Category Archives: Children’s writing

June 14, 2018 · 5:13 pm

Happy Birthday, Judith Kerr

One of the first pieces of advice I got as a beginner writer was to read other writers’ work. I’ve modified that for myself – read about the writers themselves as well. When you’re alone and suffering those scary writers’ blues and wondering if you’ll ever achieve the goals you’ve set, it helps to know that some really famous writers have been where you are and still have days when they doubt themselves or find it difficult to get that vivid idea in their head onto the page.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Judith Kerr’s brilliant children’s book, The Tiger Who Came to Tea and it is also Judith Kerr’s birthday today, Thursday, 14 June. Judith Kerr is 95 years old and came to England as a refugee, escaping the wave of Fascism which took the lives of so many. The Tiger Who Came to Tea was a bedtime story she told to her daughter and it became her first picture book.

In a BBC Radio 4 programme this morning, she explained how she’ll make several copies of a piece of work to give her scope to play around and develop it. She freely admits that “Drawings don’t take me as long now because I’ve got better at it.” Such honesty is encouraging when so many famous writers prefer not to share their development process and give the impression that they’ve always been able to create with great ease.

Listening to her speak this morning and reading about her in the The Telegraph Magazine of 2 June, she had some useful tips and although she is an illustrator, she’s also a writer:

“I go on for as long as it works. You can’t just stop, even if what you’re doing is rubbish, because you have to work through that …”

However, when she has to stop, it’s always “at a point where the next thing is sort of in view.” And her final comment: “A blank page can be very intimidating.” We can all identify with that!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, Judith Kerr!

“Pink Rabbits and Other Animals” available to download on BBC i player

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February 6, 2016 · 11:44 pm

The magical, wonderful world of children’s writing

Once upon a time in the world of publishing, there were adult books for adult readers and children’s books for children and never the twain crossed. Then Harry Potter was born and suddenly both children and adults were reading the same book or as it turned out, books as long as they began with the words “Harry Potter and …”

Suddenly it was okay for adults to read children’s books. Filmmakers tapped into this appetite for fantasy and fairy tales and plundered Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson in search of magic. The same adults, who wouldn’t have touched the books, found it okay to go and watch the stories on the big screen.

And the totally cross over market emerged. Children’s publishing which had never reached the figures of the adult market was suddenly booming. More books than ever were being published for children. It was adults who were buying them for their children and grandchildren but it was adults who in many cases were also reading them.

A children’s novel, The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge has just won the Costa Book of the Year while another children’s book, The Fox and the Star has become Waterstones Book of the Year. This is only the second time a children’s book has won the Costa and the first time one has won the Waterstones. What is it then that raised them above the other novels, mostly written for adults? Could it be that they fulfil a desire for wonder, excitement, the unexpected and the need of our inner child to truly suspend our disbelief and go back to those strange worlds that captivated us?

Those worlds where anything is possible, where you can fly with the help of a friendly dragon, restore order or defeat evil with a spell from your magic wand and combat and win against almost unassailable, overwhelming odds – how could anything grounded in reality compete with the chance to become a child once more. I don’t know why there’s so much fuss about the news – but I suppose some people are born grown-up!

Oh yes, and to celebrate Libraries Day today – five out of ten most borrowed books from UK libraries were children’s!

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September 4, 2015 · 8:07 pm

Cycling pianists, flying orcas and getting out more

 

So there you are chained to the laptop, terrified if you move an inch you’ll disconnect from the creativity flowing down from the great lump of inspiration in your right brain. That’s where your next chapter or scene is safely stored ready to download itself to your fingers and you keep telling yourself you’ll lose the muse if you move.

Sounds like you need to relax but you can’t spare the time; got to keep typing – yet  it’s not working and the muse isn’t  co-operating.

But writing’s organic – it grows and changes with everything that’s happened to you in the seconds when you’re not facing the screen, you know – like nipping out for a pint of milk or the paper or walking the cat round the block!   The necessary stuff just to keep life ticking, but not think too deeply about ‘cos you’re a right brain person and you can’t handle any of this left brain stuff while you’re creating.  Right?

Wrong – all these years we’ve been categorising ourselves.  At school, I didn’t mind not being in the top stream with all those clever girls  who could do Physics and Maths while I was doing Biology and Art, because you had to have a left brain to do them and I wanted to write and draw and you needed a right brain for them.  Simplistic – just waiting to be disproved, like all the myths we believe in.  That’s what science is for, what all those kids in the top stream were doing.

If you scan the brain when it’s dealing with creative tasks, it’s not just the right brain that’s employed but areas on both sides of the corpus callosum, which possibly explains why the greatest scientist in history said “Imagination is more important than knowledge” and  Einstein’s not exactly famous for great Art, so was he recognising that imagination used many more parts of the brain than we’ve come to believe?

