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BBC Course - Writing for Children Unearthered.
Writing for Children Unearthed
Introduction
In recent years, books written for children such as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series have been enormously successful and their appeal has spread far beyond their target audience, with special 'adult' editions being sold alongside the regular versions.
But there is a common misconception that writing for children is much easier than writing for adults - not so, and as author Diana Wynne Jones (Howl's Moving Castle, The Merlin Conspiracy, Castle in the Air) explains, children can be a far more exacting audience.
What Makes a Children's Book?
The key element to any good children's book is the story - it's is the single most important thing. No child is going to read a book that doesn't have a bold, fast-moving story with a clear course of action that comes to a satisfactory conclusion without too many dangling ends. Any mystery has to be solved; any goals should be achieved; and most characters have to be given what they deserve. You cannot start to write a book for children unless you have in your head at least the sketch of such a story.
Many people think there is a great deal of difference between a book for children and one for adults, but in reality, there isn't much between them. Relax, and in particular, stop thinking, '1 am now writing for children,' because this will clog your works like nothing else. The main difference, believe it or not, is that adults are much lazier readers. They will need a lot of padding to their stories and to be constantly reminded of the plot. Children, being on the whole much slower readers (and also being used to the fact that they don't know everything), will readily take in what you write, so you only need tell them something once.
If you don't believe this, compare any book for adults with one for children - you will find that the story-to-length ratio will be in favour of the book for children, and there will be three times the action in the same number of pages. Personally, I find this a great freedom - freedom to tell the story without constantly having to worry in case the readers haven't caught up.
A lesser difference is that adults seem to feel that there is some special virtue in being bored. They will put up with huge amounts of social documentary, glum thoughts, preaching and artistic description, whereas children will not tolerate these things for more than half a page at most. Whatever you do when you write for children, don't be boring. In fact, writing for children is a licence to enjoy yourself.
Another difference that worries a lot of people is whether or not children's books should contain overt sexual acts. This is a very adult worry, and I'm not sure most children care. They know about this stuff, but it is not usually their chief concern. The main consideration here is that most children's publishers would turn your story down if it gets too sexy, although the kind ones might suggest you try the adult market instead.
Choosing Your Story
Everyone is different, and this means that you need to write in your own, unique way. A large part of writing is discovering how you, personally, need to do it. For this, you have to start with what interests you most. If you find you prefer factual, everyday things, you would be advised to think of adventure stories first, and see what your particular take is on these. There is huge scope here, and an enthusiasm for cars, guns, computers or even just gadgets will get you a long way. Children love expertise, and they also love horror, so if you too like being frightened, then ghosts, demons, vampires and green slime are for you.
This brings us to witches, wizards and magic generally which, at the moment, are highly popular; but let me enter a caution here: it is advisable not to imitate any of these too closely, because it can get very boring. You would not credit how many imitations of, say Tolkien, there are nor how closely and drearily they all resemble one another. On the other hand, if you have a really new take on a school for wizards, or feel that the best way to start writing is to collect a set of characters in an imaginary country and send them on a wholly new sort of quest, then why not? As long as what you are doing truly interests you.
The most important thing is to enjoy what you are writing. If you find you are toiling along, getting increasingly bored, then stop. Try some other kind of story. One that fails to interest you is certainly not going to grab other people.
Plots and Puzzles
You may now be saying, 'This is all very well, but what should I put in my story?' Whatever you chose has to give children an experience they could get no other way. And it has to give hope - that is to say, if your desire is to give a detailed account of bullying, or drug addiction, or parental abuse, fine, but it does no good just to do that. Children in these situations know all about them, better than you probably do, and will find such narratives boring, while children who don't know are going to find them either glum or repulsive. You have to show someone handling these situations or, better, overcoming them.
What every writer starting out needs to understand is that the human brain is programmed to solve problems. We are programmed to like studying puzzles, then to try for solutions. The best plot for a children's book follows this framework, and the best setting for this framework is one that distances a child from her or his problems, so that they become puzzles that the child can turn this way and that, and follow with the author to the solution. Do that, and you have made a blueprint for living. And the best blueprints are usually some form of fantasy. About two-thirds of children do prefer fantasy. And once you are writing fantasy, you are free to introduce every kind of folktale and myth.
The virtue of folktales is that they break down into smaller elements very well, so that you can add them to your story in tiny scraps, knowing that children will respond to them and that this will add a depth to your narrative, or you can retell the entire tale and flesh it out with your own inventions. An excellent example of this is Robin McKinley's sumptuous Beauty, a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Such stories are timeless, as they are the ideal way of distancing a problem, and they are retold and remembered precisely because they are all blueprints of the way our minds work.
Finally, it does no harm to be extreme, to give hope, to let your imagination rip. Of course life disappoints, often you never get more than halfway to your ambition, but it is very unimaginative to discourage children from aiming as high as they can. It is better to show someone aiming at the moon and only getting halfway than to show them trying to climb to the roof and only getting to the bathroom.
