Power sockets and tips for writing a children’s story

What I’ve just realized is that pre-censorship can modify a writer’s approach in more than one way. On a superficial level, the main concern seems to be the topic of the story. An experienced writer will know that dealing with themes such as death, violence, sex, drug use is likely to lead to rejection. Quality and marketability are intertwined in contemporary literature, and sometimes the latter alone is enough to invest in the production of a “mass-market” book. On the contrary, quality that may not sell tends to be problematic. So the children’s author needs to identify her own position in the “literary economy”. The more awarness of that, the better.

However, it’s been really interesting for me to find out yet more ways in which a children’s writer can be influenced when confronting the blank page. My research highlights how the publishing market, as a part of the culture industry, establishes different boundaries in order to favour marketability. Even the very existence of age groups can be seen as one of these boundaries, since Young Adult means “suitable for 13 upwards” but also “we’re defining reading as an age-controlled activity, therefore we are enabled to decide what a teeanger is capable of reading and the target of the books we are producing”. And that’s eerie, if I think that I read “Anna Karenina” when I was 15.

Moreover, when a writer begins a story, besides considering theme and age group, she’s aware – or she should be – that production costs can sway a publisher’s final decision. Books like “Cathy’s book” or “Building Stories” by Chris Ware are really rare, and the main boundary to creativity can actually be the budget. As I assemble my fake dossier for the MA dissertation, I feel it works well because it engages the reader in reordering the story, an activity teenagers enjoy*. But I also know that it would never be published in the real world. A fake dossier made up of loose sheets, pictures, letters and cds, would cost a fortune to produce and, with no guarantee of reader response – since it is a new form – it simply wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

We could add language, setting and conventions (what is a children’s book?) to the list of boundaries a children’s writer must face. You are usually not allowed to employ strong or difficult language, for example, or locations that appear too “exotic”. It must be said that for English-speaking people “exotic” seems to mean anything coming from outside of their geographical borders. I once heard a British editor talk about picture books in England and she was very concerned about the representation of power sockets on walls. “What if an American illustrator includes an American power socket in the image? How are British children going to understand that it’s a power socket?”. Honestly, I laughed. I really think that adults can sometimes underestimate children’s ability to decode the world. Also, I’m not sure how limiting the range of children's experience will help them improve their skills.

In conclusion, being a children’s writer means coming up with a good story, writing it with competence, trying to be original while avoiding all the obstacles to marketability, and considering children’s abilities as perceived by adults. An interesting lesson for whoever thinks that writing for children is a stroll in Wonderland...

*Heath and Wolf, 2012

It's all about trust

Having spent 10 years trying to guess the needs of the publishing market, and fulfill its expectations rather than my own, I'm feeling over-inspired for perhaps the first time in my working life. Writing a creative dissertation requires you to be... well, creative! Not creative in that I'm-trying-to-fool-the-marketing-office way, but creative like a person (an artist?) who doesn’t need to sell her work to survive. Wooooo! How liberating (and ephemeral).

I decided to make the adaptation of my banned novel more interesting than a plain novella, because I didn’t like the idea of summarising the story just to fit it into the word-count. I wanted a new life for Aleksandra and the other characters, a life with fewer boundaries. I remembered what Noga, the marker on my Creative Writing course, said about my short story: you didn’t trust the reader enough. Trust is a word I’ve come across so many times during these two academic years at Roehampton. Trust the reader. Trust the author. It's so true. Trust is the secret.

Perhaps I didn’t trust my readers enough because I’m an Italian children’s writer. I don’t know about other countries, but in Italy the age group is often artificially raised. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness? In the UK it is marketed as +11, in Italy it’s a YA. The curious incident of the dog in the nightime? In the UK it’s a classic of children’s literature, in Italy (drum roll) it’s in the adult list. So maybe we get  accustomed to dumbing down stories for children. But this time, I decided, I will trust my readers. Who in this case are also my markers.

So I’m composing a fake dossier of both real and fictional material: pictures, videos, fake police investigative interviews, real articles, fake articles, letters, emails, a song in mp3, and much more. In this way the writer (me) becomes one of the characters, the one who’s collecting evidence for the fictional story (Aleksandra’s) using also non-fictional elements. Sound complicated? It’s not! It’s just exciting, and the characters feel much more alive. Because I blurred the boundaries between real and not real. Could this be defined as literary “docufiction”?

Today I also tried to jot down some poems. As if I were Aleksandra, after the trial, sharing my thoughts with Manuela the writer. Manuela had contacted Aleksandra suggesting she write something herself and here it is, a sixteen-year-old girl’s poems:

1

I am the ghost you never see,

I walk, I eat, I breathe,

one in a million girls like me.

  

 2

When the judge stared at me

What did she see?

A whore,

a moth, a wasted being?

I stared back at her, though.

What did I see?

An adult who’s never been naked

In front of a crowd

Who’s never been branded

Like a fucking cow.

 3

The first kiss was on my boob.

