Where is the hope in children's books?

Someone mischievous organised the Compelling Novels, Vulnerable Children panel for the Edinburgh Festival.

On the panel were children's authors Melvin Burgess and Anne Fine.

Fine, who was children's laureate from 2001 to 2003, famously lambasted Burgess in 2003 when his book Doing It was published, denouncing his publishers for -

... peddling this grubby book, which demeans both young women and young men? It will prove as effective a form of sexual bullying as any hardcore porno mag passed round. Read Anne Fine's 2003 Review of Doing It

I remember the review created a vociferous debate in the then nascent children's book blogosphere, with bloggers divided between supporting and resisting Fine's points of issue.

At the Edinburgh event, Anne Fine (Madame Doubtfire, Eating Things on Sticks) is reported to have deplored the gritty realism of modern children's books. I wasn't there so I can only point you to the reports in the Times, the Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday. And here is a discussion amongst a small group of authors on the Awfully Big Blog Adventure, after a post by Anne Cassidy (Looking for JJ).

This is what Anne Fine is quoted as saying:

Books for children became much more concerned with realism, or what we see as realism. But where is the hope? How do we offer them hope within that? It may be that realism has gone too far in literature for children ...

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Update (29 August 2009): there was a lot of vehement reaction to this quote - Anne Fine sent out the following correction via some writer's message boards (emphasis mine):

Contrary to press headlines, I neither 'deplored' the lack of happy endings, nor asked for a return to Blytonish books. In a wide-ranging discussion with social workers and carers in a session about Fiction for Children in Care that was chaired by Children in Scotland, I simply wondered aloud what the effect of the new wave of grimly realistic books without those old-fashioned happy endings might be on those of our children whose lives they often mirror so closely, and asked the very experienced audience what they thought - and indeed whether their clients ever read the books. As someone who has myself written some quite tough books I would not ever do anything so simplistic as 'call for happy endings'. I recognise as well as anyone what a broad church children's literature is and must be.

Many thanks to Teri Terry who passed this on. And many thanks too to Anne for the clarification. I hope she's happy to have sparked a lively conversation amongst people who care about children's book. It certainly is a conversation worth having and I will always, always as a result ask myself when I'm writing - where is the hope?

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To be fair, I have read a number of children's books, especially for teens, that made me wonder at the bleak, hopeless vision of the author. There are some books I would not recommend to my teenage friends. So I can see where Fine is coming from.

But I have read far more books that, while set in the grit and pebbledash of realism, radiate with a shining something that resists the generalisation.

The fact is, thanks to the New Media revolution, our child readers are far more aware of the darker side of life than their predecessors in Enid Blyton-reading times. And while there are still plenty of us who write the fantasy and adventure that can remove them from reality, we are still beholden to create stories that tap into our readers' experience and world view.

But it's a tough world out there. And I agree with Anne Fine: for children, books must be a haven, a place where there is hope.

So what is this shining something that can lift us authors out of the temptation to mirror the world in all its relentless hopelessness?

Funnily enough, it was something Fine's old adversary Melvin Burgess said that gave me an answer.

As you may know I recently attended a writing for teenagers week with Arvon, with Melvin Burgess and Malorie Blackman as tutors.

One of the most resonant pieces of advice I came away with was actually given to a colleague who had written a gritty novel about a deprived, self-harming teenager. I think my colleague had a conversation with Melvin about how you couldn't just dish out a relentlessly grim story. You had to temper it with something.

Melvin told her (and I paraphrase here inaccurately) that the important thing in such a piece of writing is to make sure the human spirit shines through.

Human Spirit.

Driving back from the course for three and a half hours on the M1, we were so inspired by the idea, we couldn't stop discussing it. What is human spirit? Does our writing have it? Where does it come from? How do we make sure it shines through in our stories?

Human Spirit. That's where the hope is.

Update: the third author on the panel was Rachel Ward (Numbers). She has since commented about the event on Keren David's blog post about the event. See her comment here. I just found out that Melvin Burgess has a new blog. Here is his bird's eye view.

