What Makes a Children’s Book Great?

Author Tony Bradman, critic Julia Eccleshare and teacher/critic Gwynneth Bailey discussed What Makes a Children’s Book Great at an event co-sponsored by SCBWI British Isles and the Society of Authors on 14 September 2006.

What makes a children’s book great has everything to do with who you are and little to do with tried and tested formulae.

Author Tony Bradman confesses that his favourite picture book choices is informed by the fact that his children were little in the 1980s – and so his favourites include many from that period: Mister Magnolia by Quentin Blake, Not Now Bernard by David McKee, Avocado Baby by John Burningham, The Elephant and the Bad Baby by Elfrida Vipont.

The Guardian children’s book critic Julia Eccleshare harks back to her three childhood favourites: Children on the Oregon Trail by A. Rutger Van Der Loeff, The Swarm in May by William Mayne and Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce.

Teacher Gwynneth Bailey, who also writes for the Times Educational Supplement and reviews books for Books for Keeps and other review sites, struggled to list her five favourite books and settled for the following eleven:

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
All Afloat on Noah’s Boat by Tony Mitton
Cockatoos by Quentin Blake
Sophie and the Sea Wolf by Helen Cresswell
Tanka Tanka Skunk by Steve Webb
The Whale’s Song by Dyan Sheldon
Unwitting Wisdom: An Anthology of Aesop’s Fables by Helen Ward
The Cockerel and the Fox by Helen Ward
The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey by Susan Wojciechowski
Catkin by Antonia Barber
Owl Babies by Martin Waddell

The Story or the Telling?

Julia polled “a gang of lanky, over-schooled 15 year olds” on what they believed made a children’s book great. Their answers read like a creative writing textbook:

• It must have a great story.


• There must be a battle between good and evil


• You must like the characters


• It must be set in a place you have never been to that you would like to visit

“I agree with all this but I would not say that is all,” says Julia. “What makes children’s books great? I don’t think it’s the story. How many kids finish reading a book and say that it was the narrative drive from A to B that kept them reading. What you tend to remember (from a great book) is not the story but the emotional intelligence. It’s the storytelling.”

Reading about three owl babies waiting for their mother in Owl Babies resonates with young readers. “Children really identify with Owl Babies,” says Gwynneth., “when mum goes off, is she going to come back?”

As a ten year old reading Children on the Oregon Trail, Julia felt connected with the travails of the pioneering American family at the heart of the story. “I could identify entirely with the family,” she says. “It had an emotional intelligence that somehow made you empathetic about other people in your life as well.”

For Tony, The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe struck a similar empathetic chord. “My own dad left when I was very young and The Eagle of the Ninth, which was published the year I was born, was about a boy searching for the truth about his dad,” he says. “What makes books like these qualify (for greatness) is what makes Shakespeare great – the universality of their themes.”

It’s in the Writing

“What am I looking for in a picture book? I want the words to sing!” says Gwynneth, treating the audience to an energetic performance of the onomatopoeic Tanka Tanka Skunk by Steve Webb. Tanka the elephant and his friend Skunk drum to an infectious rhythm:

And this is caterpillar.
His name has four beats.
Cat-er-pil-lar

Sometimes great writing has little to do with words, says Tony. A Visit to the Doctor by Helen Oxenbury, a hilarious but wordless story is told only with simple drawings. And then there are great words with great pictures like Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak – “Its genius is that it is great art in the service of great storytelling.”

It is the writing that puts William Mayne’s The Swarm in May on Julia’s list. Julia, who as a Smarties Prize judge has just finished ploughing through 300 books, explains: “The thing that worries me most about writing today is the over-writing – too much tell and not enough show. I think we have lost sight of the fact that you can tell a story economically. The point about an author like Mayne is the spare writing … which has an almost poetic quality. There is a quality to his writing that is electrifying – it still electrifies me.”

Writing from Childhood

“Childhood is a very fashionable thing to write about at the moment but adult writers don’t know what it is to be a child,” says Julia.

“But Philippa Pearce (Tom’s Midnight Garden) is absolutely clear about how a child sees the world. The remarkable thing about her is that she never gets outside childhood. There is a kind of helplessness in her writing, a kind of not being in control. She captures the very essence of what it feels like to be a child.”