Creating Your World
The places where your all-important story happens are almost as important as the story itself. They bring atmosphere to the book, and every book should by rights develop its own individual atmosphere on page one, certainly before the end of chapter one. But there is this great catch: children find long descriptions totally boring - for instance, don't ever start with a detailed description of a landscape or town.
You can get away with long descriptions later, if what you are describing is part of the narrative - if your protagonists are creeping along a corridor in a haunted castle, then you can go to town with cobwebs, carvings and corbels - but don't ever foist on children a loving description of something that has nothing to do with the story. Write those for adults if you must, because they have learnt how to skip. A much better way is to visualise, see the place in your mind, as wholly and exactly as you can, as if you were standing in the place yourself, and then simply write the story that happens there.
The people in your book are even more important than the scenery, because they are the ones that make the story happen. It follows that they usually have to be fairly strong, dynamic characters, and some of them have to be people that children will follow willingly into the action. For this reason, it was thought at one time that the main characters always had to be children. This turns out not to be true (take a look at The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud, where the main character is a demon) as long as someone in the story is likeable, understandable or a loveable rogue and so on. Many characters in books for children are animals, and are much loved by children, but beware of making absurd random changes - such as Toad in The Wind in the Willows who is sometimes frog-size and sometimes human-size, which tends to destroy any feeling of the reality of the story. Children will notice this sort of thing.
Stories in which everyone is unpleasant are not usually liked, but as long as you have your sympathetic character, you can have any number of unpleasant baddies. Children like to have a good hate even more than adults do, and it helps if you yourself hate the baddie too. Understanding the baddies may seem politically correct but is not recommended. Children - rightly to my mind - regard this sort of milky tolerance with contempt.
The same technique that applies to scenery applies even more strongly to people. You need not waste time in describing them at length, but you must then know them exceedingly well. Before you start writing, you will need to know your characters so well that you can hear their voices - then what they say will come out right without you really trying - and see details that won't get into the book, like the way they walk and what they habitually wear. This is where understanding your baddies comes in, and you have to know what they are really after, and why. You can ache with sympathy for your villain here and delicately comprehend exactly what childhood trauma caused her or him to be such a nasty piece of work, so long as you remember that she or he is really quite hateful.
Getting Vocabulary Right
When considering what kind of language to use when writing for children, it is not at all necessary to limit yourself only to easily-understood words. After all, how else are children going to learn new words unless they read them?
On the other hand, almost anything worth saying can be said in short, simple words, and tends to make a greater impact if it is. The advice here is not to start your book with a string of unusual words which will be off-putting, but to include them by all means when the context makes it clear what the words mean. Enid Blyton was good at this. For instance, in The Castle of Adventure, she first makes it plain that it was impossible to get into the castle and then uses the word 'impregnable' to sum up the situation. My own experience is that most children love and savour colourful words, especially if these are introduced in passages that are already exciting, so that the words get swallowed along with the story.
However, you must remember that most children are slower readers than adults are. This does not mean that you need to write in short, jerky sentences, but it does mean that your sentences must be constructed so that readers will not lose their way in them. If you are in any doubt, read the sentence aloud. This will almost infallibly show you if it is right or wrong, because you will get in a muddle if it is wrong.
People needlessly worry about how long a children's book should be. If your story is fascinating enough, children will read it whatever its length. (And it's worth repeating here that if you are fascinated by your story, then so will the readers.) There is a current fashion for longer books, and none of these vast tomes seem to bother the readers. The only requirement is that a child should be able to lift the book.
The suggested readership age is something to let the publisher worry about. Most children read what grabs them, regardless, and your book will write itself regardless. For this reason it is best, if your protagonists are children, never actually to specify their actual ages. No one is more humiliated than the 12-year-old who eagerly follows the adventures of a strong character, only to find that this character is five years old.
Common Pitfalls
The infallible way to find out if you have fallen into any common writing pitfalls is to notice, while you are reading the story back to yourself, all the places where you do a sort of inner squirm and then say to yourself, 'Oh, I suppose that will do.' It never will, so work on the problem until the squirm goes away.
Boring your readers is always something to watch for, and some of the common causes have already been mentioned above. Add to these any long exposition that is unbroken by action, including sections dealing with politics, extensive soul-searching by one or more characters, explicit sex, descriptions of the workings of machinery not necessary for the story, lectures on the rules of magic or astrology, and general ranting. But even worse is the loving re-creation of how it felt to be a child in, say, 1920 AD or 2000 BC. Unless this is demonstrated in narrative, it is just a history lesson.
Many people still believe that it is the duty of children's writers to teach moral lessons, impart wisdom and inculcate civilised behaviour. And so it is - you probably wouldn't want to do the opposite - but it is fatal to do it overtly. Children hate to feel got at, so build your message into the story and show readers what you mean, or, better still, let it just arise as you write.
