All the glittering prizes - by Piers Torday

Yesterday, the Guardian revealed the eight fantastic books on the longlist for this year's Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. I'm not going to say any more about the books in this post, you can read all about them here. But you should do more than read about them, you should, if you haven't read them already, pack every one in your summer suitcase. They're fab.

One of the lucky privileges of winning the aforementioned prize last year is the long running tradition of being invited to judge the next one. It's something of a daunting task, involving a lot of reading, but a privilege all the same. For one thing, it has meant hanging out with my fab fellow judges Natasha Farrant and Jenny Valentine, our chair Julia Eccleshare and Guardian children's acting editor Emily Drabble - and doing nothing but talking about books! What joy.

I am, of course, sworn to secrecy on the details of the judging process so far: the books we have rejected, the books we love in different ways and the books which provoke the most vigorous discussion...

Instead, I want to reflect on the experience in a more general way.

Reading to judge is a category on its own. Like many of you, I suspect, you read a lot more young people's fiction  than the average adult, including parents. I read for inspiration, to learn, to keep my reading diet mixed, keep an eye on the market and quite often just for fun. But when you read a book that is up for a prize, you read in such a different way. And that way is: "Is this book the best it can possibly be?" Your capacity for generosity, indulgence and ambivalence is muted.  Otherwise the process can never be fair. You respond with your gut, as ever, but ultimately a prize judge is required to stand back and pass critical judgement. On story, character, tone, style, and plot. Oddly, the net result is to be filled with admiration at the incredible standard of children's writing at the moment. Some of the choices we had to make (only 8 books make the long-list) were on a knife-edge, and sometimes came down to very finely turned nuances of opinion and criticism.

Yet the process is also exhilarating. You begin reading in the mode of impartial judge, but can end up fighting and championing texts with a passion which you never imagined the text would provoke. The more closely one examines the texts under consideration, the more one is filed with awe and respect for the sweat, work and soul which has gone into every one.

But most of all, I learned to go on a journey with a few books.


It is quite a thing to finish one, and be so sure and immediate in your reaction, only to find that after several hours of intense debate with your fellow judges, the story you hold in your hand feels quite different, an almost alien beast to the one you initially encountered. For better, for worse.

Some people will love the books we have listed so far, some will have wished for others. All I can say for sure is that being a prize judge, has left me in awe not just at the strength of contemporary children's literature, but renewed my faith in stories as the elusive, many-faced and ever changing magic spirits I once beheld them to be.

 Piers Torday

@PiersTorday

www.pierstorday.co.uk

Once upon a time... the end

In my past life, as a teacher, one of my most disliked tasks was marking. Not because I didn’t like reading my pupils’ work (though I often didn’t), but because having to assess a piece of writing against a set of increasingly arbitrary assessment objectives sometimes made me think it was all about jumping through hoops rather than the actual rules of good writing.

When I sat down a few weeks ago to judge a short story competition, I delighted in the fact that this time I was setting my own objectives, and they were pretty simple. Does this story work? Does it draw me in and keep me hooked? Do I feel confident in this writer’s hands?

I’ve won quite a few short story competitions, and it was flattering to be asked to judge this one. It was a fairly small, but very professionally-run competition, organised by a magazine. The magazine is Ireland-based, as am I, but attracted entries from all over the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The stories had been pre-shortlisted and were judged anonymously. Not knowing anything about a writer really makes you focus on what’s important in the story.

I’ve often read judges’ reports on competitions which say that the winner announced itself in the first few sentences, and I know agents and publishers often say that they can tell almost at once if a book is going to impress. This wasn’t my experience. Instead, though I found it easy to choose the winning story, several stories promised a great deal in the first paragraph, only to disappoint as the story went on. Some writers had put so much emphasis on that all-important hooking of the reader that they forgot to reel her in, and she was left dangling.

Several of the stories contained fantastic writing – really imaginative use of language. Heart-stopping moments. Intense character identification. Yet none of these stories was placed. Why? Because great use of language isn’t enough – a story has a job to do, and if it doesn’t do that, if it doesn’t take a character from A to B, it doesn’t matter how delightful its metaphors are. 

I write young adult fiction, and it’s normally a 70,000 word novel as opposed to a 2,000 word story. Yet I found the experience of assessing these stories really helped me to look dispassionately at my own work. Young adults, like short story judges, are hard to please. They aren’t fooled by metaphor-fur-coat and no story-knickers. They won’t keep going if a story doesn’t live up to early promise.

I enjoyed assessing these stories, and I’m looking forward to meeting the winners at the ceremony in November. But even more, I enjoyed being reminded of the nuts and bolts of good story-telling, and I hope my own readers stand to benefit from that.

Can You Teach Creativity? - Heather Dyer

copyright gnuckx

 

I’m teaching an eight-week course at the moment called Developing Creativity. I’m a little apprehensive since I have yet to find out if the exercises I am planning will really demonstrate the theories I want to share. But I’m looking forward to hearing feedback from my students.

I’m structuring the eight 2 ½ hour sessions around principles of Eastern philosophy. There will be some writing exercises, and some ‘creativity’ games – but this is a course for people who want to be creative in any discipline, not just writing. So this has forced me to look into the heart of the matter and not to just teach writing technique – which, although perfectly useful and necessary, is not about creativity.

I tried out a couple of the exercises on a friend, who said, “this sounds more like a self-help course, not a creativity course.” And in a way she’s right. It was Abraham Maslow who said:

“My feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy, self- actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing.”

I’m planning the eight week sessions as follows:

1. Not knowing – ‘beginner’s mind’.
2. Close attention to detail and the present moment.
3. Not judging.
4. Authenticity and acting on your intuition.
5. Letting go – being open to outcome, not attached to outcome.
6. Passion and compassion – following your bliss.
7. Discipline without desire.
8. The ego – keeping it out of the way. 

I wonder if anyone else has found this link between creativity and 'zen' practice helpful? Have you read any good books about it? If so, I'd love to hear about them. 

I’ll let you know how I get on in my next post…