If you go back even further than Einstein, you realise that people didn’t separate science from art in the way in which education and society has done since the Industrial Revolution.  Michael Faraday who discovered electricity did so by observing and imagining and isn’t that what writers do?   Leonardo da Vinci, known mostly for the Mona Lisa, was a serial experimenter in just about any field possible.  His inventions, which were mostly impossible to produce in his time, exist today or were quietly subsumed in the Industrial Revolution.  This was a man who used just about every possible part of his brain.

Okay so this must seem all really left field, so time to go back to the first paragraph and why you need to get out and see what’s going on elsewhere.   Nuggets of information acquired out there in the real world have a habit of suddenly popping into your head when you’re stuck for an idea.    Take the writer, Diana Wynne Jones who wrote Howl’s Moving Castle.  She might never have come up with that idea if she hadn’t gone to a school to talk about writing.  A young boy asked her if she could write about a castle that moved.   I wonder how long it took her to come up with the whole story.   And if she hadn’t got away from her laptop, would she have got that idea on her own?   Studio Ghibli were very pleased she did when they made it into an animation in 2005.

And my cycling pianists and flying orcas – yes I did actually see them when my husband prised me from my laptop.   The cycling pianist came round a corner at the Fleetwood Transport Festival and nearly knocked me over.  His piano was attached to a bicycle and he was wearing a top hat.  It was a very strange thing to see a man sitting side saddle on a bicycle and playing a piano at the same time.  Now there’s an imagination to applaud.  And the flying orca – a bit of a cheat – it was a twenty foot inflatable kite at the St. Anne’s Kite Festival but the image against a clear blue sky above a Northern beach keeps teasing me.  Borrow either of them if you like because what you might do with them will be completely different to what I will, because we’ll all be using different parts of our brain with different experiences.

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/16/left-right-brain-distinction-myth

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June 23, 2015 · 9:48 am

The character you never invited.

The story’s coming together, you know who’s the hero and who’s the baddie.  You’ve got all the ancillary characters, the locations, you’re sure of the theme.  You’re ready to get down to the scene by scene and then suddenly from nowhere this character appears.  You’re not quite sure how they’ve got there but suddenly they’re in the scene and they’re part of the story and if you tried to take them out, you’d find yourself with a hole in the plot.  Your uninvited guest has made themselves at home.

This kind of development happens more to me in prose than it does in scripts and it may well be that prose at the early draft stage is more relaxed and open to experimentation..  Also it could be novels allow the reader to handle more characters than drama – there’s time for the reader to wander down meandering roads.  The novel is not the tightly constructed screen play, where, if you follow the Hollywood model, you’ll know exactly where you are and if you’re not, what you need to do to get there.  Films need a story as tightly nailed down as a short, short story.  There’s no room f.or uninvited characters.

Yet just because you didn’t know they were coming, until you opened the door on a scene and there they were, doesn’t mean that your uninvited characters are going to change the story you want to tell.  You could suddenly find that your story expands or gains depth through the new character providing a storyline that has resonance for the hero.

In the children’s novel I’m working on at the moment, I was writing a scene where a lieutenant has to report to the arch villain, Jeremiah, who’s evil and cruel.  Writing’s all about show not tell as we’re continually told, so to leave the reader in no doubt as to Jeremiah’s despicable nature, I wrote a scene where he’s interrogating a poor snivelling wretch.  Even poor snivelling wretches if you give them dialogue have to have names but beware, as soon as you give them one, they’ll come alive and start offering you insights into how they could add a bit of variety and humour and even allow your main characters to show who they really are.  Still you should think carefully before you christen them; will Snivelling Wretch No. 1 become a monster and try to take over the show.

So Edwards, as he is now, is part of The Curse of Millie Hapless.  He hasn’t taken over the show, just fitted in nicely.  Millie is a 12 year old girl who accidentally travels back in time and discovers that her ancestor, a famous lady smuggler and spy has been wrongly accused of betraying England, a slur that has echoed through the centuries and impacted on the modern day Hapless family. Millie naturally sets about overturning this injustice.  It was only when I wrote Edwards into that interrogation scene that I saw how he could add to the twists and turns of the plot and even help to save Millie’s great, great, great, great grandmother, Lucy from the gallows.

I’m not saying that all uninvited guests shouldn’t be shown the door but just occasionally it’s worth offering the odd one some hospitality for they could repay you handsomely.

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May 12, 2015 · 12:52 pm

Digging up bluebells

Forty years ago my front door bell rang. It was my next door neighbour bearing a bulging shopping bag.

“Fancy some bluebells,” he asked, knowing I was on the lookout for anything to go in my new garden. I was only too grateful and spent the next hour planting them and looking forward to the coming Spring. I wasn’t disappointed – the bluebells sprouted and suddenly my barren garden had been transformed into a magical woodland – well almost. Yes, I know, I knew very little about gardening but I have a vivid imagination. It was just a pity that I didn’t know a little more about bluebells for these lovely, nodding heads held on tall stalks were quickly followed by long, green, glossy leaves that swamped everything within twelve inches. Never mind, I reasoned, they can be quickly pulled up and tidied away, not too big a job.  I’ll get round to it some time.

