Precooked Children and Pushy Parents - Clémentine Beauvais

My new research project for my academic work is on precocious children in literature and culture. I was trying to explain this in wobbly Spanish to my friend in Madrid by saying that I was studying 'el niño precocido', which made her burst out laughing - turns out it means the 'precooked child'.

It's a shame I'm not actually doing that; as far as I'm aware, it's a very undertheorised motif.

Maurice Sendak, In the Night Kitchen

Anyway, the term 'precooked' keeps popping back into my head as I read. Throughout the 20th century, there's been a conceptual battle around the question of child precocity in child psychology and the sociology of education. 'Precocious' children are now widely considered, as the etymology suggests, to be 'praecox', 'ripe before their age', mostly thanks to an alignment of good circumstances: supportive family and school environments, task commitment, and above all social valuation of whichever type of 'intelligence' the child manages to develop ahead of peers.

But the literature, though it does acknowledge parental involvement in so-called child 'precocity', can be vociferous against parents. Parents are often described as 'pushing' their child, 'too early', with no regard for 'normal development'. In other words, they're indeed 'precooking' their child in the hope that it will have the equivalent effect as their 'ripening early'. 

And everyone knows that no amount of apple compote will make up for their being unripe.

Even scientifically rigorous articles get into very harsh denunciations of parents who try to 'create' 'precocious' children. Some scholars make the striking claim that exceptional children ahead of their peers who have been 'pushed' by their parents don't 'deserve' to be called precocious. Since the notion is essentially fallacious, its definition fluctuates anyway, but the hostility against the 'pushy parent' is interestingly intense.

Roald Dahl's Matilda famously begins with a critique of such parents:

It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think that he or she is wonderful.
Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.

Children's books and films are indeed generally quite severe against parents who 'push' their children to 'overachieve', and don't grant them the same status as children presented as 'naturally gifted'.There's a clear moral split between the precooked and the precocious, even if in effect they achieve the same results. 

The bad precocious child

  Dahl is at the forefront - think of the punishments endured by the 'precooked' children of pushy parents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The myth of child precocity is paradoxical. It's torn between conflicting adult desires that such children should be, on the one hand, entirely unexplainable (a conservative, mystical view of precocity) and on the other hand, possible to create (from a more liberal democratic perspective).
 
So we don't like the idea that some children should be born with more 'gifts' than others: that hurts our egalitarianism. But at the same time, we definitely don't like to see how they're made, how they're cooked, specifically by their parents. It feels like we're just being tricked ('it's not real precocity!'). The ambiguity of this discourse is reflected in scientific articles about child precocity or 'giftedness', and often in children's books and films.

TMI.

At heart, we want to believe in the possibility of a 'miraculous' child whose intelligence and creativity has no rational explanation. We also think that pushy parents are only pushy out of pure narcissism. And also, yes, we're jealous: who are these parents who are so 'gifted' at this parenting thing? (Judging from my Facebook feed, it's a ferocious competition out there).

We prefer to think that they will suffer a sad fate, and their children too. They will be punished for precooking children when they aren't ripe enough. HA!

Children's literature from Jacqueline Wilson to J.K. Rowling often indulges in such dreams, with cautionary tales that such 'fake precocious children' will never 'achieve their potential' and instead end up depressed and lonely - or, for the more positive tales, rebel before they're completely rotten.

The good precocious child

How hypocritical we writers can be... We know that we depend on an army of pushy middle-class parents to get their kids to read our books; increasingly so with the rumoured decline of the book. We deify precocious, 'gifted', 'genius' children in our texts. And we desperately want to have an impact on children, too.

And yet the ideal precocious child is uncooked, free from additives, a mystery to all. It is a child who laughs at the efforts of well-meaning adults to influence her.

That ideal precocious child lands in our writerly nets.

And then we can give it our books. Children's literature is absolutely OK with 'real' precocious child characters reading our books. We just love being in charge of the cooking.

_____________________________________

Clementine Beauvais, hypocrite auteur of several books featuring precocious children, writes in both French and English. The former are of all kinds and shapes, and the latter a humour/adventure detective series, the Sesame Seade mysteries (Hodder). She blogs here about children's literature and academia and is on Twitter @blueclementine.

The comfort of storytelling - Lily Hyde

Last week, for anyone who knows or cares about Ukraine, was one where reality outstripped most scary stories or fairytales.

Any story that was being told, of a choice between the European Union and Russia; of ultra-nationalists versus a democratically elected government; of a gradual exchange of power from president to parliament; of things reverting to normal once all the homeless bums realised they couldn’t live in protest tents forever and went back to whatever gutter they’d crawled from – whatever the story was, however coherent and persuasive the narrative, it was utterly overtaken by events.

Who could make up police snipers shooting down unarmed protesters with live ammunition? Or charter flights of the wealthy and well-connected with their suitcases of cash queuing nose to tail to take off for Russia or the West? That the tanks and soldiers allegedly heading to Kiev would never arrive? That the president would sign an agreement to hold early elections and then disappear? That next day his country residence would be open to the public to wander around and gawp at his ostentatious and thoroughly kitsch display of stolen wealth?

