You most likely know Jenny Wagner for her picture books with illustrator Ron Brooks— The Bunyip of Berkeley's Creek and John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat, for example, or for her novel The Nimbin. But Jenny Wagner also wrote one of the most useful, practical and entertaining books I've come across on writing books for children. It's called On Writing Books For Children and it was published in 1992 but it's not that hard to find a copy today online.
One of the things I particularly like about this book is that it contains both detailed advice about matters of style which would be helpful to someone who had never written a book of any kind before as well as more general outlines of, for example, the different ways in which you might choose to tell a story. There's a chapter entitled A Matter of Style which deals with the following: 'clumsiness, clichés, redundancies, inappropriate grandeur, archaic expressions, inappropriate imagery and accidental music to name just a few.' In the section on Clumsiness she says this, which is both informative and encouraging:
'Beginning writers often overlook clumsiness, which usually takes the form of a lot of little faults rather than a few dramatically big ones. But like all writing faults, they are cumulative; you can get away with one or two, but several can cast a veil over the writing, eventually making it unreadable. Fortunately it works the other way too: the removal of many small roughnesses can make a startling improvement to clarity and vividness.'
This is a short and entertaining book but contains lots of helpful information. Over the years I've enjoyed dipping into it from time to time but I think it would be most useful to those who think they'd like to write a children's book but have never really given much thought to what might be involved in doing so. There's a very succinct discussion of narrative points-of-view and a terrific chapter on dialogue which begins with some very basic stuff, but it's stuff you wouldn't know if you'd never written dialogue before— among other things, where you need a comma and where a full stop.
Then there's quite a lot about speech attributions, a subject I find endlessly interesting. Wagner suggests that if you're writing for older children and are trying to avoid attributions you can 'drop in a name here and there', as in "I'll fix that, Julian!", but goes on to say: 'Only don't overdo it, unless you want your character to sound like a used car salesman. In real life people don't use other people's names a great deal, and we become suspicious when they do; we suspect they are trying to sell us something—a car, a time-share unit, or even a religion.'
Wagner describes what she's trying to do in her introduction. Having said there are no rules (the obligatory preface to a book about writing) she says:
'This book is not a collection of handy hints that will bring you fame and fortune; instead I am giving you a toolbox. I explain what the tools are, what job they do and how they do it; I show you the best ways I know of using them, and how not to hurt your fingers on them. I even suggest some things you might like to make. But I don't claim for one moment that these are the only tools available, or that there is only one way to use them.'
And here to end is a warning to all writers:
'Sometimes the faults in your writing hide from you. The desire to write something excellent is overshadowed by the even greater desire to have already written it.'
On Writing Books for Children by Jenny Wagner, Allen and Unwin 1992
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