“Eye on the ball, children first,” says Tony. “People are sniffy about Jacky (Jacqueline Wilson) but in (books like) The Illustrated Mum she can really capture the child surviving adult mayhem, the way children are very sensitive, very aware of things.”

And yet the current glut of fantasy in the children’s market seems a rejection Jacqueline Wilson style reality-in-fiction.

Says Julia of fantasy, “We cannot possibly continue at the level we have at the moment. We don’t seem to be allowed to write about children in the real world perhaps because children (today) are more policed, monitored and controlled than at any other time. You cannot have reality in fiction when children are not allowed to do anything.”

A Struggle Between Story and Utilitarian Anxieties

Julia tells of her struggle every week to select children’s books to write about in the Guardian. “Let’s not give it all to the 12-pluses,” she sighs. “Every week, I have to decide in my mind what really constitutes children fiction.”

“There has always been a tension between what adults want from them (books) and what children get from them,” says Tony. “Either the story should teach a moral lesson, or somehow be educational. If a child enjoys a book, the parent instantly disagrees – it must be trash!”

Books targeted at five to eight year olds in particular have “always been a Cinderella group obsessed with literacy”. “You get educational publishing with dreadful reading schemes and books rebranded with national curriculum goals,” he says. “The market is full of anxious parents.”

Says Julia: “Publishing is only a business. (Children’s books) may be art but publishers will only publish what works.”

Authors owe a debt to J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter), she says – “Whatever one thinks of J.K. her work has put us in an unthinkable position. She has shown that publishers can make money out of children’s books. Every author in the land should never forget their gratitude to her. Julia Donaldson (The Gruffalo) has done the same for picture books. Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials) has given children’s books intellectual credibility.”

The Art of Urgency

“I read a phenomenal amount and for me, the acid test of a great book, is whether you want to give it to someone else to read,” says Julia. “What makes a book so amazing is the feeling that you cannot stop reading it. This is an urgent book, you say. Urgent is something a book has to be.”

Julia remembers reading Anne Fine’s Mrs Doubtfire – “hilarious and truly funny” – and handing it straight across to her husband and telling him to read it.

“The great books,” she says, “are the ones that make readers.”

Think twice before pitching to children’s editors and publishers (in strange places)

Just before the editors and agents panel were rolled out at SCBWI’s pre-Bologna conference last April, organiser Lawrence Schimel made a little plea to attendees to remain calm and avoid the urge to grab an editor and pitch their manuscripts. “No sliding manuscripts under bathroom doors,” he cautioned.

Some attendees were a bit miffed by the warning, refusing to believe that wannabe children’s writers would do such a thing. Well, I recently checked out this Publisher’s Weekly link from Janet at the excellent Wordpool forum about how children’s editors get pitched ideas in the weirdest of places:

Beverly Horowitz, v-p and publisher, Bantam Delacorte Dell Books for Young Readers: My mother was close with her brother. He’d been seriously ill and finally died. Everyone from our family, of course, was at the funeral. We went from the service to the cemetery, and when it was over and people were starting to head back to their cars, I was walking with my mother when a woman she knew came up.

“I’m so sorry, I knew you were very close,” she said. Then she asked, “Is that your daughter, the one in publishing?”

When my mother said yes, it was, she said, “I thought I’d see her here with you. That’s why I have with me the manuscript I have always wanted to give to her.” She took it out of her purse and handed it to me.

I was totally taken aback. As she smiled at me I said, “Excuse me, I was just taking my mother to the car.” She held out an envelope.

I said, “I don’t really think I can take it. I might lose it.”

“No, you won’t,” she said. “You can fit it into your handbag.” At which point my mother said, “Just take it!”

After she left I told my mother, “I usually empathize with aspiring writers, but for this one, even if it’s Proust, I’m going to reject it!”

Read the article Weddings Funerals and Everywhere in Between by Diane Roback.

My father-in-law was a gynecologist, another occupation that invites unwanted attention. But he perfected a strategy for dealing with strangers seeking free medical advice.

"I am a doctor," he would admit. Then as the stranger prepared to launch into a detailed description of a medical problem, he would add: "I specialise in venereal disease."