Truth stranger and more fantastic than any fiction. I’ve been making stories out of Ukraine for several years, both as a journalist and as a fiction writer. This last week I’ve just stared in horror, astonishment, awe, sadness, cautious hope. I could never have guessed what would happen, let alone made all this up.

Barricades in central Kiev (photo by Max Bibik) 

In the face of all the confusion and upheaval, people continue to make up stories. It’s what makes us human. One Ukrainian city greeted riot police returning from Kiev as heroes; another made them walk down a ‘parade of shame’. The Russian press narrative is that the interim government is made of bandits and extremists; the West’s story is that it’s a triumph for democracy. Many protestors in Ukraine call it a sell-out. The proposed new prime minister has his own story: “this is the government of political suiciders! So welcome to hell.”


History will make its own story out of these events. We don’t know yet who will write that version. Who will evaluate it, embellish it, censor it, cross out and rewrite it, turn it into poetry, a children’s story, a romance, a tragedy – a happy ending…?

Memorial for those killed (photo by Max Bibik)

www.lilyhyde.com 

The Silent Einsteins - Andrew Strong

I was once a great believer in philosophy for children.  I’d read a class of children the wonderful chapter from Winnie the Pooh, ‘Eeyore’s Birthday’ in which  Pooh wants to give Eeyore a pot of honey but eats the honey, and Piglet has a balloon for Eeyore, but it bursts.  So Eeyore ends up with a burst balloon and an empty pot, but he’s delighted, he can put the burst balloon into the pot and take it out again. He’s happy.  Then, of course, the children can discuss happiness and what it is and what it means, and how it happens.  The wordy, confident pupils usually dominate the discussion, sometimes offering insight, often demonstrating some sort of philosophical approach.  “It depends what you mean by happiness,” one will say, and I will be delighted.

The quieter children will still be thinking about the story, or are lost somewhere along the way, maybe stalled at the point where Piglet falls on the balloon and thinks he’s dead.  But, you know, we have to move things along, get to the philosophy bit.

Except the other day a wordy confident child asked me if I knew what E=MC2 meant.  Well, I said, I do, sort of, but I can’t really explain it beyond the most superficial outline.  I did my best and he said he understood it.  I explained that Einstein had one of his first major breakthroughs when he thought of someone falling.  A person falling for long enough would achieve weightlessness.

I asked the wordy, confident boy to imagine he was in a lift, holding a pen, and then the cable broke and the lift fell, and kept falling until he was weightless.  Imagine, I said, you then let go the pen.  What happens to it?

Wordy boy mimicked the pen shooting up out of his hand.  And then, from behind him, I noticed a girl who had said nothing, but who was listening intently, suddenly leaning forward.  She was staring at me and her eyes were bright.

“It would stay there,” she said. “The pen would just stay there.”  She nodded to herself as if confirming her idea, and sat back, resuming her silent rumination.

These silent children, these children who don’t shine or sparkle, or who fail to make any early impression on the world, I am convinced their thoughts are quietly gestating.  Their minds are finding new ways to reimagine the world.  The wordy, confident ones, the brilliant academic children who fly through exams, they have often matured early, they know to repeat what they’ve been told, adding some calculated sparkle for good measure.

Here’s an example of a test question that so infuriated me I set fire to it and let it float, a fiery cloud, over the silent fields of my suppressed rage.  It asked pupils to read a text and then describe what a character was ‘feeling’.  In order to do this, it seems, a pupil scours the page for synonyms of the word ‘feel’ and then quotes these phrases.  ‘He sensed doubt’ ‘His worries compounded’ and so on. Yet throughout the passage there were louring skies, distant cries, a current in a pool eddies and swirls, all these things externalising the protagonists fears. Yet none of these were acceptable.  The limits of what the text could do had been set in stone by some evil test setter. 

Education rewards the wordy group, and more and more, demoralises the others.  The winners go on to become evil test setters.  And things like ‘Philosophy for Children’ just exacerbate it.  The quieter pupils allow images to rise and fall, let them simmer and settle.  The wordy ones want to pin them down as soon as possible, try and articulate something immediately. 

But literature is not a science, and art cannot have such simplistic one to one relationships.  A single word is a trove of associations, a text is a universe, and there is far too much to be found to expect everyone to discover the same things.

What Teaching Writing is Teaching Me About Writing - Tamsyn Murray

I've been teaching my Writing For Children course at London City University for a term and a half now. It's a short course - ten weekly classes in which I try to distil the essence of writing for - erm - children. When I first got the gig, I didn't worry too much about how I would teach the course: I had ten years' worth of teaching adults under my belt and eight books for children and teens in the shops. I knew I had the experience and the knowledge to devise and deliver a syllabus. What I didn't know was how much of my own writing was done on instinct.

