Writing for growing toes and growing minds (Anne Rooney)

 Next month I'm teaching a course on writing children's non-fiction (cnf), which is what I write about half of the time. There aren't many courses on this in the UK, though more in the US where cnf has always had a higher profile — largely because schools pay more attention to non-fiction there than they do in the UK. The profile of cnf has risen in the UK over the last ten years or so with lots of really beautifully produced books. One result is that more people are attracted to writing it. On the whole, creative writing courses haven't kept up and still focus on writing fiction, sometimes with a minor component on non-fiction thrown in. Yet children's non-fiction takes a large market share: the books sell, and children like them.

Putting the course together has been fine. But it's been a struggle  finding the extra resources — the books, articles, blog posts, videos and so on to point participants towards for extra advice and info. I've been looking through my stash of books on writing and most assume the reader wants to write fiction, and particularly novels. There are some more academic books on the structure, pedagogy, politics and so on of children's non-fiction but those aren't really appropriate for this introductory course. Most books about writing for children focus on plot, character, world-building, and so on. You could use these in narrative non-fiction, but the course doesn't cover that — precisely because all those things are important to that but not to other types of cnf, so it's a cop-out.

The challenges in writing children's non-fiction are rather different from those in writing fiction. Yes, you still need to hold the reader's interest. But the ways of doing that are often different from how you would do it in a story. The main aim of much non-fiction is not to impart information (which is what people assume it is) but to excite interest and wonder. It's to make the reader want to find out more, do something — or to enrich what they already known with understanding, with putting it into a bigger picture. It seeks to create 'aaaah' moments and 'wow' moments, to show children that knowing things is exciting, empowering, opens doors and will give them satisfaction and pleasure. How you do this is through selecting the right material, structuring  the material, pacing, choice of language and style, integration with images and — counterintuitively — what you leave out. What you leave out in terms of which content you skip (as there is far more to say than you have space to say), but even more importantly in where you leave space for the reader to jump ahead, make connections, use their intuition and imagination. Space to empower the reader. Space for them to grow. Think of the book as like a shoe. You don't want it fitting snugly to their toes or it will only be comfortable for a very short time. You need wiggle room, growing room, space to mould it to their particular shape. I don't know of a writing book that explains this and how to do it. Perhaps I'll have to write one.  But for now, if you know any resources that will help my students with children's non-fiction, please post them in the comments! I've got some, but more will help them.

Anne Rooney

Out now: The Story of Planet Earth, Arcturus, 2022