Interestingly, from that point, you could always rely on all conversation of a medical nature to wither away.

Why competition from the internet means children’s writers must get web savvy

My 15-year-old son read three novels last week. Perhaps no mean feat for some, but it sure gave me a warm feeling inside. Normally, the boy would rather be downloading iTunes than flicking through a wedge of bound paper.

What made this reading binge possible? We had no internet access while on holiday in a remote part of Ireland.

Comes the headline ‘Book sales a page turner’ in the Daily Telegraph:

Despite ever greater competition from television, the internet and iPods for people’s free time, book publishers are enjoying a resurgence in British sales.

Stephen Seawright
The Telegraph, 11 Aug 2006

It was a report on strong results for UK publishers, improvements that hopefully signal a recovery in the depressed book market. Cause for celebration? Oh yes, especially for us unpublished writers desperate for a break. But wait – it was not all good news.

Ofcom reported last week that young people (16 to 24 years old) were forsaking old media (books, landline telephones, TV, radio) in favour of a multitude of new technologies. You can read the relevant part of the Ofcom report under section 1.2.2 ‘Young people are moving away from old media’.

Broadband has been key to this sharp change of allegiance – with the number of connections increasing by a humongous 63 percent and the price of broadband falling from £41 a month to as little as £16 a month.

The Ofcom report only describes 16 to 24-year-old media use but we are all painfully aware of how precocious the younger members of this tribe can be. Know your reader, they say in all the How To books on getting published and writing for children. Well, for goodness sake, according to Ofcom, the kids are even switching off the TV – reading’s traditional rival – to get online!

Are writers for children losing their readers to the internet?

Know Your Enemy

Well, do you? Do you know why the internet is such a turn-on for kids? Or do you shuffle into a dark corner and mutter about the youf and bloody new technology? Do you mourn the days when it was enough to take a pen to paper?

But there is no time to moan.

The longer we delay, the further we will be left behind by the internet juggernaut that even now is evolving into something bigger and more pervasive than we ever could have imagined.

You only have to look at a few authors’ websites to figure it out. Most are merely flyers about the authors’ work or, worse, CVs that might as well be on a printed page for all the interactivity they offer. And sadly, a few are only out to impress their mothers, close friends and former associates looking them up on Google.

Now look at what our market is into. You may think you know Ebay and Amazon. The teenagers we write for are into blogging, Flickr, Friendster, Technorati, del-icio.us, wikis, podcasting, YouTube. No time to explain here what these sites are all about except to say it’s all about social networking. Their Web is not just about Google, email and newsgroup discussions, it’s about sharing not just words but images, sounds, videos and authorware programmes. They are not only literate but transliterate.

The transliterate person has the ability to read, write, create and interact across multiple platforms. A simple example might be understanding the variations between reading the print edition of The Guardian newspaper, and reading the online edition - each have their own physicality and navigability, to name but two of many features worthy of discussion. Or the difference between communicating a sequence of events by drawing in the sand with a stick versus oral storytelling versus hypertext.

These are our readers. And when it comes to How to Use the Web they really get it. If you write for younger readers, don’t worry, they will get it too.

So you – we, all of us – writers need to get with the Web or lose out.

Get with it

“If email once eclipsed the letter, it now sits in the shadow of the social Web,” writes Daniel Anderson a teacher at the University of North Carolina in his blog I Am Dan.

Anderson, in a blog addressing teachers of writing and their students, makes the point that “writing can be a social act”, citing blogging as evidence of a significant shift in the way people are writing. He quotes Pew Report figures showing that 12 to 19 year olds blog more than twice as much as older bloggers.

“Writing is moving into social Web space. And Web writers compose with multimedia,” Anderson says, offering a list of suggestions about “what you need to know and what you need to do to write today”.

To write today you need to:

Conceptualize networks,

Find and move materials,

Make rights decisions.

Edit images,

Edit sounds,

Use a movie or authorware program,

Compose prose,

And what else?

You need to spatialize the net. Understand computing metaphors, established (desktop, server) and alternative (bus stop, kitchen sink). Know about files and applications. Understand and shape your computing environment. Find archives and databases. Compose searches. Get into the public domain. Know not to be thwarted. Capture. Screen shot. Exercise your fair use. Make decisions. Give credit. Know about layers. Resize. Crop. Add text. Move among media. Compose with a timeline. Fade in. Say something. Shape it. Fade out.

