Geraldine McCaughrean describes the art of writing for children
Geraldine McCaughrean
Award-winning children’s author Geraldine McCaughrean has written over 120 books, including Whitbread Children’s Book Award winners A Little Lower Than The Angels, Gold Dust and Not the End of the World. Her most renowned book is Peter Pan in Scarlet, the official sequel to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
What made you become a children’s author?
It never occurred to me that I would write for a living. I thought it was a field closed to all but clever academics. I submitted many manuscripts during my teens and twenties but without any huge expectation of them being accepted. Equally, it never occurred to me to write for children. In the end it happened almost by accident that I was published by a children’s publisher (OUP) and one not too adamant about making a text easily accessible to children.
I write whatever book is in me, and hope that it will be acceptable to one of my publishers. I also hope (probably in vain) that adults as well as children will read my novels, because there is nothing to stop them doing so with enjoyment. After all, a story’s a story. The chief difference between books for children and adults, I think, is a matter of subject matter and pace. In a children’s book you can’t afford to digress too much or revel unduly in the sound of your own voice.
Did you find an agent or a publisher first?
I was very lucky in that I went to church with the Children’s Editor at Oxford University Press. My schoolteacher was a friend of his and she put in a good word for my writing. The first book I ‘auditioned’ for was a retelling of 1001 Arabian Nights and on the strength of two chapters, I got the commission. Almost 30 years later, it’s still in print, I’m happy to say.
What would you say are the key ingredients to a successful synopsis?
The secret of a good pitch is fitting it all on to one side of a sheet of A4.
At one time I used to work on a partwork magazine (‘a written publication released as a series of planned magazine-like issues over a period of time’ Wikipedia) and I got to write the back cover copy: “Coming next week…”
I got quite adept at making stuff sound exciting. It was good practice for writing blurbs. These days I make a point of writing the blurb for a novel and submitting it at the same time as the book. It not only serves as a puff, it saves anyone writing one in-house. I can’t believe how bad some editors are at writing book blurbs!
Did you face much rejection initially?
Oh yes, of course! There is no sound so miserable as the thud of a manuscript coming back through the letterbox. In those days there wasn’t the tradition of sending in a few chapters and a synopsis and saving on postage.
As a teenager I was writing books about adult life – of which I knew NOTHING. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I caught on to writing for children – at least I had been a child, after all!
I still get the odd story turned down. I keep it in a bottom drawer and sometimes it comes in handy for someone else working to a tight deadline and desperate for copy.
How were you selected to write the first-ever authorised sequel to Peter Pan?
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children announced a worldwide competition to find the lucky author. Entrants had to be published authors, put forward by a literary agent or a publisher, and had to submit both a synopsis and a trial chapter. I only went into it for fun, never dreaming I would actually get the job.
I badly wanted to be true to Barrie’s original book. Not to the cartoon version or the pantomime or the last movie, but to the 1911 book. So I read and re-read Peter Pan and Wendy, and tried to soak up something of Barrie’s style and sense of humour and quirky style.
But I also wanted to create something distinctly my own. So what I went for was a literary counterpart – the matching bookend - same world, but somewhat altered.
With your novels, what comes first – the plot or the characters?
In the old days it used to be the first page – something happening from which the rest of the action would grow, though I wrote without a plan, without knowing what would happen next. That’s ideal, not just because it’s more fun, but because the writer is then in the same frame of mind as the reader – wanting to turn the page to find out what is in store for the hero.
The older I get the more interested I become in character and my stories tend to arise out of the needs of the character – Sym’s isolation, for instance in the White Darkness, and her use of an inner world of the imagination as consolation.
I couldn’t have written the Peter Pan sequel unless J M Barrie’s characters had been richly interesting – flawed hero, villain-with-a-background. As a writer, I don’t think you can become swallowed up by a book unless the characters in it open the door and invite you in. Otherwise you are just manipulating chess pieces on a black-and-white board.