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Some "realistic" books I have read that for me strongly evoke the human spirit (in no particular order).

Desire Lines (Definitions) by Jack Gantos

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

A Swift Pure Cry by Siobhan Dowd

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

Finding Violet Park by Jenny Valentine

Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd

Ways To Live Forever by Sally Nicholls

... do add your own books in comments - i can think of more but I'd love to hear yours.

Learning from Toy Story 2's Audio Commentary

I am thinking of turning a fantasy novel that I have written into a trilogy.

And whenever I’m in need of something to freshen up my writing, I turn to the audio commentaries of my favourite movies. It’s like reading a familiar book with the voice of the author in your head discussing how he worked it all out.

One of the best I've heard is the audio commentary for Toy Story 2 - featuring director John Lasseter, co-directors Lee Unkrich and Ash Brannon, and writer Andrew Stanton.

Listening to the Toy Story 2 team discuss how they plotted and schemed, how they played the audience, planting all the set ups, how they tightened the screws and tightened the scenes, the scenes that were shed pretty much evokes what it's like to write a novel.

The fact that Toy Story 2 is a sequel throws up interesting dillemas which might fascinate folks working on their own sequels or trilogies or series.

Like, how do you surprise an audience that knows your characters so well?

How do you remind the reader or audience (in the most economical way) what the key characters care about?

How does a character go forward when he has already completed his arc in the previous episode?

How do you bring back characters from the previous episode without boring exposition, how do you (again, economically) bring these characters in actions and scenes instead of endless boring paragraphs?

Andew Stanton described making a sequel as ‘overwhelming’ because of the seemingly ‘insurmountable goals’ – not least of which was the high expectation that came from having had a successful first episode.

The team had to find ways to reprise what was wonderful in the first story without compromising story in the sequel. For example, how does one bring back the fun of the first Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear, who thought he was a real spaceman and not a toy?

"Half the reason it was so much fun to watch Buzz was that he was deluded," Stanton says. In Toy Story 2, Buzz meets another Buzz Lightyear in a toy store, who is even more deluded than he was in the first Toy Story. The fun begins when the other Buzz swaps places with him and Buzz's friends don't realise they are not with the real Buzz

How do you make an idea fresher, faster, better, more surprising, more exciting, more unexpected?

The humour, the staging, the action and the great visuals ... we knew they would come. But it was that emotion that was so important because what we value is a story in which characters change, in which characters grow. In Toy Story we were very proud of the way Woody and Buzz both grew. And we couldn’t make them go back and get amnesia and grow in the same way again. They had to grow in a different way and that was extremely challenging.

Once a book/film is out, the author/filmmaker gives up ownership of his or her characters. Suddenly, the stakes are higher, because, as John Lassiter says, "These characters don’t belong to us anymore they belong to the world ... We had to do it right. We had to do it great."

It does make you think.

These characters we have been living with and whose lives we’ve been creating all this time? Ultimately, they are not ours to keep.

Titian: the Last Days by Mark Hudson -- a book trailer made by his daughter (hee hee)

Should we get our kids to help promote our books?

You can also view the video here

Love the part where she says: "I think it's boring but my mum read it and she thought it was really ... interesting."

Late add: This video is testament to the hoops authors have to jump through to sell their books. I just read Nathan Bransford's recent blog post in which he asks:

Can you be "just an author" these days, pecking away at a typewriter in a basement somewhere but otherwise completely eschewing publicity and remaining out of the public eye, Salinger- and Pynchon-style, writing in a bubble-like Platonic ideal of authordom?

His conclusion is that an established author could probably pull off a hermit-profile. But really, what with the economy in dire straits, publishers want bang for their buck ...

And one of the best ways to get bang for the buck is to start with an author who is doing everything they can to help out with publicity, thus multiplying the publisher's efforts

We have to live with the realities of our time and sometimes that means making the most of YouTube.