'"Big" is a Banned Word in Our Classroom...' Musings on Creative Writing and SATs - Cecilia Busby

I'm butting in here, slightly, as someone who's not normally a regular contributor to ABBA. But there are some things that have been brewing in my head for a while to do with writing in schools. The recent controversies over Michael Gove's new reforms, pushing yet more formal grammar down the throats of the nations primary school children, has caused them to boil over into a blog post. Luckily ABBA was at hand to give me an outlet!

When I was at primary school (a long time ago it seems now!) teachers regularly read stories to their class - lots and lots of stories - picture books, short stories, fairy tales, longer books over a week or more. Children learned the many ways of creative story-telling by listening to and living in these stories. And then they were encouraged to write their own, whatever and however they wanted – just stories. Glorious, creative, fun, mad, rambling stories, meant to be simply enjoyed.

One amazing afternoon, when I was eleven, the teacher from the other, companion class to ours read us the whole of Paul Gallico’s Snow Goose, start to finish. He had a soft Scottish accent and a wonderful reading voice, and the whole class spent that afternoon in a completely magical other place, of snow and bleak landscapes and tears. Every single girl in the class instantly fell in love with him, and I bet no one there has ever forgotten it.

We were not expected to critique these stories – we were never asked to identify the genre, or discuss the foibles of the main character, or identify the metaphors being used in the passage we’d just been read. That particular ruination of stories lay in the future, at secondary school. We were just allowed to enjoy them, absorb them, be inspired by them – and slowly learn how stories worked and what they did by listening and reading.

Gradually, children, as they read more, as teachers gently pointed out the need for full stops and capital letters, and encouraged correct spelling, produced more coherent, grammatical sentences, more sophisticated descriptions, richer vocabulary. But they did this at their own pace, in relation to the kinds of books they were reading, and as their own story dictated. My best friend and I went through an intensely poetical phase in the third year of junior school in which our writing was essentially nothing but strings of adjectives, each of us out-doing the other in flights of fancy (‘the white, pale, glittering diamond snow drifts gently, mounds of sparkling coldness heaped in silvery piles’…) 

My teacher was always nice about them. She was still nice when I became obsessed with Biggles, and everyone in my stories started ‘observing wryly’ or ‘laughing carelessly’ instead of ‘saying’ anything. She let me develop a writing style at my own pace, and in relation to what I wanted to say, and just enjoyed the roller-coaster ride – and as a result what I never, ever felt was judged against any kind of externally imposed standard. We were praised for the creativity we showed, for making the teacher laugh, for the ideas in our stories. We weren't told that our story had achieved a level 4A or 3B, and what we needed to do to get the next highest level was use more 'interesting words' and include several similes. At eleven I wouldn't have recognised a simile if it had come up and hit me on the head (and that's a personification of a simile, by the way, and so a kind of metaphor, as most eleven-year-olds would now be expected to tell you...) But I'm sure I used them, all the time - not consciously, to impress examiners, but joyously, because they enabled me to describe what I had in my head in exactly the right way.

What has happened in the intervening years is a kind of madness sparked off by an increasing tendency for the bureaucratic state to value surveillance over trust. Instead of assuming that professionals could be trusted,  the state started to ask for evidence that its practitioners were providing 'value for money' and the only evidence that seemed to 'count' was numbers. In education, this meant the National Curriculum, imposed standards, testing, and league tables. I have watched my children go through the primary system, one after the other, and for a while I trained to become a primary teacher myself. I now go into schools as an author. All those experiences have left me increasingly sad and angry at the effect that these changes have had on children's relationship to literature and writing.

To take writing. In the attempt to codify and externalise the standards that children could be judged by, academics and policy-makers took the processes that happen as children develop their writing skills (development of wider vocabulary, greater use of figurative language, more accurate grammar, better spelling) and made them explicit teaching goals which were then  tested. Inevitably, with schools and children then judged by these tests/standards, teachers were forced to make explicit to their pupils the grounds on which they had succeeded or 'failed' to reach certain levels; to drill them in the 'right' techniques to do well in the tests. This is even considered by Ofsted to be good teaching practice - woe betide a teacher who doesn't put the 'learning goal' clearly on the board for each lesson, or whose pupils don't know exactly what level they are working at and how to get to the next rung of the ladder.