Then I rented out my house and went to live in Canada. Four years later when I returned with my small son and my cat, I looked forward once more to spring and the bluebells. It was just in those four years they had taken over the entire garden. They were everywhere – they didn’t behave like well mannered daffodils and just stay in one place. They forced their way between paving stones, sprouted out of the foundations and hid in the middle of bushes. “They can’t get much worse,” I told myself, ignoring the fact that they’d colonised my neighbours’ gardens as well and they were not best pleased.

You’re probably wondering what bluebells have got to do with writing, well there is a tenuous link, because if all that time ago, I had dug up those dratted bluebells when I realised my mistake, I wouldn’t be faced with the monumental task I now have to shoulder. My bluebells are Spanish, and in the mild British climate, are romping away, threatening the native English bluebell, a smaller, more beautiful, to my British eye, and sweetly perfumed plant, which fits into the British landscape and doesn’t look out of place. So now I’m spending hours digging up these foreign invaders and consigning them to the bonfire.

And the tenuous link? A third of the way into the children’s novel I’m writing, I made a decision to have my two characters time travel and arrive together and in order for them to meet their antagonist, took them on a long, convoluted route through the story. The whole structure creaked but I persevered, determined it would work but it didn’t and impacted on all the other characters and on the plot.   It took my daughter to say “I don’t believe this bit,” to make me take a long hard look and agree.   I’d taken the easy way out like I did when I turned a blind eye to the bluebells.  I thought I could just tweak my story here and there like I thought I could control the bluebells by pulling up the leaves and leaving the bulb to work its way further and further into the ground.  It was time to rewrite – time to dig up the tortuous plot that had no business being there.

I know writers who’ve pressed the delete button on far more words than I had to, so I’m not awarding myself any medals. I’m going to make sure in the future though, whether I’m writing or gardening that I’m planting the right bluebells.

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February 23, 2015 · 9:55 am

Diversity and the box ticking game

What would you do if one of your kids came home from school with a picture they’d drawn of themselves and it didn’t look anything like them because the drawing was of a child who was white and your child was black?  You’d be worried about why they saw themselves like that but the answer wouldn’t be difficult to find.  The overwhelming majority of characters in the media that surrounds us are white.

How many of us use characters from other cultures or ethnic minorities within our own country or do we stick to people with the same ethnicity as our own?  Do we think about characters from other cultures only when a story might be racially based?    As writers we use our imaginations and our life experiences to create worlds to which we can relate and if there are more writers from the larger racial group, then the characters created will mirror this, which is why society tries wherever possible to encourage diversity with box ticking.

Recently Dominic Treadwell-Collins, Producer from EastEnders,  refused to support this practice.   He ‘has rejected the idea of diversity targets on the show, adding that he has no intention of including ethnic minority characters just for their own sake.’ as doing this and then ‘defining them by story lines around ethnicity, sexuality or disability, would leave viewers with ”a blancmange”.   The Guardian.

But why would he have to define them?  Are the white characters in EastEnders defined in a similar way?

It was recently pointed out that fictional Walford is twice as white as the real East London but this is where market forces come into play.   It’s not just East London that’s watching EastEnders; it’s the whole of the UK. When we watch drama, we’re in a make-believe world that won’t be a mirror image of the one on which it’s based. But do characters have to be defined by the story lines that Treadwell-Collins mentions?

I remember seeing the original Star Wars movie.  It was in a small town cinema somewhere in the States and I apologise for not remembering exactly where as I was travelling around a lot then but the scene that stands out most in my mind is when Han Solo and Luke Skywalker go into the bar which is full of aliens and virtually every alien is different and speaks a different language.  And nobody bats an eyelid.  How’s that for diversity?  How interesting, funny, engaging and downright entertaining that scene was.  Now imagine what it would have been like if it had been full of characters from just one culture, the typical kind of character who featured in, say,  a science fiction movie of the fifties or early sixties.  You know the sort, where the men are all white and there’s a token female for the love interest and there to be rescued from the alien.    Not half as interesting.  And not one of those characters had story lines defining them.  And yes, it was a feature film and not a continuing drama series but why should that matter?

Have we come very far along the road towards diversity?  If we look back on say children’s books – I can’t remember any books from when I was growing up that had children from different ethnicities but then I can’t remember any books about kids from working class areas either.  My favourite books as a child were fairy tales, Hans Christian Anderson and The Brothers Grimm and the book that I will return to read over and over again, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  You could say that when it came to diversity, Lewis Carroll was ahead of his time.  Look at his characters, the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat and he even had a female as his protagonist. And when it comes to being completely inclusive, the Mad Hatter, who, after Shakespeare’s Richard III, must be one of the oldest disabled characters in history. 
 
It was at a Commonword workshop on writing for children that I heard about the little boy and his picture. Commonword in Manchester champions diversity and encourages new writers.  If you want to write for children, their annual competition is worth a look  – http://www.cultureword.org.uk  And if we want to achieve greater diversity in our writing, it’s up to us all to think outside the boxes that constrain us as well as the box ticking ones – that way we can be better writers and reach a wider audience.

 

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