We Begin

Writing for young people can be a dangerous business.

An author of mystery novels is customarily pictured with a cigarette and a bottle of scotch. It's easy to visualize a writer of history in a tweed jacket with a cup of rapidly cooling tea rattling to the pounding of his keyboard. Investigative journalists are pictured knocking out their hot stories in rolled-up shirtsleeves with battered fedoras still clamped on their beans, periodically shouting "Copy!"

Children's authors are easily seen wearing red rubber clown noses, surrounded by bubbles.

Like prostitution, the business of children's literature has been compromised by amateurs. Every grandmother on this spinning blue orb believes she can and should create a cute story about fur-bearing animals with alliterative names, colorful little teapots, talkative Chihuahuas, or magic garden decorations that spring into horrifying, Day-of-the-Dead life. Otherwise sober authors seize on the money-making notion of writing a kiddie book and pursue this hollow illusion of wealth into embarrassing doggerel, cherishing the odd belief that children appreciate rhymes more than sense.

The truth of the medium is that writing for children is much more difficult than writing for adults. I can attest honestly because I've written on both sides of the catalogue. Children demand sense and clarity more than antic cuteness. They haven't had the numbing experience of reading college textbooks, so their attention spans will turn on their size 3 heels before Peter Panda can blurt out more than a few sappy truisms.

Writing for children is wooing an intelligent, judgmental and uncompromising audience. The great skill of it is not in dumbing down or using small words (kids are remarkably multisyllabic), but in creating a Shaker simplicity of construction and form. It's not the vocabulary that restricts, it's the sentence structure and the creation of logical concepts.

The saddest thing about most children's literature is the lack of respect for children's intellects. A commonly-held belief among grandmothers and hacks is that writing a kid's story is an easier approach to literature than novels, because children don't require much in the way of detail, fact, historic accuracy or research. That is: children are weak and stupid and will be grateful for anything set before them.

Fact: reading children are as bright as they'll ever be; they lack only experience. Their logical faculties are well-developed and they can spot a phony sooner than most adults. They also have a sensitive awareness of being manipulated.

Fact: making a bicycle pink doesn't make it a girl's bicycle, and abandoning reality doesn't make a story suitable for children.

Fact: Alice In Wonderland is vastly overrated as literature and most children find it confusing and scary. Like much "beloved" children's literature, it is more appreciated by jaded adults than by kids.

Fact: Writing for children demands the same care in description, rhythm, style and the balance of language that the best writing for adults displays. Except that the children's writer must work on a smaller and more restrictive canvas, and speak to a more distractable audience, and compete with Sesame Street in the background. Grace, lyricism, just-so wordplay and careful observation of the human condition are necessary parts of all literature . . . and are critically important in serious (that is, successful) work for children.

I've written for children and adults in more than thirty-eight books, innumerable articles, narrations, texts and scripts. My particular oeuvre is non-fiction for children. You can see a list of my books and a brief bio at www.janadkins.com. Much of this blog will be discussion and controversy about writing for kids. I'll be contending that good writing is good writing, and that writing well in one field doesn't necessarily translate to success in another. I've been lucky: most of my life's work has been explaining things – tab A and slot B. I've explained things in text and image, for kids, adults, National Geographic, museums, film and corporate reports. I've had a chance to train up to the task of writing plainly for young people. I'm opinionated and passionate about this tiny part of the publishing spectrum.

The purpose of this blog is to invite discussion and argument, welcome dissent, bring in examples, and encourage a more detailed look at what we do. Beyond children's literature we'll also deal with other favorite topics: food, cultural phenomena, maritime heritage, hiking, sailing, tools, pens, and illustration. We begin.

Jan Adkins

Braxinoso speaks:
Adkins can be tiresomely stuffy about his hobby horses. He can lose perspective as easily as a cocker spaniel can lose a tennis ball in the weeds. When he gets on a rant he waxes wordy, even florid, and can sound like a passed-over assistant professor. In my small way I'll try to keep him on-track and restrain his grander tendencies. But one doubts it will do much good.
Braxinoso