The second, on my butt.

The third, on my vag.

This is the fairy tale of sleeping beauties

Who’ll never wake up.

David and Melvin

When it comes to names and titles, British etiquette can be extremely familiar, and that’s taken some getting used to.

I had to call the director of the NCRCL at Roehampton “Lisa”. My lecturers were Alison, Jane, Clementine, rather than professor Surname. At first it was distressing. Weren’t British people supposed to be big fans of class distinction? So how come they won’t have a title before their names? Or are titles a prerogative of Lords and Ladies? Oh, hi Lisa (sweating).

Then I enrolled on a workshop taught by David Almond. I want to write that again: David Almond. The great children’s writer who won the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2010. My knees were like pizza dough when I took my place with a dozen other students round a table with him. Showing up at a creative writing course when you are not a native-speaker comes across as either very brave or very presumptuous, depending on how the native participants like foreigners worming their way into the British cultural system. So you are really excited but tense. And on top of that, you’re expected to say David to the writer you would naturally address as Master, with a bow, like in Star Wars or some fantasy saga. It sounded so wrong to me. Like calling the Pope Frank.

Of course it’s not the British who are to blame. Italians seem so easy-going until you find out they have a weakness for the feudal system and the more titles you can add to your name, the bigger the reverence other people will show you. A degree in something or other is enough to be called “dottore” (doctor). All teachers are professors. And if you are an engineer, nobody will ever call you by your first name again: you will be “ingegner”+Surname. Despite 3,3 million unemployed, we have a great many titles to indicate different professionals.

After a while, though, I thought I was beginning to relax about all this. Until I had to speak to Melvin Burgess on Skype. Hi, Melvin.

In the selfie below, you can see my face 4 seconds before he called.

BTW, thank you to Roehampton University for
that amazing opportunity ! I love (Mr) Melvin (Burgess)!

The stork (i.e. Sex and Gatekeepers)

I imagine I’m kissing his lips, that makes it easier and hearing him sigh with pleasure makes me go on even though my jaw’s hurting and, at times, I feel like I can’t breathe. He places a hand on my shoulder, stroking my hair, pushing my head down gently.

“Take everything off,” he murmurs, and I obey. He touches me, still groaning, and I want to make love to him, whatever happens, but I keep kissing him between his legs until he asks me, in a strangled voice: “All the way? Can I?”

I go red. I don’t really know what he means. So I just smile and he takes it as a yes. We go all the way. I’m not sure if I like it to be honest, I don’t know if it’s better than the kiss I was expecting, but I do know that, right now, Ruben’s mine and he needs me. While I’ve got my head between his legs, he keeps groaning and saying I'm special and then he has a spasm and liquid fills my mouth.”

            This is a passage from my novel about underage prostitution and grooming girls for sex (chapter 15). Can you guess why parents and teachers didn’t like it? Strong scenes (?), explicit sex, broken taboos, all the ingredients to cause gatekeepers an heart attack. My editor Alessandro, a sweet young man who supported me through the whole writing process, was torn about this novel he had really wanted. When he read the first draft, he phoned me: “I have  bad news and good news. What do you want to hear first?”

“The good news,” I said.

“It’s really the best text by an Italian author I’ve ever read during my career. Yeah, I know it’s not so long, but anyway.”

“So what can possibly be bad about it?”

“It won’t sell.” Full stop.

It didn’t sell. Editors may not be so good at predicting what will sell, but they surely know what won’t. They know gatekeepers, they can feel them breathing down their necks, they know that if you talk about death and/or sex in a children’s book, you’re done for.

            What happens when a brave publisher chooses to take her chances? From that very moment, both editor and author are confronted with censorship. Pre-censorship helps an editor contain the damage. Every time Alessandro called to discuss the novel, I could read between the lines. He was telling me without telling me: “Please, write about sex without writing about sex.” After all, we are fed fairy tales with mother's milk and we learn early on that the curtain must be lowered before the wedding party is over.

More insidious is self-censorship, something that the author inflicts on herself to avoid cuts or heavy revisions. It doesn’t matter that you vividly remember how straightforward it was to talk about sex during your childhood and teenage years, and how your friends loved to be explicit and detailed. Your entire sexual knowledge depended on that frankness, but as an author you know that adults often don’t like the combination children+frankness+sex. They seem to prefer children+innocence+the stork.

What is suitable for a child to read? And for a teenager? Why are adults usually indulgent when it comes to TV, internet and videogames but then expect children’s books to be reassuring? (Sorry, I censored myself; what I meant was: then expect children’s books to lie to children in order to fake the innocence that is so hard to find in real life...). I’m collecting answers to these questions for my dissertation. If you want to give your contribution, I’ll be happy! But don’t tell me that children are vulnerable angels because one of my favourite pastimes as a little girl was to play at HELL: I would be Satan and my little friends were the damned in the deepest circle of hell. I’m serious. Really.

Pixar's stork in "Partly Cloudy".