I've never taken any formal writing courses. When I decided I wanted to write children's books, I read a lot of them first and then just gave it my best shot. So it's been interesting to sit down and work out the rules of writing for children (in as much as they actually exist) and to see how many things I do without realising I'm doing them. For example, one of the things I tell my students about is the three act story structure, beloved of scriptwriters everywhere, where rising tension is offset against a series of incidents that drive the story to its climax. Without realising I was doing it, I had given my characters pivotal moments and conflict to overcome, led them to a dark moment when it seemed everything was lost and then hit them with the climax of the story and gave them their resolution. I understood what made a good story without understanding why.

Explaining POV has shown me why writing in the first person is often easier for beginners - it's more difficult (but by no means impossible) to slip out of your character's viewpoint when you are inside their head. And teaching about one-dimensional characters has been a revelation about where I might have skimped on character development myself, especially where my antagonists are concerned. One of my students asked me for an example of a one-dimensional character in children's literature and I struggled for a week to come up with a true example of a flat character. Then I realised that they don't necessarily exist - they get weeded out or strengthened during the publishing process. But it was still a timely reminder to ensure that I know my characters' history and motivation.

I wouldn't say that teaching the Writing For Children course is teaching me how to write. But it does seem to be revealing some of the things I never knew I knew.

What You Learn on a Writing Weekend with the SAS - Liz Kessler

I am writing this blog from a train, having spent the weekend locked away in a hotel with forty wonderful children’s authors (all members of the Scattered Authors' Society, otherwise known as the 'other' SAS). And I have to say, it was a very lovely hotel to be locked away in, surrounded by trees and lakes and snowdrops.

OK, we weren’t actually locked away. We were all there by choice. And while I'm clearing up inaccuracies, I'm not in fact simply 'getting the train home'. I'm getting a...

• Taxi to the station;
• Train to London;
• Tube across London;
• Train to the airport;
• Flight to Newquay (not because I’m a posh jet setter who normally gets around via aeroplane, but because train lines in and out of Cornwall are currently out of action due to the recent storms);
• Lift home in a car.

I’m not saying all this in an attempt to impress anyone with my mammoth journey, but to show how much trouble I am willing to go to in order to spend a weekend with not only some of the finest children’s authors in the country, but some of the loveliest people to boot. (I don’t think I’ve ever used the expression ‘to boot’ before. I like it.)

In other words, it was a wonderful weekend.

As writers generally work at home on their own, you can perhaps imagine how we feel about getting together like this. It’s a bit like a group of work colleagues who have LOADS to talk about, but only get to hang out around the water cooler three times a year.

It’s not just a whole load of fun; you also learn things. So, here are ten things I learned this time.

1. Writers’ fortunes go up and down so much that we really shouldn’t worry too much when times are tough – or get complacent when they’re good. It’s probably all gonna look different when you come back and see everyone again next year.

2. The Scattered Authors’ Society will always support you in the former of those times and cheer for you in the latter.

3. Most children’s authors seem to have black swimming costumes.

4. Tim Collins is extremely good at coping with being surrounded by forty women (and is also very clever and very funny).

5. Anne Rooney is totally amazing at putting together huge amounts of interesting information and producing a fascinating PowerPoint presentation in the time it takes other people to sleep, have breakfast and brush their teeth.

6. Sally Nicholls will always be the winner if you get into a game of ‘How many people have you killed off in a single novel?’ (Unless you know anyone who has killed more than 45% of Europe.)

7. Malorie Blackman is, basically, wonderful.

8. If you get ten SAS members sitting in a bar at an event like this, you are quite likely to discover that you have 156 years' experience of the publishing industry around the table.

9. My A Level in Maths wasn’t all for nothing, as I managed to correctly work out the above without the use of a calculator.

10. When you’re running late with your blog post and haven’t got any ideas of your own, someone else will usually have a good one you can nick/share. Thanks Abie! 

(Please head over to Abie Longstaff’s sister blog today!)

MASSIVE thanks to the wonderful duo, Mary Hoffman and Anne Rooney, for working so hard to put together such a fab weekend. Hope to see lots of you around the water cooler again soon.

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the Magic of the Hay Cartagena Festival - Maeve Friel

Cartagena de Indias is a walled city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, founded by Spanish conquistadors in 1533. I was thrilled to visit it recently to attend the Hay Cartagena Literary Festival. It is a magical and enchanting city, steeped in romance and brimming with literary and historical references.  It is also beautiful. Once squalid and rundown while a new high-rise city grew up further along the coast, old Cartagena has undergone a renaissance and is full of old colonial houses, secret courtyards,  leafy squares and cobbled streets of vibrantly painted houses with bougainvillea spilling from their wooden balconies.

It is the unnamed but clearly identifiable city where Gabriel Garcia Marquez set Love in the Time of Cholera.  In late 19^th century, Cartagena was gripped by cholera and the bourgeoisie tried to avoid being infected by cholera by enclosing themselves in the walled city.

You can sit on a park bench under the almond trees in the Plaza Fernández de Madrid and imagine the lovelorn Florentino Ariza sitting beside you reading poetry and hoping to catch a glimpse of Fermina Daza emerging from the handsome house opposite, the one with the overhanging balcony and the parrot door knocker beside the Alliance Francaise. (I missed the parrot door but saw many other distinctive ones. I´ve a bit of a thing about door furniture.)