Children also hate being talked-down to but, alas, they are very used to being patronised. One of the sure signs that you are talking down is when you find yourself referring to children or any part of them as 'little' - 'tiny hands' is a no-no. Besides, if you are writing for people of 12 or more, the chances are that they are larger than you. The same goes for telling readers that they, or any character, are 'too young to understand'. This is plain insulting. A subtler form of patronisation is referring to yourself and the reader as 'we' ('Come along, children, and we'll all be fairies!') or suggesting things like 'we all love fairies'.
Fairies in themselves are too whimsical for today's children (Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl books are a notable exception, but usually orcs are to be preferred), but whimsy is more generally to be found in writing that tries to imitate Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, where strange things 'just happen' without reason or explanation. Pink dinosaurs pop out of the fridge, twee little men sit on bedposts and sing silly songs, and scented rainbows wrap our little heroine in lilac toffee. Have these things, by all means, but only if there is a good reason in the story for them to occur. Above all, do not try to be 'charming'.
The Trouble with Clichés
It may sound extremely obvious, but make sure you don't leave anything out, because every story has to have reasons for the things which happen in it. Disregard the fact that young children tell a story in great long chunks linked with 'and… and… and…' - this is simply a lack of practice in storytelling and not at all what children themselves want to read. You are going to have to put all the connections in, although it is surprisingly easy to forget and leave them out. I once taught a writing course in which one lady's story had two lads suddenly arrested for no good reason.
'Why is this?' I asked.
'Oh,' she said, 'they broke into a factory and stole a lot of soft drinks.'
'Then why didn't you put this in the story?'
'Did I have to?'
Watch out for lapses like this.
As with any form of creative writing, clichés are also to be avoided. There are all sorts, from the well known, 'With one bound he was by her side,' to, 'Long ululating cries and a stench of evil emanated from the slavering horde.' (For some reason vampires and demons attract clichés like nothing else.) Clichés are not only found in descriptive passages, but in the action as well, such as when our romantic heroine dislikes a tall dark stranger on sight and then marries him in chapter 30. The signs to watch for are when you find yourself slipping along too easily in rather colourful phrases (and the warning of your own inner squirm, of course), and the real trouble is that clichés make your book very ordinary.
To avoid this, whenever you find yourself possessed of a cliché, try taking the action right back behind the words that describe it and then live what you are trying to say: watch the lover's movement, smell the breath of the slavering hordes, and then think what words really best describe it. There is no guarantee, however, that you will not simply arrive back at a cliché!
Wrapping It Up
Concluding a book is not easy. It is often difficult to know just where to stop in the story. Opinions vary between an abrupt stop ('Good-bye,' said Jack) and a long coda in which you tie up all the ends and describe exactly what Jack (and Mary and Zuleika and Auntie May) did for the next twenty years. It is up to you to choose, with the proviso that you first make sure all the important facts are accounted for, like explaining why the villain did what he did, or making sure that Jack is not still buried alive in a mineshaft.
Above all, never get out of your difficulties by ending, 'Then she woke up and it was all a dream.' I know there are precedents for this, but children regard it as cheating. It spoils Alice, The Box of Delights and many a lesser book. Worse still is Rudyard Kipling in Puck of Pook's Hill, who has his children bespelled to forget the entire story. It is almost as bad as ending up with your entire cast dead, which always strikes me as an extreme act of writer's desperation.
One of the most important things to remember, however, is that you aren't writing for children, as such, but for the next three generations of adults. This is why so many books for children featured on the BBC's Big Read list. People read those marvellous books when they were small and they never forget them. If you get your book even ninety percent right, then the chances are it could be the marvellous, inventive, wise, and magical book that the baby just this minute being born will later read and find it has changed her or his life completely. You will have been responsible, and that is quite some thought.
About Diana Wynne Jones
Books
You don't have to be a child to read these, but sometimes it helps.
Pollinger, Lesley and Frewin Jones, Allen: Writing for Children
One of many 'how to' guides available, covering every aspect from getting started, writing picture books and non-fiction as well as fiction, and how to market your work to agents and publishers.
Dahl, Roald: The Witches
Or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The Twits; Revolting tales to relish from the grand master of children's fiction.
Aiken, Joan - The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
Abandoned orphans, cruel governesses, and wolves roaming the English countryside - what more could you want from a gothic story which bends history and puts its central characters in mortal danger? A prime example of blending fantasy and terror for younger readers.
Wilson, Jacqueline: The Illustrated Mum
Another powerful example of how to write about the problems children encounter in everyday life, from a child's perspective, by the woman who in 2003 became the most borrowed author from British libraries.
Article Source - BBC - British Broadcasting Corporation
Author - Diana Wynne Jones. ALL Information Copyright
Diana Wynne Jones author of - Howl's Moving Castle, The Merlin Conspiracy, Castle in the Air.
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Dec/30/2005, 10:58 pm
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