Part One – A Demanding Audience …
Diana Wynne Jones Reading - Highlights
What Makes a Children’s Book?
- No child is going to read a book that doesn’t have a bold, fast-moving story with a clear course of action that comes to a satisfactory conclusion without too many dangling ends. Mysteries need to be solved, goals need to be achieved and characters should be given what they deserve.
- Children are slower readers and thus readily take in what is being told thus there is no need to constantly remind them of the plot.
- When you write for children, don’t be boring. Children will only tolerate social documentary, glum thoughts, preaching and artistic description for no more than half a page.
Choosing Your Story
- Write in your own, unique way.
- A large part of writing is discovering how you, personally, need to do it. For this, you have to start with what interests you most.
- Children love expertise, and they also love horror
- Witches, wizards and magic, at the moment, are highly popular; but it is advisable not to imitate any of these too closely, because it can get very boring.
- The most important thing is to enjoy what you are writing. If you find you are toiling along, getting increasingly bored, then stop. Try some other kind of story. One that fails to interest you is certainly not going to grab other people.
Plots and Puzzles
- Whatever you chose has to give children an experience they could get no other way. And it has to give hope … You have to show someone handling these situations or, better, overcoming them.
- The human brain is programmed to solve problems. We are programmed to like studying puzzles, then to try for solutions. The best plot for a children’s book follows this framework, and the best setting for this framework is one that distances a child from her or his problems, so that they become puzzles that the child can turn this way and that, and follow with the author to the solution.
- About two-thirds of children prefer fantasy.
Exercise
Take an example of a folk talk, fairy tale or myth, and plot out how you could make it the basis of a children’s story. Think about:
When you want to set your story – is it historical or contemporary?
Where – a recognisable town or country?
Do you want to give the story a contemporary twist?
Brainstorm
Thinking about folk tales, fairy tales and myths I came up with the following:
- The Boy Who Cried Wolf
- Hansel and Gretel
- Little Red Riding Hood
- The Toothfairy
- Princess/Prince Charming stories
- The Frog Prince
- The Princess and the Pea
- The Emperor’s New Clothes
- Ugly Duckling
- Pinocchio
- Jack and the Beanstalk
- The Three Little Pigs
I thought my list was very limited and realised that a lot of what I knew about children’s literature also came from children’s movies and popular-selling books such as:
- Harry Potter
- Dr Seuss – The Cat in the Hat
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
- Roald Dahl – the BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda
- Shrek
- Alice in Wonderland
- The Wizard of Oz
- Peter Pan
- Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella – the Disney catalogue
The fairytale I decided to do this exercise on was Pinocchio. The story as I remember it begins with the creation of a wooden marionette, Pinocchio, by an old man who longs for a son. His wish is granted by a fairy but Pinocchio stays as a wooden marionette until he proves himself worthy to be a real boy. Jiminy Cricket acts as Pinocchio’s conscience and tries to keep him out of trouble as he embarks on many adventures. The one standout feature of the story is the liar’s long nose.
Although this is already a children’s story when I thought about how I could change it to form the basis of another children’s story I began to think about my goal in this course:
- to create a series of short stories that encourage my cousin’s to read more and to enjoy their reading
So keeping in mind the story of Pinocchio, I would give it a contemporary twist, setting it in an Australian suburban context. It would follow the quest of a schoolboy [eg: Pino] who has bullied his way out of doing homework. He picks on the smaller boys to do his homework until one day he is told to stop by the new kid [eg: Harry] in school or else he would bear the consequences of his actions. Shrugging this off he bullies Harry to write the answers to his maths homework and the next day wakes up as a pencil inside Harry’s pencil case. Now the only other person aware of what has happened is Harry as it is his own magical powers that have created this dilemma for Pino. To prove himself worthy of being a boy again, Pino must complete Harry’s homework as well as write letters of apologies to all those he has bullied. Each time that Pino refuses to do so or does not acknowledge his past behaviour, the lead in the pencil snaps and so the pencil must be sharpened, making it smaller and smaller. It is only when Pino realises his mistakes and is truly sorry that he is returned to his normal self.