Or you can stroll under the arches where Fiorentino and Fermina first met and where the hawkers still sell sweets to passersby. 

1.    The gorgeous Hotel Santa Clara (where the visiting Hay writers all stay), inspired another magical novel by Garcia Marquez Of Love and Other Demons. Once a convent, this is where Garcia Marquez, then an aspiring journalist, first heard about the discovery of a skeleton of a girl with over twenty metres of hair. 

Nowadays, rather than captive virgins and demure nuns,  there is a large Botero nude in the lush hotel gardens and a resident toucan flitting about.  

On the first evening of the festival, I had arranged to meet John Boyne for a drink in the hotel bar - he had earlier given a fabulous talk with Peter Florence. director of Hay,  about his new WW1 novel The Absolutist. The slightly surreal atmosphere of the place was enhanced when we heard plain chanting and a pair of incense bearing cowled monks appeared, a nightly ritual in honour of the hotel´s former existence as a monastery.

2.      

Everything about the city was an inspiration but add in the Hay Festival participants and you have a heady mix.

 

Irvine Welsh talked about Skagboys, a return twenty years later to his characters in Trainspotting (the most shoplifted book in the UK, apparently). He spoke about heroin addiction, Scottish independence, the breakdown of consensus in modern Britain and  his love of music. He told us that he creates a playlist for every character: he needs to know "where they stay, who they lay and what they play".
   

There were so many highlights: the Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal (Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mama también) introducing his documentary about illegal immigrants to the USA); a thoughtful Joe Sacco, self-described cartoonist, with his new fold-out frieze about WW1 and getting some hostile questions about his book on Palestine and its "lack of balance"; Yoani Sanchez, the Cuban blogger; David Rieff, the journalist, talking to Colombian writer Hector Abad about remembrance in the context of war and conflict,  how memory is not sacred, is often faulty, and controversially declaring that there is no such thing as collective memory. Remembering is not a moral act - under some circumstances, it is better to forget. 

I loved  Rosie Boycott´s interview with the engaging Tom Hart Dyke, orchid fanatic, who spent eight horrendous months as a hostage of the FARC guerrillas in the Darién rainforest in Panamá. 

Strolling from venue to venue, there were many bookshops and cafes - Abaco,  my favourite,  was both  bookshop and café.

4    Leaving Abaco one night, I was delighted to meet Martin Murillo who has been wheeling his carreta literaria, his literary cart, through the streets of Cartagena for years, lending books for free. 

     

An early school leaver, Martin  used to sell bottled water but was sponsored to fulfil his dream and set up his literary cart by the organiser of a beauty contest and a journalist who were his water customers.(Doesn´t that sound like something Garcia Marquez would make up?) From the original two hundred volumes, his library now has thousands of books, all donated by publishers and individuals - every day he makes a new selection to include children´s books, novels, technical manuals, poetry, philosophy. Loans are free and without strings attached. He assumes people will be honest and return their books, even if it takes them years.  He now travels around Colombia visiting schools and libraries encouraging the love of reading. 

 
Another morning, we saw two men sitting on upturned paint tins, playing draughts on a painted square of wood with red and white bottle tops as pieces.

Day and night, there were colourful palenqueras, the descendants of slaves from Palenque, selling fruit from the trays they balanced on their head. This lady told me she started aged ten.

There were vultures on the roof tops, horse-drawn carriages and literary celebrities strolling on the sea wall in their new Panamá hats. 

There were children in a courtyard drawing armadillos and spider monkeys and, in a school that I visited, a flock of peacocks in the grounds to keep the snakes away.

 You couldn´t make it up.

Maeve Friel
I am currently living in Panamá. Please come and visit my website www.maevefriel.com or subscribe to my blog www.maevefriel.com/blog where I am mostly writing about my time in Panamá and about Latin American children´s literature. Or follow me on twitter @MaeveFriel or on Facebook.

Read For My School - Megan Rix and Ruth Symes

(Our lovely puppy girl Emma)

When I was at primary school I caught whooping cough and had to spend weeks and weeks at home in bed. Nowadays I’d have been able to play on my computer and maybe have a TV in my room (which I would have loved back then in the 1970’s but didn’t have.) Instead twice a week my mum went to the library and brought me home lots of library books to read and I also read through just about every book in our house, appropriate or not. Dennis Wheatley horrors were a huge favourite.

I was away for such a long time that everyone in my class sent me a letter as part of an English project and I wrote back. My letters were all about the books I’d been reading and the characters in them. No longer was I wondering how to sound out each word as I read - now I wanted to know what happened next in the story and imagined myself as the characters in them. I became totally immerssed in the books. Condensed Readers’ Digest versions of Nevil Shute’s books gave me a longing to go to Australia which I did in my 20’s. Just as the books my Gran read to me, before I could read, about a Maori village made my first visit to New Zealand a very special trip. 