The example that really brought this process home to me happened when I was visiting a year 6 class in a small village primary in Devon a few months ago. Talking about the characters in my book, Frogspell, I read out a description of Sir Bertram Pendragon, 'a gruff, burly knight with a deep voice and a large moustache' who also happens to enjoy whacking his enemies with his 'big sword'. 'Can I just stop you there?' said the teacher. 'The word "big" is one of the banned words in our classroom. What do you think of that?'

I was temporarily speechless. I recovered enough to make it quite clear that I didn't think any word should be banned, and that sometimes 'big' was exactly the right word for the job you wanted it to do, but it made me think anew about the results of a testing regime that gives higher marks to the use of more complex vocabulary. The inevitable end point is that children are told not to use the word 'big' if they can possibly shoehorn in 'enormous', 'gigantic', extraordinarily excessive' or 'mountainous'.

The result is that writing, for children in primary schools - especially at the upper levels - is now a very much more conscious activity. Their heads are full of instructions: use 'interesting' words; use similes and metaphors and personification; use commas and semi-colons if you can; never, ever use the word 'big'. That they manage to find any joy at all in writing in the face of these multiple goals to aspire to and pitfalls to be avoided is a tribute to their irrepressible creativity and passion.

I recently read a lovely piece about writing by a fellow social anthropologist, Tim Ingold.
The full text is here: http://www.dur.ac.uk/writingacrossboundaries/writingonwriting/timingold/

Ingold bemoans the universal use of the computer for university students' essays, and writes about how he encourages his students to put pen to paper, and feel the flow of writing as a flow, from brain to hand. Writing is not a technical fitting together of ready made bits and pieces in a way that will gain approval from an examiner/teacher, it is a craft. It's more akin to carving a knotted piece of wood than putting together an IKEA flatpack. Ingold likens it to hunting - you don't go from A to B in a straight line: 'To hunt you have to be alert for clues and ready to follow trails wherever they may lead. Thoughtful writers need to be good hunters.'

Introduce the computer, and its associated cut-and-paste techniques, Ingold argues, and immediately 'students are introduced to the idea that academic writing is a game whose primary object is to generate novelty through the juxtaposition and recombination of materials from prescribed sources'. This is word-processing rather than writing, and, as he says, it 'is a travesty of the writer's craft.'

The National Curriculum, and SAT tests, seem to me to have done the same thing to primary children's writing. They are being taught that writing is a process of exemplifying one's mastery of certain 'techniques', juggling and fitting together approved words and phrases like a puzzle (like a pre-designed Lego set). That we are teaching youngsters at this boundlessly creative age that writing is a kind of engineering makes me want to weep.

Of course, there are still many, many great teachers out there, who inspire and encourage their pupils, and read to them, just as I was encouraged, inspired and read to. But they do it not against a background where their judgement is key, but against one where they themselves are judged and tested, and often found wanting. Gove's 'reforms' look set to exacerbate this problem, and increase the number of demoralised teachers found wanting because they haven't drilled their pupils sufficiently in the recognition of gerunds and participles, or made it sufficiently clear that 'big' is a banned word.

I'd like to end with a suggestion. There' a great scheme out there, called Patrons of Reading. The website is here:
http://www.patronofreading.co.uk/
The idea is that a local author links with a primary school and makes a relationship with them over a year, encouraging reading, encouraging writing, and generally being a kind of 'reading mascot'. I think it's a brilliant way to bring the experience of real writers into schools in a more long-term way than  just a single 'author visit'. I'm currently touting my services to my local primaries. And maybe if it takes off, there'll be a few more people out there giving children permission to use the word 'big', if the word big fits the bill.


Cecilia Busby was trained as a social anthropologist; she now writes for children as C.J. Busby.

http://www.frogspell.co.uk/ ("Great fun!" - Diana Wynne Jones; "packed with humour" - The Bookseller)

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ceciliabusby

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/CJBusby/509258069106074?ref=hl

Thanks to Joan Lennon for letting me take her ABBA slot for my musings!

