leading us, rather than the other way round? This book will not ask you to ignore this, but help you to learn how to recognise, understand and use the creativity meaningfully. Further, if you have wandered off the track, hopefully you will be able to spot this and get back on course. All too often I have seen the story go down the wrong route and turn into a swamp. Writing is all about combining the inspiration with the craft, and I will be addressing this too, because the worst thing you can ever do is write in a formulaic manner. Be original and interesting. This book is not about discouraging creativity; rather, it is about recognising the best of your creativity.

You have to be aware of language.

Literary language, the language of the writer, narrative, with its verbs and nouns, metaphors and metonyms, similes, images, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, syntax, synecdoche, codicils, silences as hypothetical postulates, truths and lies and endless ellipses… is a daunting prospect at any age. Yet using it is easier than you might think because it is what you deal with every day of your life. But when writing for children you also have to be aware of the appropriateness of language. I don’t mean policing profanities (sometimes a well-timed curse is essential), but being aware of the audience we are addressing. A cliché may come as a breath of fresh air to some children (although personally I try to avoid them like the plague), but the development and delivery of metaphor and simile, for example, are not so straightforward.

The same goes for viewpoint. There is little point in knowing that the third-person viewpoint is a grammatical category of pronouns and verbs that is used when referring to objects or individuals other than the speaker and his or her addressee if you cannot use it objectively and with good purpose. And certainly there is no point in knowing this if you didn’t understand what I wrote in the first place. Once again, don’t worry, this will become clearer. When you see third-person narrative incorporating, say, a persuasively limited POV you will realise how an ordinary piece of text can suddenly come alive and you will be surprised how much you already know.

In many respects, this is why I am not a huge fan of many ‘How to write… So you want to be a writer…’ books. Most of them discuss the mechanics of writing, the techniques, reflections, process, creativity and even inspiration but then miss the point of why we write and what we do with language.

It doesn’t take a genius to tell you reading more helps you to write better.

‘A.S. Byatt, in a discussion after a reading of her book Angels and Insects [Muswell Hill Bookshop, London, 1992], said that, for her, reading and writing were parts of the same process, that reading and writing are inseparable.’⁵ Reading what and whom is crucial here. Antonia Byatt is an academic as well as an accomplished writer and I am sure she was not referring to reading ‘how to write books’. My advice is that you should read wider and critically....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Write for Children
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• For Abbi and Daniel Who Like to Read Good Writing
• Introduction
• 1: Crafting and the Critically Creative
• 2: Write the Rights/Know the Wrongs
• 3: Write the Height
• 4: Write the Rest
• Notes
• Bibliography