But how?

Here's how the Telegraph report said publishers were responding:

Despite the recovery in British sales, publishers still realise they need to adapt to the internet. Penguin is starting to provide e-books and podcasts to compete as more people move online. In a recent interview, Random House chief executive Gail Rebuck said she was looking forward to the day when she could read a variety of titles in one e-book.

So these publishers seem to think readers want to read books on the screens of their PDAs or listen to them on their iPods. But I would argue that our readers want much, much more.

The good news is that for once we can do something about this problem – unlike scary stuff over which we lowly authors have no control like sinking book sales, publishers not publishing new authors, accountants dictating publishing decisions.

I recently blogged a report YA Voice: Slang and Teen Vernacular based on a workshop by YA author Scott Westerfeld. I was amazed to very quickly get comments from Scott’s readers and, checking out Scott’s blog, I found that he was getting up to a hundred comments a day from teenagers who had discovered his books.

How did he get such a following? Well, apart from the excellence of his prose (I thought Uglies was great!) Scott really knows how to talk to his readers. He publishes their drawings, links to their websites and comments on their comments. It’s a wonder that he gets any writing done at all.

I’m no expert but it’s all new territory anyway – so here are some ideas on how to get with the Web game, with thanks to Scott for showing the way:

Published or unpublished, you can practice talking to your audience through a blog. Check out Scott’s blog to see how he does it. Or try developing a character by putting all his thoughts in a blog. Here's Wilf's blog - wilf being a fictitious boy who admires Buzz Aldrin and loves inventions. Here's another fictional blog by Atyllah the Hen, a chicken with Attitude from the planet Novapulse, here (a la Mork of Mork and Mindy) to research the human condition. Or why not go the whole hog and blog your novel - that is, if you can bear to be critiqued in public!

If you are setting up a website, think interactive – can you update it regularly? Ask your designer about designing for a CMS – Content Management System – an example is Macromedia Contribute which claims you only need word processing skills to update your website. But the quick, cheap and easy way to set up a website you can update is to set up a blog (see Blogger)- it's not hard if you've got the bandwidth.

It’s the social networking that young people enjoy. If you’ve got a website already, is there a space for your readers to publish their own drawings, photos, comments? Here is a teen video collage homage to Scott’s Uglies book and Scott’s homage to their homage.

Have your readers got a reason to return to your website?

Set up an entry for the lead character of your book in Friendster or MySpace. Check out the MySpace page for Scott Westerfeld fans Or how about a blog? Count Olaf (A Series of Unfortunate Events) had a short-lived blog as part of the marketing campaign for the movie version of the bestselling books. Not the most brilliant example but you get the idea.

You can learn a lot from looking at DVD bonus materials. When you’ve published your book, what will your ‘bonus materials’ be? Examples – podcasts, historical background, anecdotes about The Making Of, the true stories behind the fiction, roughs of illustrations, etc. etc.

If your book is still a work-in-progress, you can whet the appetites of readers with tantalising background stories about the process either by blogging or participating in relevant chatroom discussions. Here is Scott Westerfeld’s blog on the book he is currently writing And, taking a cue from the movieworld,
this is the week by week production diary kept by director Peter Jackson while making King Kong. Hmm. We could use that idea.

Visit the newsgroups and chatrooms where your readers hang out. Post a notice when you’ve got new entries and not only will they come to check it out, you increase the ranking of your Google listing!

Good luck - we'll need it.

Do write in if you've got more ideas on how to exploit the Web or links to more examples of authors using the Web to their advantage.

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Update! Publishing News (24 Aug 2006) reports that London-based independent publisher Gravity Publishing is developing a new e-reader that bypasses the internet. By cutting out the web, the e-reader overcomes the rights issues associated with the internet.

The use of reading matter differs greatly from the iPod model of music consumption. When you realise the lack of rights security comes from expressly delivering texts into computers and computer-like machines that can talk to the Internet, all else follows.

But doesn't all the talk of e-readers miss the point of the internet? Surely getting people to read off monitors and expensive little electronic devices is not the best use of the web. people are connecting to people, not to display formats.