Invisible boundaries and social media - C.J. Busby

A few weeks ago, a young American first-time author, Kathleen Hale, unleashed a bit of a social media storm by publishing a piece in The Guardian about the increasingly vexed online relationship between authors and bloggers. The article (here) which ran in the Saturday magazine, detailed how she became obsessed by one of her online critics, a blogger called Blythe Harris. When Hale engaged with Blythe's criticism's of her book (despite the many, many warnings she received that authors should not answer back to bad reviews), Blythe and many of her fellow bloggers apparently turned on her and Hale found herself labelled a BBA - a badly behaved author. For Hale (and I should emphasise that we only get Hale's perspective on what happened here), Blythe was wilfully malicious, ruining the reception of her book, and using her clique of friends and fellow bloggers to trash Hale's reputation. In return, Hale details her own increasing obsession with Blythe - an obsession which rapidly moved from what she termed 'light stalking' (gathering any and every detail she could from Blythe's online presence) to what by any standards is just plain stalking - using subterfuge to gain access to Blythe's real-life identity, workplace address and home address.

It's a sorry tale, and I'm not going to rehash the Hale case here, but it did make me think about the business of social media, writers, bloggers and boundaries. Authors, as Hale notes, are encouraged to get online and have a social media presence, but their natural audience, book bloggers and fans, seem quite often to resent authors turning up on their turf and, as they see it, throwing their weight around. A while ago, as a bit of a newbie author, I brushed up against a similar controversy when I noticed an online discussion on a book blogger's site about one of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series.

I'm a bit of a fan of this series, and was interested to see that the author had stopped by and commented, explaining where some of the features the blogger was discussing had come from in the writing process. It was (I thought) a perfectly polite contribution, and not in the least critical of her analysis, simply adding a bit of background information. But it caused an immediate storm, in which I was very slightly caught up, having added a comment of my own about the strange ways the writing process worked. For some of the following commentators, writers were simply not welcome on a book blogging site - they were guilty of abusing the power they had as authors to dominate a space that was not for them. Book blogs and fan sites should be considered a space for fans and book lovers to freely express themselves and not somewhere authors should feel free to gatecrash.

It was all resolved fairly amicably - Ben Aaronovitch backed down with a bit of grumbling, and I apologised profusely for being new to all this and not understanding the rules of the game. But the Hale article did bring this experience back to me.

What both examples make clear, I think, is that engaging in discussion with other people on social media is now the easiest thing in the world to do, but that it's also potentially perilous - what seems to be a simple opening gambit in a conversation can quickly become a reason for several people you've never met to decide they hate you. And thinking about why this is, made me realise that it's partly about the lack of social clues we have online.

Picture this: an author walks into a cafe, orders a coffee, and then realises that at the table next to him are six women, clearly friends, all discussing why they don't really like his new book. He would have to be completely mad or utterly self-obsessed to lean across and say, "Excuse me, ladies, that point you've just made is very interesting, but as the author, I'd have to say you've misunderstood my intention...." More likely, he'd hide behind a newspaper, or slink out. It's not his place to push into a group which is clearly bounded by longstanding interactions and mutual exchange of opinions. On the web, though, it's hard to see those boundaries, easier to think this is a discussion open to anyone who happens to wander past.

We've probably all had the experience of adding comments on a forum discussion, only to have what we've said utterly ignored as the next commentator simply replies to the one before you, and the next one carries on as if you never said anything. It feels like a snub (it is a snub) - but if this were real life, the group discussing this burning issue would be that bunch of students who always occupy the table in the corner of the canteen, looking daggers at anyone who even thinks about sitting next to them - and we wouldn't be in the least surprised if they ignored our comment. (We'd almost certainly never make it in the first place.)

Would you interrupt the conversation?

As social animals, we have built up over generations the ability to detect the smallest social clues about other people and groups around us. The kinds of interaction we engage in with other people are largely determined by our previous interactions with them, their status as friends or family or work colleagues. Even with total strangers we can use visible clues like dress, body language, expression, context, to judge what is or isn't appropriate. All these help us to 'see' the boundaries that we would be transgressing and the trouble we could be causing if we were to be, for example, inappropriately intimate or aggressive or opinionated.

The trouble with social media is these clues are just not there. We've only had access to this multitude of potential conversations with strangers  for a very short time, and people appear on it as little more than speech. Speech which is devoid of accents, of voice, of clues about who this person is. It's like wandering in a dark fog, listening to many voices all talking at random - but the people behind the voices are invisible. So we have to make guesses about what kinds of people they are, and whether we are gatecrashing through an invisible boundary, or striking up a conversation with someone genuinely interested in talking to us.

Those speaking to each other on a forum, a blog, on Goodreads, can appear as simply a bunch of individuals interested in the same topic, a bunch of reasonable, open individuals who would welcome a newcomer to their midst. Sometimes that is exactly what they are. But sometimes, the invisible boundaries are as fierce as barbed wire, and we cross them at our peril.

