Children’s fiction
One of Geraldine's children's novels
Geraldine McCaughrean is the author of more than 120 children’s books, including A Little Lower Than The Angels, Gold Dust and Not the End of the World, each of which won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. Here she shares her 10-step guide to writing well for children.
I became a children’s author because I got that lucky break every author needs: I became friends with the Children’s Editor at Oxford University Press. But I tell myself that I would have managed eventually to get published by someone, even if this connection wasn’t made.
1. Aim to have your words read and enjoyed by adults too
I would be very ashamed to write a book for children that could not be read with equal enjoyment by an adult. The only thing with writing for young people is that you cannot be so self-indulgent. Adult authors are allowed to waffle on and spend whole pages describing people and places. Young readers won’t put up with that. They want you to get on with the story.
My wonderful editor at Oxford believes - and I do too - that a children’s author has no right to leave a reader drowning in misery and fear. It does not matter where you go during the course of a book - almost any subject can be tackled, so long as it isn’t boring - but you ought to bring the reader safely home to somewhere bearable at the end.
That doesn’t mean a happy ending, necessarily, but it does mean a spark of hope - an upward path out of the darkness. Some authors don’t think so. Melvin Burgess, for instance, would disagree completely. What do you think?
2. Focus on the key ingredients
Pace, character and a pinch of novelty are, in my experience, the key ingredients of a successful children’s novel. I, personally, like the twists and turns in a story to be UNPREDICTABLE, but that doesn’t seem to be the secret of success. Lots of readers like to look ahead as they read and to guess what is going to happen next, and they feel good when it happens the way they expect.
Most important of all, I think, is to create a world real enough for the reader to feel the fabric of the hero’s clothes against their skin and the stones through the soles of his shoes.
Sometimes I can do it. Sometimes I can’t. It usually depends how real the world has become for me. I bet, when you read a book, you can tell when a writer is enjoying herself and when it’s just a job of work.
3. Avoid patronising your readers
I suppose you ought to allow for the fact that children don’t know as many words as adults. But I tend to think: “Oh what the heck - words are nice and children are very good at working out what new words mean from the context in which they are used. They have been doing it since they were one year old, haven’t they?
So I use big words and long sentences and mix in lots of metaphor and simile and hope that my readers like eating rich things.
The hardest thing these days is avoiding ‘politically incorrectness’. For example I have just been retelling the story of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, who creep out of their beds and down a tunnel to dance with demons all night long, thus wearing out their silken slippers.
Apparently going out all night, without permission of your parents, and dancing with strange, demonic men is okay. But when the hero comes along and has to discover the dread secret of why their slippers keep wearing out, the princesses mustn’t be shown giving him a glass of wine to make him sleep. Wine is a no-no.
The hero is also a soldier in the original story - a soldier returning from the war, without a penny in the world. For some reason he can’t be a soldier now, either. I would be really interested to know if there is anyone out there who thinks they have been ruined for life by reading fairy stories.
4. Enjoy the process of writing
I get to step into the shoes of my hero and gift her (or him) all the qualities I don’t have in real life - courage, resourcefulness, grace, daring… I can go on adventures and paint myself into impossible corners from which I have to escape.
But at the end of the day I’m - amazingly - not actually dead. I get to write my own happy ending. I get to find out what I think about things - every book tells me something about myself that I did not know before.
5. Be prepared to spend time in schools
On the down side, visits to schools break up a working week. If the writing is going well and I take a day out to do a school visit, I can be sure the rest of the week is wasted, because I have surfaced, like a mole, into the bright daylight, and it takes time to burrow down again.
On the up side, I get to meet the people I write for. Sometimes they just wish I was Darren Shan or Anthony Horowitz, but sometimes they take an idea and run with it; magical beasts spring out of their imaginations, before my very eyes, and they pull down harpies out of the sky, and their exercise books are already half full of stories part begun… and I think, “Ah yes, there’s someone like me; there’s a fellow writer.”
But in reality I don’t thinks it’s important at all to spend time with children just because you write for them. I’m not very good at putting my thoughts into speech. I was tongue-tied as a child and that is why I took up writing. I would much rather you read my books than met me.
6. Accept that you will only ever write the books that are in you
Now, I suppose I could use school visit to ask, “What would you like me to write next?” But the children would just tell me to write like their current favourite author - to be Darren Shan or Anthony Horowitz - and I’m afraid I’m never going to manage that. I can only be myself, and I can only write the books that are in me. You can’t ask a chicken to lay a dinosaur egg (oof) because she won’t manage it.
7. Be aware that children’s books differs from other writing markets
I used to write adult books. It was very glitzy and glamorous. Fame and riches were just over the next hill.Always, over the next hill.
The world of children’s book is honest and straightforward. An author does not have to be pretty or racy or good at after-dinner speeches. She just has to be good at writing.
Only a handful of children’s authors will ever get rich. But out there are readers who mind terrifically about their favourite author; who read as if they are drinking the words up through a straw, who might read a book this week which they will remember when they are grown up with children of their own.
When the world inside a book comes real for a young reader, it comes more real than any adult book will ever do in the adult mind.
8. Expect strange reactions from people when you tell them what you do for a living
Most say - the grown ups I mean - say: “I”ve always thought I could write a book if I just had the time.”
Children don’t quite believe me. Surely all authors are dead, aren’t they? Fair do’s. I have to confess that as I child, I always assumed authors were dead.
9. Read, and listen, to other people’s stories
Although I did read a lot as a child, I was not very good at it, not very fast, not very adventurous in what I chose to read. I actually took up writing because it was a quicker and easier way to get deep inside an imaginary place where I wanted to be.
There is no denying it: reading widely is the quickest way of picking up the techniques, the tricks of the trade. But personally I think the very best form is the audio book: the written word being read aloud. You pick up the cadences, the rise and fall, the stop and start, the shape a thought put into words. And you never even know you are doing it. It just soaks in. Also, listening to stories is one of the oldest pleasures in the world.
10. Accept advice and criticism kindly offered
Don’t make a career of writing unless you would go on doing it, no matter what: even if you are never published; even if no one ever reads one word you have written.
Write because it makes you happy, because it opens up a cat flap in you: it lets OUT what’s inside you, and it lets IN a world of places, a host of characters, a raft of adventures that your soul craves.
Remember Ivan Turgenev and Shakespeare and Agatha Christie and even Darren Shan were aspiring writers once. You’re next. The world just doesn’t know it yet.
Oh, and learn to type properly. That will give you at least one advantage over Shakespeare.