Once I wasn’t contagious and allowed to go to the library by myself I discovered Jean Plaidy in the adult section that happened to be closest to the children’s area and history became my books of choice for a while.

Almost a whole half-term off school meant I needed help catching up in maths (I'd completely missed out on roman numerals) but the strange thing was I'd gone from near the bottom of the class in English to near the top. All that reading had paid off and once I'd caught the reading bug I didn't stop. I can remember looking at the comprehension part of the test paper and then down at the questions below and just ‘getting it’ for probably the first time. It wasn’t that I hadn’t liked making up stories long long before this time it was just the mechanics of it all had got me a bit lost.

I see this time and again when I take my dog Traffy into school to listen to children read and love it when the child changes from stumbling over sounding out the letters and feeling hesitant and unsure to being gripped by the story and a more confident reader.

The Read For My School annual competition launched at the end of January and runs until the 28th of March and it’s not too late to take part. It challenges pupils in England from year 3 to year 8 to read as many books as they can in 2 months - which is about the same amount of time it took to turn me from a non-reader into an avid one and I’m sure for many children Read For My School will do the same.

Megan's books about dogs in WW2 have been shortlisted for the East Sussex, Doncaster, Stockton, Shrewsbury and Worcestershire Children's Books of the Year.

In medias res - Joan Lennon

In 1919, PG Wodehouse began his novel A Damsel in Distress with these words: 

Inasmuch as the scene of this story is that historic pile, Belpher Castle, in the county of Hampshire, it would be an agreeable task to open it with a leisurely description of the place, followed by some notes on the history of the Earls of Marshmoreton, who have owned it since the fifteenth century.  Unfortunately, in these days of rush and hurry, a novelist works at a disadvantage.  He must leap into the middle of his tale with as little delay as he would employ in boarding a moving tramcar.   He must get off the mark with the smooth swiftness of a jack-rabbit surprised while lunching.  Otherwise, people throw him aside and go out to picture palaces.


It isn't exactly new, of course - long before picture palaces, Horace says of the ideal epic poet:

Nor does he begin the Trojan War from the egg,
but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things ...
(Wikipedia)  

 I sat in on one of Alan Bissett's creative writing sessions once.  He had us writing an opening to a story.  When we had finished, he suggested we delete the first seven sentences and that THAT would be where the story really began. We read out our original opening sentences, and the new opening, and very frequently, the new one was, indeed, streets better. (I tried this with a group of young writers.  The first lad I asked to read out, looked at me sadly and said, "I only wrote seven sentences.")

At one stage, I used to start my own creative writing sessions with the words, "Every good story begins with what the main character had for breakfast."  I was, of course, hoping for a chorus of "No it doesn't - that's boring - good stories start with something exciting!"  What I tended to get was a chorus of blank stares.  I stopped using that particular opener.

(image: Abe Books)

(image: The Project Gutenberg Project)

(image: Penguin Books)

But, in this time of rush and hurry, have we got stuck with in medias res as the only way?  When was the last time you wrote a book that didn't open like a rabbit surprised?  When was the last time you read one? 

Are we missing out?  Tell me what you think ...


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.

Messing About With Ancient History - Lucy Coats

Sticklers for historical accuracy may, possibly, want to look away from this post, as there will be talk of meddling and messing. You have been warned!

I've been mixing ancient history with geography for years - first with Atticus the Storyteller, in which my sandal-making hero visited all the places where the Greek myths were said to have taken place, then with Coll, a young bard travelling round Celtic Britain. The thing about ancient history, though - especially as far back as I like to travel - is that there's a lot of wriggle room, because there aren't that many verifiable facts. Also, my heroes were made up, so I could do what I liked, take them where I wanted to, as long as what facts I did use were as authentic as possible.

This time round it's been a bit different. I've been writing about a real character - probably one of the most famous women in ancient history. Everyone knows Cleopatra, right? Wrong. They think they do, because so much has been written about her - but most of that information came from the Romans, and those 'his-stories' were written well after she died. I say 'his-stories' for a reason. The writers were men - and they had an agenda. Cleopatra was a powerful woman, and the Romans didn't care for powerful women at all - they found them threatening. Thus the legend of the exotic seductress witch/siren was born - after all Cleopatra couldn't possibly have been intelligent and clever all on her own, could she? Or so the Romans thought, and they were the victors here, so they wrote the history which future generations have believed ever since.

I wanted to tell a different story - a story which no one had told before - a story about an intelligent, educated young Cleopatra before she ever became queen, before she entered onto the stage of world history. Surprisingly little is known about that younger period of her life - and that gave me the freedom to mess about a bit, to speculate, to research my socks off and then shake the few historically accurate scraps of fact around and come up with a 'what-might-have-happened' story of my own. Being me, I also wanted to throw the myths of Ancient Egypt into the mix - the gods and goddesses of the Ennead and the Ogdoad. That's the book I've just finished - and I'm just about to start writing the second of 'my' Cleo's adventures. However, before I started, I took a short break to catch up on my huge TBR pile. Bear with me here - it is relevant to the messing with ancient history theme!