The way invisible boundaries are so difficult to negotiate sometimes makes me want to give up on all forms of online interaction. Like Liz Kessler, who posted recently about social media on ABBA (here), I have considered just ditching all of it in favour of interactions in real life only. But, in the end, I don't, because so far I've managed to negotiate those boundaries more or less unscathed, and in the process I've 'met' some really brilliant people (some of whom I've gone on to really meet).

The fact is, most people on social media ARE open, engaged, reasonable and friendly, and, if you transgress an invisible boundary, they are usually polite enough to just inform you gently that you're in the wrong place. But I do think it's important to be aware that just because those boundaries are invisible, doesn't mean they are not there - and when you find a clear notice that says "Authors (or whoever) are Not Welcome Beyond this Point", it probably pays to respect it.

C.J. Busby writes funny, fast-paced fantasy for children aged 7-12. Her latest books, Dragon Amber, is published by Templar.

www.cjbusby.co.uk

@ceciliabusby

An Interview with Frances Hardinge - by C.J. Busby

I first met Frances Hardinge as part of an intrepid SAS contingent that stormed the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton in October 2013. We had a great time, although there were fewer costumes than I'd hoped, and no centaurs galloping through the plenary session...

Myself, Teresa Flavin and Katherine Roberts do the costume thing...

I recently read and reviewed Frances Hardinge's new book, Cuckoo Song, for ABBA reviews (you can find the review here).  I loved it - and I wanted to ask Frances some questions about it, and about her writing in general, of which I am great admirer. So I thought I would hijack my ABBA post this month to interview her. Luckily, she is a very accommodating person, and was happy to allow me to grill her. As we live at opposite ends of the country, this had to be by email: but let's pretend we met in a chippy in Brighton for this conversation...

Waiting for fish and chips

So, Frances, unlike in previous novels, Cuckoo Song is set in a real historical period. How did you find that compared with setting your stories in secondary worlds where you are free to make it all up? 

Writing a book set in a specific real world time period is much harder. There's always the fear of getting some detail wrong, and being caught out. One becomes obsessed with checking historical minutae, even for details that probably won't make the final cut. In a way it's a lot of fun, and you discover lots of new things during the research, but you can go quite, quite mad. In spite of my checking, I'm sure there are still lurking errors.

I did find myself making some compromises. Sometimes to preserve the pace of the book, you can't afford to detour into lengthy explanations of historical context. 

And I had to compromise when it came to the dialogue. At first I really wanted to have my characters using plenty of slang from the time. Then I started looking at the things people actually said in 1920s Britain.

I say! Rather! I should think so! Jolly decent. A good sort. Old thing. Old bean. Old man. Ragging. Blighter. What rot! What a lark! That's torn it!

Nowadays we can't read these phrases without hearing them in the voice of Bertie Wooster or Billy Bunter. They sound flippant, innocent, comical and bit twee. When one is trying to build suspense in a tale of psychological horror, that's the last thing you need. The characters might as well be exclaiming:

“Oh well, never mind, old girl. What ho! Ginger beer!”

Yes - that would have ruined the atmosphere for sure! It's a bit like the dilemma of using Shakespearian language in an Elizabethan setting - the odd words and phrases give a sense of a different time, but too many 'thee's and 'thou's and it starts to sound like a send up. Of course, in Cuckoo Song it's not only a case of real-world historical details, because you are also depicting another world - the fairie realm. I loved the idea of fairies as these strange bird-like Besiders who lurk in out-of-the-way places. How much did you draw on particular details for myths and folktales as inspiration when developing your otherworld characters?

In the case of Cuckoo Song, I drew quite heavily on the old changeling folktales. These tales make for a disturbing read, not just because of the nightmare scenario of a malignant imposter taking the place of one's child. In the stories, the human hosts usually rid themselves of the changeling through utter cruelty - leaving them on a dunghill, flinging them into deep water, hurling them into the fire, etc. (It's particularly unpleasant because there's evidence that in past centuries some children with severe disabilities really did die from such brutal treatment, because they were thought to be 'changelings'.)

