Why Bother?As a children’s writer I visit many schools where I enjoy the privilege of meeting and working with my readership. I’ve found that kids can be an author’s greatest support but also his (sometimes unintentionally) harshest critics. As well as learning what children like to read – or why they don’t! – there are other benefits in talking to them. Read the rest of this entry »
First, Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas and, like me, you’re probably glad the snow has gone. But I couldn’t resist including one of the pics that my daughter-in-law took of Kenilworth Castle over the festive season – whether you like snow or not, that kind of view takes some beating.
Thanks to Sinead for last week’s blog. She’s absolutely right about “… the strange parallel universe that exists in the world of magazine deadlines”. Some writers just can’t get their head around the fact that you need to be writing and submitting your Christmas material to magazines in June and that if you’re considering any anniversary in May 2011 you should be writing it now. Having said that, look at this month’s E-zee Writer for some ideas on things to write about. Read the rest of this entry »
As you know, every month I ask one of our Writers Bureau tutors to provide a guest blog, to provide a bit of variety and a different viewpoint. Next week it will be the turn of poet and competition adjudicator, Alison Chisholm, and she’ll be explaining why it’s so important to polish your poetry if you want it to stand the test of time.
This week’s blog is a bit of a hotchpotch (or, so my dictionary tells me, a hodgepodge if you’re American or Canadian).
So to start with, if you love words, some useless facts! An average six-year-old knows 9,000 – 13,000 words. This rises to 40,000 – 50,000 by the time they reach their teens. Though, as you’ve probably noticed, they only use a fraction of this on a daily basis. According to Global Language Monitor a new word is created every 98 minutes and last year English acquired its one millionth words. (Though how they work this out is beyond me!) So, if you’re sitting down to write that novel you’ve got lots of words to play with.
But what if you’re writing for children ? You obviously need to take some care ensuring that the level of language you use (vocabulary and syntax) is suitable for the age range you’re targeting. We all have four vocabularies. Listening is our largest – we often hear words that we can only understand in the context in which they are spoken. Next comes speaking, followed by reading (again we sometimes guess at the meaning from the context). The fourth is writing which is more precise and we have to think before putting pen to paper. A quick tip here: when writing for children, if you need to consult a thesaurus, use one designed for children rather than the somewhat ponderous adult versions.
And finally, as a self-confessed Luddite, I couldn’t resist this quote from Joel Achenbach in The Washington Post that I saw recently in a writers’ magazine:
“The best feature of print is that it doesn’t interrupt you. It doesn’t try to link you somewhere else. It doesn’t talk back…Interactivity is a great virtue sometimes, but there are other times when you want to read a story that doesn’t try to heckle you…”
