When superheroes get into social networking

My baby brother made this video - voiced it, shot it, drew it! I especially love the voice!

What happens when authors become cool online personalities

Not that YA author John Green (Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska) is a cool online personality only because he's trying to sell his books ... but look at what he got from his social network on his birthday -

And here was John's response:

If you can't be arsed to view the entire video, here's the most important thing John said:

People didn't make those songs or artwork or pictures and video clips in order to become famous or rich. They did it, to quote William Faulkner, "not for glory and least of all for profit but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before."

Mmmm. Human spirit.
He also said:

Every single day I get emails from aspiring writers asking my advice about how to become a writer. And here is the only advice I can give: Don't make stuff because you want to make money; it will never make you enough money. And don't make stuff because you wanna feel famous because you will never feel famous enough. Make GIFTS for people. And work hard on making those gifts so that people will notice the gift and like the gift. Maybe they will notice how hard you worked and maybe they won't. And if they don't, I know it's frustrating. But ultimately that doesn't matter because your responsibility is not to the people who notice but to the gift itself.

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.