The nature of the changeling varies from one folktale to another. Sometimes it's a fretful, sickly fairy child, swapped for a healthy human infant by envious fairy parents. Sometimes it's a full-grown adult fairy, infiltrating the mortal cottage so that it can be pampered and fed. Occasionally, however, the changeling nothing more than a doll, fashioned from leaves, wood or wax, and enchanted to look like an ailing child. It was the third type that started to fascinate me.

The journey of Triss and Pen into the Underbelly is inspired by a particular folktale called "The Smith and the Fairies". After his son is stolen by fairies, a smith is advised by a wise man to go to the green hill on a certain night, armed with only a dirk, a Bible and a crowing cock. The way into the hill will be open that night. He must drive the dirk into the ground to make sure the hill does not close behind him. The Bible is protection. It is the rooster, however, that will most upset the fairies...

In some ways, however, I deliberately deviated from traditional fairy lore. The fairies of folklore tend to be vulnerable to cold iron, but also to trappings of the church - Bibles, prayers, blessings, church bells. In my book, the Besiders are twilight creatures, inhabitants of the in-between and unmapped places, and their great enemy is certainty. Most iron will not hurt them, but they have a horror of scissors, which cleanly and cruelly divide, leaving nothing in between. Religious faith is dangerous to them, but so is faith and certainty of all kinds.

I found the idea of the scissors as a symbol of dividing everything neatly into one side or the other quite chilling - as you make clear, so much cruelty comes from that kind of black and white thinking. The book is very good at delving into the grey areas between, and showing how mixed-up most people's characters are. I especially liked your portrayal of the relationship between the two sisters, Triss and Pen. As one of two sisters myself, I totally recognised that combination of fierce hatred and love - the way your sister can be both your worst enemy and the one person you can always rely on. Do you have sisters, or was that an impressive feat of imagination?

I do have a sister. I was older, but by only eleven months, and it always felt as though we were basically the same age. We constructed elaborate imaginary worlds together, tried to set up a detective agency (we never got any cases), wrote plays with songs, invented codes and fought like fury. The first time one of my milk teeth came out, it was because I was biting my sister.

Ha, ha. I knew it! I was also the eldest and my sister was thirteen months younger, so a very similar gap. And yes, we fought bitterly, but also collaborated to create imaginary worlds and games, write letters in code, make maps and search for hidden treasure (we never found any). It's a great apprenticeship for writing children's books! 

One of the things I also like about your books is that you never really hurt or destroy your main characters - they may have some heart-stopping or tearful moments, but they are generally put down gently on safe ground at the end. Are you conscious of that, and is it related to the age you write for, or is it just part of who you are as a writer, that you don't have a desire to take your readers to very dark or unhappy places? (Or do you secretly nurse a desire to write a book with a massacre in it?)

Funnily enough, one of my books does have a massacre in it! It's my third book, Gullstruck Island. I won't say any more since it's an important plot event, and I wouldn't want to commit spoilers.

Ah - I haven't read that one! (Orders it from the library immediately...)

My books tend to have a bodycount, and for the course of the story I like my readers to be in real doubt about whether my main character will survive. Most of them live in quite unforgiving worlds. I suspect that in fact I probably do take my protagonists to some dark and unhappy places... but then allow them to find a way out again, through their own ingenuity, courage and strength of will. 

My books don't often have neat or straightforward 'happy endings', but hope generally triumphs. That isn't because I'm softening my books for a younger audience, but because I'm naturally quite a hopeful person. I'm a cynical optimist.

I think that's what I meant, really - not that there aren't dark times or places, but that as a reader I feel safe. I know that somehow it will work out, the main characters will find a way. I like the idea of being a cynical optimist - I think I'm probably one, too.

I'd like to finish  by asking you a bit about the nuts and bolts of how you write. Your language is wonderfully inventive - your descriptions always fresh and original. Is that something that just flows from your pen or do you refine a lot in subsequent versions?

I am not one of those authors who manages to produce the same number of words each day (though I admire the discipline of all those who do). I have spurts of productivity where I turn out a lot of text in a day. Afterwards I go back and fiddle with it neurotically, and usually the 'fiddling' takes the form of cutting. I have a terrible addiction to metaphors, so when I revise my own work it usually involves the gentle patter of snipped metaphors and similes hitting the floor.

That's interesting - so the first draft has even more of that inventive figurative language! I'd love to see a Frances Hardinge text before it's been pruned, all overgrown and tangled with trailing metaphors. What a treat! But your stories aren't just beautifully described, they have cracking plots. Do you work these out beforehand, or follow leads as they come up? In other words, are you a plotter or a pantser?