The first book on the pile happened to be Jamie Buxton's Temple Boys, which comes out on 27th February from Egmont - I'm lucky enough to have been sent an early copy.  Like me, Jamie Buxton is a digger and delver into the territory of long ago (his imaginative riff on the Arthur legend, I Am the Blade and Heartless Dark are favourites of mine), so I took one look at the cover and the blurb - a gang of boys, Romans, a magician - and dived right in. Just my sort of thing, I thought, and it was - only the 'magician' wasn't at all what I was expecting.

Jamie Buxton has gone several notches above me here when it comes to writing about someone famous. He's taken the Biggest Historical Character of Them All - the one pretty much everyone in the whole world knows about - and told his (or should I say His?) story from the point of view of a small beggar boy on the streets of Jerusalem. What is more, he's done it in a way which made me think once again about how history is perceived by the generations of the future - and about how the facts of that crucial 'what-really-happened' story slip and slide through the backward-looking lens that is our past.

Temple Boys is based around a story about one man which is told around the world every single day - a story which has become a faith for millions. People everywhere wear the story's symbol around their necks. I know this story backwards. I know how it begins, how it ends, who the characters are, what each of them does - and yet in storytelling wizard Jamie's extraordinarily capable hands, the story of Flea and Yeshua became for me a totally new and thrilling tale which I couldn't bear to put down for one minute.

This is what truly compelling history - ancient or otherwise - for children should be. Not something dry and dusty in an old, forgotten tome, parading fact after boring fact, but something which grips the mind and makes the heart thud with excitement or fear, sadness or joy. I believe that the spell really good storytelling casts over us all is the way to pull children and teenagers into the past and make it come alive for them.  If I, as a writer, have to mess about with history a bit to make that happen - well, I'll take a few roars of disapproval from the sticklers for every young person who has told me that Atticus was the book which made them choose to study Classics or Ancient History at university. I think it's a price worth paying, and I hope that both Jamie's meddling with Yeshua/Jesus and my own with Cleopatra (when she comes in 2015) will infect lots of young readers with the history bug - preferably for the rest of their lives!

Lucy's new picture book, Captain Beastlie's Pirate Party is now out from Nosy Crow!

"A splendidly riotous romp…Miss the Captain’s party at your peril." Jill Bennett

"An early candidate for piratey book of the year." ReadItDaddy blog

Bear's Best Friend is published by Bloomsbury  

"Coats's ebullient, sympathetic story is perfectly matched by Sarah Dyer's warm and witty illustrations." The Times   

Lucy's latest series for 7-9s, Greek Beasts and Heroes is out now from Orion Children's Books. 

Lucy's Website

Follow Lucy on Twitter

Lucy is represented by Sophie Hicks at Ed Victor Ltd

The Creative - a Journey - Linda Strachan

As a writer, wherever I am wherever I go the story is always there playing in my head in quiet moments.

I am  currently on the other side of the world in New Zealand, and it is the middle of the night (at home) as I write this.  Summer while at home it is winter but after a while it no longer seems strange and ideas that  are generated by living in a different place.

But the fantastic thing about travel is the people you meet, and the different cultures, ways of using words and the stories you hear (or overhear!) that start to grow in your head.

While in Adelaide, South Australia we met up with a writer from home who had just completed an amazing trip on a ship carrying the Clipper City of Adelaide form Scotland to it's final berth in Adelaide .cityofadelaide.org.au/  It was an amazing journey and I can't wait to read the book she is writing about her experiences.
We also met up with Catdownunder who lives in Adelaide and it made me realise how people who write speak the same language wherever they are in the world.

But this writing lark although wonderful, it can make you want to tear your hair out at times.
Does it ever get any easier? I don't think it does, really.

 You write something that is dear to your heart with characters that matter to you.
 They live and breathe and become as close to you as family. You laugh and cry while they surprise you; walking in and out of the story having crisis, disasters, broken hearts and moments of pure joy. You spend hours, days, weeks and months wrestling with their story, at times ready to toss it all into the bin and at others elated having solved a knotty plot problem.

 The road the story takes is at times like running after a snowball down a hill, at others pushing an enormous boulder up a mountain. About three quarters of the way up the mountain towards the crisis point every problem the characters face appear to be unsolvable. you hit a brick wall and you are sure the story is fit for nothing but the compost heap.


 Despair, thinking of all the wasted time you have spent on it, because nothing you write is ever going to be of interest to anyone. Just as you want to give up, a Eureka! Moment, and the answer to the problem  appears like magic along with renewed enthusiasm and excitement.

Before you know it you've reached the tipping point and you rush towards that wonderful moment when can type THE END.

 Delight and pride in your new creation lasts until you send it off..... This begins another roller coaster of emotion as you wonder, will your publisher/agent like it? Will they greet it with enthusiasm and delight or... no, the other possibility is not worth thinking about.

 Does it ever get any easier....?
 Possibly not, but perhaps that is what drives us to write. The joy and excitement of a new idea, new characters and getting lost in a world of your own creation... that never gets old!

