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.
4 comments:
I regularly recommend that new writers join critique groups, not so that their own work can be critiqued, but so that they can learn from critiquing others. Having to explain clearly what works and what doesn't in a piece of writing you're not emotionally attached to is so useful.
This is so true, Tamsyn. I have found out so much about my own writing process when I explain it to children in school events - either in formal workshop exercises, or answering their very perceptive questions. I do wonder, though, does understanding how we do what we originally did by instinct, help us do it better, or not...
Yes Lari, I often wonder about the same thing. It seems to me that the good stuff comes as a surprise, out of a creative state of mind that has nothing to do with thinking about an overall plan or technique. Perhaps it's possible to go back and forth... I've yet to master that art.
Food for thought, especially your last point (I'm an embryonic children's author, writing my first book and hoping at least *some* things are coming naturally!). I spent ages working out believable, workable motivations for my villains that wouldn't just be being evil for the hell of it, and generally trying to make them reasonably well-rounded. But then, I think under the influence of some Dahl, I wondered it it's more satisfying to have properly loathsome baddies who you can wholeheartedly hate? I suppose that really there is room for both, getting more sophisticated as your audience gets older, but I did end up retrofitting my villains with a bit more evil!
(The first characters that came to mind as one-dimensional were Aunts Spiker and Sponge from James and the Giant Peach, but I think they're so overblown that they're one-dimensional without being flat...)
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