I always plot out my books before I write them. For my first book I even had a chapter by chapter outline. I haven't gone into quite that much detail in plans for my later books, but I always map out the main incidents, and know what the ending will be.

However, there's always some room for making things up on the fly. A book should be a journey of discovery for the writer as well as the reader, otherwise the writing process can become dull and leaden. My stories surprise me. Characters develop in unexpected ways. Just now and then, I change my mind about my plot structure halfway through writing the book. It's still useful to have that first plan, though, even if I decide to deviate from it. I need that trellis, even if I can't full predict how my story-vine will grow.

What do you do when you get stuck? How do you get the ideas and words flowing again?

I seldom reach a point where I can't write. Instead, I get a form of writers' block where I write the same chapter over and over again, and can't get the text to 'work'. It lies there on the screen like a stunned weasel.

If you're sitting alone in a study for too long you can get hypnotised by your own screen. Sometimes I go for a ten-mile hike, just so that I can work through some plot knots in my head. 

I find it a lot easier to write, however, if there is a deadline looming, even if it's an artifical one. I belong to a couple of writers' groups, and I find that I become a lot more productive just before the sessions...

I think that's probably enough. I could happily carry on all day, but we need to get started on those chips! Many thanks for answering my questions, and good luck with the next book!

It's been a pleasure. Pass the ketchup!

I hope everyone's enjoyed this conversation as much as I did - and if any of you haven't come across Frances's books, do go and seek them out. They are among the most inventive, delightful and original books for older children I've read.

C.J. Busby writes funny fantasy for 7-10. Her latest book, Deep Amber, is out with Templar. The sequel, Dragon Amber, will be published in September.

Website: www.cjbusby.co.uk

Twitter: @ceciliabusby

How do we judge quality in children's books?

By Cecilia Busby

There are a couple of things recently that have made me think about how we judge quality in children's books. One was the rather interesting discussion about kids reading 'trash', started by Clementine Beauvais on ABBA and continued in other places for a few weeks afterwards. The other is my decision this year to try to read all the Carnegie shortlisted books. Both have made me think about how we judge what is good in children's literature.

The Carnegie Book Prize is probably the best known and most prestigious prize awarded to children’s books in the UK – it’s effectively the Booker for children. It generates a great deal of interest, a lot of attention for the shortlist of nominated books, and it’s a brilliant show-piece for the best in children’s writing.

A couple of years ago, my son’s school, like many across the country, took part in a Carnegie shadowing event – children at the school read the shortlisted books and then met to discuss and vote for their own favourites. It was the occasion of his most epic reading challenge ever: with only a week to go before the vote, he read the entire Chaos Walking trilogy, as he didn’t want to just read Monsters of Men on its own.

This year, I thought I’d do a little Carnegie shadowing of my own, wondering if it would be worth doing something similar with the primary school where I am Patron of Reading.  Normally, Carnegie shadowing is done by secondary schools, and when I looked at the shortlist, I realised why. I was struck by just how dark the themes were, and how many of the books were for older readers. Of the eight books, three are designated 14+, four 11+ and only one 9+. Only one of these books, then, sits firmly in the classic 9–12 age range. The others are aimed at secondary school readers: either 11–14, or 14–17. In the descriptions, the words that caught my eye were ‘trauma victim’, ‘difficult’ or ‘bleak’ circumstances, ‘a brave book that pulls no punches’, ‘unimaginable terror’, ‘shocking brutality of war’, ‘abusive, alcoholic partner’, ‘dysfunctional family dynamics’, ‘brutal act of cruelty’, ‘political tension’, and ‘family conflicts’. Only two of the books, Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers and Rebecca Stead’s Liar and Spy (the 9–12 book), appear to have a more light-hearted element.

Maybe this is just about the periodic shifts in what is ‘of the moment’ in children’s literature, or maybe just coincidentally the best of the books published this year have tended towards an older age range and a dark strand of realism. But the shortlist chimed for me with a growing sense that children’s book prizes, like children’s book reviews, tend to favour the more ‘literary’ end of writing, and particularly the older, more adult books. Is this because their quality, as children's literature, is better? Curious, I went to find the criteria for the Carnegie nominations, to see what these judgements were based on.