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Linda Strachan  is  Patron of Reading to Liberton High School, Edinburgh 

Author of over 60 books for all ages from picture books to teenage novels and a writing handbook  Writing For Children    Her latest YA novel is Don't Judge Me  

website:  www.lindastrachan.com
blog: Bookwords

Why I'm Happy to Support Age-Banding of Children's Books by Emma Barnes

I’m a bit reluctant to raise this issue, because I know even a mention of it can cause fellow authors to start foaming at the mouth, talking about the end of civilization as we know it. For some reason, this is an issue that authors feel very strongly about. So here goes (whisper it)… I support the age-banding of children’s books. And many authors don’t.

 My new book actually has an age recommendation on the cover. See? My publishers were tentative when they first suggested it. They are obviously well aware of the sensitivities around this issue. But I said…go ahead.  It's actually very subtle.

For those not familiar with this topic, it kicked off a few years back, when publishers found, having surveyed their customers, that most would welcome some guidance on the covers of children’s books. There are, after all, a vast amount of titles in print. It’s not always clear from a cursory glance how “kiddish” a Wimpy Kid may be, how “little” a Little Woman or how “wild” a Wild Thing (in case you’d like to know, she’s a wild five year old, but her adventures are narrated by her older sister, and my publisher expects her adventures to appeal to 8 plus.)

Often the same author and illustrator produce books that look similar but are actually for different age-groups. These books by Jacqueline Wilson are for different age groups, but can you tell the difference?

When publishers first suggested that it might be a good idea to put a discreet piece of age guidance on back covers (very discreet indeed) a tirade of author anger was let forth. A campaign was started. Prestigious authors protested. You can see their statement of opposition here and author Philip Pullman’s particularly resounding condemnation here.

I will say straight off that I’m absolutely in agreement with all those authors and librarians who have a desire to see children have as much access to books as possible. It’s something I feel passionately about (as any friend who has heard me rant on about this subject will attest.) I so much want children to find books they enjoy. I despair when I hear about another library closure…visit a school with shelves virtually devoid of books…or read studies like this, with its grim findings about the negative attitudes of children to books. (My heart lifts when I meet those inspiring teachers and librarians that are doing wonderful work to bring books and children together.) I desperately want children to have access to books, and to find the books that appeal to them – and I think it’s a massive tragedy that so many don’t.

If I could have three wishes, one would be for every primary school to have a librarian – somebody well read in children’s books, able to maintain a well-stocked library, to keep up with new releases and to guide children to the books likely to interest them. The Society of Authors is campaigning for exactly that, and I think it would have a massive, positive impact on children’s reading – and their wider well being.

What I don’t understand is why an age recommendation on a book is somehow seen as being contrary to these ideals.

The trouble I think is in some people’s minds, age guidance of any kind seems to mean only one thing: censorship. Now censorship can be an issue in children’s books: every year, for example, the list is published of most banned books from US libraries. Then there is the more implicit kind of censorship – the worry that publishers might perhaps feel that a gay character will prove less popular than a straight character in YA fiction, or should be of a certain race to maximize sales. But neither of these issues have anything to do with age-banding. And especially not here in the UK, where I’ve seen little evidence that (the sadly increasingly few) children’s librarians out there are interested in limiting children’s access to books in any way. As for parents, I’d argue that they are more concerned about what kids see on the screen, than what they might find between the pages of a book.

Having an age guidance figure on a book does not mean a child can’t or shouldn’t read it. It’s not a legal limit. It’s guidance. Guidance. That’s all. Last time the issue hit the news, I remember reading an article where the journalist explained he’d been reading Balzac at age nine. (Or was it Voltaire at eight? I can’t remember.) Nobody is setting out to rein in Balzac-reading nine year olds. I’m not especially worried how many swear words adolescents read either. (Though some are – see the recent debates following this article about a new YA novel, which sparked off the age-banding debate again.) What I do care about is that more books should reach more children – and I think that some kind of well-meaning indicators for the adults choosing books (it is mostly adults who buy children’s books) helps that goal.

One thing we do know for sure is that many parents almost never buy books for their children. Surveys show that almost one in three children in the UK did not own a single book.  Research in the UK and USA has also shown that book ownership is strongly correlated with children’s enjoyment of, and ability in, reading. Children who owned more books were significantly more likely to have positive attitudes to reading. And there is now strong evidence that children who read for pleasure do significantly better educationally in all areas than those who don’t – even in mathematics - see here.  Have a look at this overview to see the many important benefits reading for pleasure brings.

For me, all of the above is strong evidence that we should do whatever we can to help parents in getting books to their children. As a parent buying books, I know I’m regularly confused about who a book is aimed at. I inspect the cover…the blurb…I flick through. And some of the time, I’m still confused. But the cover and blurb are “rich in clues” the anti-age banding lobby tells me. Well, guess what. I can’t always read the clues. And if I can’t read them – and I’m a children’s writer – then why should any other parent be able to either? And do you know what happens when parents can’t tell? They buy a copy of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, because they can remember exactly what it was like and who it was for, or they buy a copy of Roald Dahl for the same reason. Now, I’ve got nothing against either author. Or the tables and tables of rereleased classics – Stig of the Dump, Tom’s Midnight Garden – that seem to be mushrooming in my local Waterstones. But I think it is a shame if it means that children are less likely to discover contemporary authors, the ones that are writing specifically for them, about their lives, right now.