What would you say are the key ingredients to a successful children’s novel?
I make it a rule that something happens on every page of my books, because children bore easily. Most important to me, though, is for the reader to be able to identify with the main protagonist and climb inside their shoes.
One incontrovertible value of fiction for children is that they exercise the ability to identify with their fellow human-beings and imagine how it feels to be The Other Guy.
The other is that children reading become empowered with all kinds of qualities they may crave in real life: bravery, resourcefulness, popularity, beauty, success, the ability to triumph over adversity and find a happy ending.
What do you find the most challenging aspects of writing for children?
Secretly the most dispiriting aspect is that so few of the children I come in contact with are ever going to enjoy my books. I don’t write populist and my style and vocabulary restrict my readership to bookish children and librarians.
Librarians LOVE my books. Children? I think they can take them or leave them. So perhaps I write for adults after all.
Whose writing do you admire?
I admire all kinds of authors for doing all kinds of things. I am easily intimidated by books, so I am not the Booker-Prize type reader, but there again I detest chick-lit.
So Michael Frayn, Bill Bryson, Sebastian Faulks – that’s my kind of level. In terms of children’s writing, I admire Ted Hughes, Philip Pullman and Allan Ahlberg for their style, Frank Cottrell Boyce for his humour and diverse genius, Philip Reeve and William Nicholson for their concepts, and Terry Pratchett for both. Nina Bawden and Jan Mark for their craft…
Too many, too many. My admiration for fellow authors also tends to be coloured by how nice they are personally.
What inspires you?
I often take myself off to the theatre. I get very excited by theatre and the experiences that have most coloured my writing life have been plays rather than books – Christopher Fry, John Webster, Rostand…
I write to music, as well. So long as it hasn’t got words, it can colour in the background of an imaginary world and put me in the right mood.
How would you describe your writing style?
Rather too devoted to imagery and delicious words, and the nicely shaped sentence. My daughter says she can recognise a mile off anything I’ve written, though I hope I have at least two writing styles: one for humour and one for tragedy.
I think the literary criticism name for what I often do is Magic Realism.
Please describe an average writing day.
That is a bit like remembering the sunshiny days of childhood. These days there are so many poxy interviews, emails, school visits and ‘matters arising’ that I never get a chance to write at all.
I have finally crawled to the end of the next novel, snatching the odd opportunity here and there, but it wasn’t a happy experience.
I’ve sworn that next year I shall become a recluse and see if I can remember how it used to be in the days when I began writing as soon as the child had gone to school and stopped only when I realised she had been standing abandoned in the school yard for half an hour because her mother had forgotten to pick her up. (She didn’t suffer lasting damage, by the way. She writes books of her own these days and neglects to do the things SHE is supposed to be doing.)
What advice would you offer an aspiring novelist?
Don’t do it unless you will go on writing whether or not you get published. Writing is an affliction, not a job. The fact that it is an enjoyable affliction is neither here nor there.
Apart from that, try to think what unique thing you have to say – don’t follow market trends, because it takes 18 months to put a book in the bookshops and market trends don’t last that long.
The Kite Rider, by Geraldine Mccaughrean
Is there a book you have written but never published?
Well, there are adult thrillers and lugubrious Russian-type romances about unrequited love, but they are best consigned to the past.
And of course there is the one I have just finished, which is very odd and which people may like or loath, I have no idea. But its hero did engage my affections, so I hope at least a few people take him to their heart.
It is called The Death Defying Pepper Roux and it is about a boy who has been told he will be dead by the age of fourteen…
For more go to www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk
For more on Geraldine’s activities, click here
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I love how varied Geraldine’s influences are - Sebastian Faulks to Terry Pratchett… That’s a pretty broad spectrum!
I agree, but I’m surprised that as she describes her style as Magic Realism she hasn’t mentioned any of the masters of that genre such as Salman Rushdie or Ben Okri!