The criteria are here, and they make interesting reading. There is no mention of the world ‘children’ anywhere, except in terms of eligibility: nominations must be for children’s books. In the main criteria, it is emphasised that the book should be ‘of outstanding literary quality’, and the specifications for this relate to plot, character, and literary style. The list could just as easily be applied to an adult novel.

Children’s writers, even those for young children, use and display fantastic skills in plot, character and style – but it’s important, I think, to specify that these are being assessed in relation to child readers. Because the skill to engage a child reader may involve certain linguistic tricks, certain exaggerations of character, certain simplifications of plot, that would not necessarily work in a novel for older readers or adults, and that can, at first glance, seem less, well, less ‘literary’. Not always, of course, and indeed, one of the younger age-range books on the Carnegie shortlist, Rooftoppers, is full of astonishingly inventive imagery. But is this what makes it a great children's book?

If we make 'literary' writing the main criteria for judging quality then in effect we are judging children's books in the same way we judge adult books. This seems reasonable for the older teenage books: a literate fourteen year old is, in essence, an adult reader. Their interests, in terms of subject matter, may be different, but their ‘reading’ skills are sufficient for the deployment of the full range of adult literary styles and tricks of plotting and language.

The Carnegie judges are skilled and established children’s librarians, so it’s likely that the panel do consider these elements in relation to the age of the reader. But I wonder if the often dazzling language effects and narrative innovations that writers for older teens can utilise inevitably appear to fulfil Carnegie criteria to a higher degree than the simpler (though no less well-judged) effects used by writers for the younger age range. I wonder if the more hard-hitting and controversial subject matter that can be delved into in a teen book inevitably makes the lighter touch needed for young readers appear to be lacking in intensity by comparison. Looking at the last ten to fifteen years of the Carnegie would seem to confirm that it’s the teen books and ‘difficult’ subjects that predominate, with only a couple of winners that would not be considered YA.

I have no objection to the Carnegie celebrating the best that older teen fiction has to offer, and such books can be reasonably judged on adult literary criteria. But what if we want to celebrate the best in classic childrens books, the 9–12 (middle-grade) books? This, after all, is the age when children most fully engage with books, the age when they love them with an intensity I don’t think you ever truly find again. Books that spark that kind of love deserve to be lauded. Maybe it's time for two Carnegie Prizes - for young adult and for children's books.

If we want to celebrate these books for younger readers, though, do we need different criteria? Should we acknowledge that they simply can’t be judged by (or only by) standard ‘literary’ criteria, that these don’t fit with the way children (as opposed to teenagers) read books? Perhaps so, but then  how do we judge them? That's a trickier matter. Drawing on my own experience of the books I fell in love with as a child, I would like to suggest some criteria for judging quality in children's fiction.

1. Is a child who reads this book likely to put it down with a sigh at the end and say, “That’s the best book I ever read’?

2. Would a child who read this book want to immediately read the next book in the series, or make a note of the author and find everything they’ve ever written?

3. Is the book likely to make its child readers laugh out loud, and/or cry, without it necessarily being a wholly ‘funny’ or wholly ‘sad’ book? (Both require skill and judgement, although personally I think making them laugh is harder. But both show that the reader’s emotions are fully engaged.)

4. Is a child reader likely to be so absorbed by the story in this book so that by the end they don’t want to eat, sleep or engage with the outside world until they’ve finished it and found out what happens?

5. Are there characters in the book that will be so fiercely loved by many of the children that read it that they would give anything to walk around the corner and find them walking the other way?

6. Are these characters and the world they live in so loved by the child reader that they are likely to feel bereft when the book is over, and more than half inclined to read the whole book again from the beginning, just to keep those characters alive a little longer in their heads?

Of course, these criteria are subjective. They also rely on an adult making judgements based on their own memory of being a child reader, based on talking to children, based on their experience of children's likes and dislikes. But all judgments (including literary ones) are subjective - and these are at least very different questions to ask of a book than ones about the deployment of style, narrative, characterisation and language (although all these things contribute to the end effects I’m talking about). They are first and foremost questions about the heart and soul of the book, and its effect on child (not adult) readers.

Perhaps, if these had been the criteria over the last decade, the Carnegie winners would still have been the same books. Perhaps it doesn’t make a difference. What do you think? I am certain that the Carnegie winners over the last years have been great books. I am less certain about whether they have been great children’s books.