It’s even more of a shame - more of a mini-tragedy - if that parent (or aunty, granddad, friend) gives up on the idea of buying a book for fear of getting it wrong and decides it would be much easier to buy something else instead.

Not everybody is familiar with the language of book covers. Not everyone has even heard of Roald Dahl, Horrid Henry or Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s true. The most striking example I can think of is the woman I know who gave a ten year old an explicitly erotic bodyripper as a present. She gave it in genuine good faith, and would have been mortified to know of its content. But she didn’t read the clues. (In fact she had worked out it was historical, and she knew this particular child liked history. It wasn’t that she couldn’t be bothered trying to find the right book.) She was a member of an immigrant community, and English was not her first language. There are many parents in this category. There are also people who are unfamiliar with libraries and bookstores, or who struggle to read themselves. Many still want to buy books for their children. They may not, however, have easy access to advice, or be able to easily afford to write off the price of a book if they “get it wrong”.

I can’t help feeling there’s a kind of intellectual snobbery in the idea that everyone should be able to deduce the nature of a children’s books – (or even, as sometimes helpfully suggested, that they should read the book first themselves. Maybe a parent of a book hungry child doesn’t have the time? Maybe they don’t have the ability? A voracious reader will be reading far more at eight, nine or ten years old than even the most interested adult will have time to keep up with.) I also find it rather ironic that children’s authors – generally a liberal and leftward-leaning lot – have been so keen to embrace a line which I feel can make it harder for many to enter and explore the world of children’s literature.

So why else are people opposed? These seem to be the main arguments:

Slower readers will feel embarrassed about reading books with younger age-ranges on the cover 

I put this one first, because it may be true and certainly does concern me. But I’d be interested to see the evidence that age ranges on covers puts off readers – or that kids even notice them. (They are pretty discreet – look at the photo.) When I asked high school librarians recently about the accelerated reader scheme – which assigns a “level” to books, and then encourages children to progress through the levels – they denied that having “levels” humiliated or embarrassed less able readers. On the contrary, they claimed that the scheme appealed most to exactly those kids (less able boys) that form the much worried about “reluctant reader” category.

You can’t choose an age-range – every child is different.

They are. And they may develop at different rates. But it’s surely daft to say that because individual children vary, age is irrelevant. A child will most likely enjoy The Gruffalo before they start reading Horrid Henry before they read Harry Potter… Even if there is no explicit age band given, there is still an audience in mind.

Expert librarians and booksellers can guide children to the right books.

Sadly, both are becoming almost as rare as hen’s teeth. (And likely to remain so unless the political and economic climate changes.) Libraries and bookshops are closing at an alarming rate.

So can teachers. 

Another lovely thought, but until children’s literature is a much more prominent part of teacher training, and every primary school has a designated school librarian (and well-stocked library) most children will not get this kind of expert guidance. Primary teachers are generalists, not book specialists, and have 30 plus children in their class. 

Bookshops already categorise by age.

Yes. So why shouldn’t publishers help them? After all publishers and authors know the books best. And what about those buyers (likely to have the lowest incomes) who can only access charity shops or supermarkets?

Good books are for everyone. Age is irrelevant. 

Yes – and no. Sorry. Yes, I might enjoy curling up with Alice or Winnie-the-Pooh or Jennings or The Church Mouse or The Ogre Downstairs or a zillion other favourite children’s books, but the art of writing for children, I’d argue, is that the writer is able to craft something that appeals (in language, theme or content) primarily to a child at a particular stage of development, with a particular level of experience. The very few genuine crossovers (Harry Potter perhaps) remain the exception, not the rule. I love reading children’s books, but I read them on those terms – I feel privileged to return to a child’s view when I read them, and I don’t expect to find an adult perspective or theme suddenly appear. (Some children’s books, especially picture books, may include jokes for their adult readers. That’s great. But they mustn’t lose sight of their child reader. And even the most universal of material – say, Greek mythology – will be presented in different ways appropriate for different age-groups.)

In conclusion, I’m glad that my book has an age-band on it. I hope it won’t put off those six or seven year olds who might enjoy it, or much older readers too. I don’t believe that it will. And if it helps those people, parents in particular, that I’ve met at schools and signings, and whose first question is always: “What age is it for?” then I’ll be more than happy.

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Emma's new book, Wild Thing,  about the naughtiest little sister ever, is out now from Scholastic. It is the first of a series for readers 8+.

 Wolfie is published by Strident.   Sometimes a Girl’s Best Friend is…a Wolf. 
"A real cracker of a book" Armadillo 
"Funny, clever and satisfying...thoroughly recommended" Books for Keeps - Book of the Week 
"This delightful story is an ideal mix of love and loyalty, stirred together with a little magic and fantasy" Carousel 

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