Cecilia Busby writes fantasy adventures for 7+ as C.J. Busby. Her new book, DEEP AMBER, is aimed at age 8-10, published with Templar.

Website www.cjbusby.co.uk
Twitter @ceciliabusby

Why children’s books are the opposite of tragedies - C.J. Busby

I was thinking the other day about how, in so many children’s books, the hero finds they have hidden powers. I think it’s one of the aspects of children’s books I love the most, and loved especially as a child myself – the sense that, however ordinary you felt you were, there might be this magical ability hidden inside you, or some unexpected aspect of your character, just waiting for the right opportunity, the right trigger, to reveal itself. 

In one of my favourite books as a child, Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones, Cat Chant discovers, after many trials and mix-ups, that he’s an enchanter – from being a child who could do absolutely no magic, he becomes one who can make almost anything happen by just telling it to. In Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, Will discovers he’s an Old One, and learns to use his new powers to fight the Dark. And Harry Potter, ordinary downtrodden child, finds he is really a wizard, and a very special one at that. 

But in more mundane ways, many children’s books chart the ways their protagonists learn to draw on hidden strengths or find reserves of bravery, intelligence, compassion, understanding, or determination to overcome obstacles and win through in difficult or challenging circumstances. 

In The Lord of the Rings, for example, it is the 'children' of the book, the hobbits, who really save Middle Earth - and they do so by finding in themselves the sort of courage, grit, compassion, confidence and ability to survive that they'd never have dreamed of in sleepy Hobbiton. The change in them is made gloriously manifest in their final return to the Shire and the battle with Sharkey.

In essence, these sorts of stories tell their readers – you can be amazing! It’s a great message for children – indeed, for any reader. It says, nothing about you is fixed, you don’t have to accept that you are only ever going to be this person or that person. Round the corner, an adventure might be waiting that will draw out of you all sorts of things – that will change you into a kind of hero, with new and unexpected powers. No matter that you are not top of the class, or ‘gifted and talented’, no matter that you think of yourself as ‘ordinary’ – there’s always hope.

This kind of transformative possibility in children’s books seems to me to be the very opposite of tragedy. In tragedies, most often, it’s the inherent flaws in the protagonist’s character that lead to the inevitable tragic outcome. Hamlet’s total introspection, his inability to stop dithering; Othello’s insane jealousy; Coriolanus’s pride; or in the classic Greek tragedies, the hero’s hubris, or their rigidity, or the inevitable repercussions of one terrible action. There’s a feeling of watching a slow motion train crash – nothing stops the slide towards mutual destruction because none of the characters are capable of changing who they are. When I was in my twenties, life sometimes felt exactly like this, and when it did, my best friend and I used to wail: ‘Aargh - I’m in an Iris Murdoch novel!’

In much adult literature events unfold in this way – the characters, like Martin Luther, ‘can do no other’, they react to each other and to events in ways that drive the plot forward, and it’s not very often that one of them finds a hidden power that solves the tangle they’ve all got themselves into. For me, then, tragedy is a quintessentially grown-up (‘literary’) form of literature, about people working through the consequences of who they are, who they have become. But children are always becoming, and so children’s literature seems to me in its purest form the very opposite of tragedy – characterised not by comedy, but a kind of positive hopefulness, an expectation of finding some new, positive aspect of yourself which explodes into the plot and turns it on its head.

This seems especially important to me now, when schools – even primary – are riddled with exams and tests and gradings: children, according to Ofsted good practice, should know exactly what National Curriculum Level they are (a 3a, or a 4b) and why they aren’t yet at the next level up. There is only one path allowed: three points of progress in academic work per school year. Ofsted is not interested in whether you might, in the meantime, have fought dragons, or learnt to conjure a whirlwind.

As with all generalisations, I’m sure people will find exceptions and caveats, and I don’t at all mean to be prescriptive. It’s not that I think all children’s books must conform to this model – but for me, the ‘ideal type’, if you like, of a children’s book, is that it has this sort of transformative hope at its centre. And the ideal anti-type is the tragedy.


C.J. Busby writes funny, fast paced fantasy for primary age children.

Her latest book, Deep Amber, is a multiple worlds adventure for 8-12, published March 2014 by Templar.

'This is an adventure... here are runes and swords and incredibly stupid knights in armour – enjoy!' (ABBA Reviews: Read the rest of the review here).

Website: www.cjbusby.co.uk

Twitter: @ceciliabusby