Author Annie Barrows will be visiting Morgantown on October 17 to do a reading at 7:30 p.m. in the Milano Reading
Room in the downtown WVU library.
Annie is the author of multiple children and adult books including Ivy + Bean, The Magic Half, Magic in the Mix, The Truth According To Us, and The Guernsey Literary and Peel and Potato Peel Pie Society. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Mills College and previously worked as Senior Editor at Chronicle Books.
She was nice enough to discuss what it’s like writing for two very different audiences in advance of her reading.
Q: “What is the biggest difference between writing for children and adults?”
A: Adults generally don’t start crying because they’re hungry in the middle of a reading. That’s a big difference.
But, as usual, the real answer is more complicated.
All stories have the same general shape (a mountain), even if an author gets tricky and runs the story backwards or from the middle out (in which case it’s shaped like a volcano, still a mountain). So you could say that geometrically, writing for kids is similar to writing for adults.
You could say that, but it would be a fraud, because that’s the only similarity. Everything else is different. The differences come in various sizes: small, medium, and large. For example, word-choice. I consider this to be small, as problems go. I can’t use the word cuspidor in a kids’ book. So what? I’d probably think twice before I’d use it in a book for grownups, too. But the issue of word-choice really means—watch the small difference become medium-sized—that I have to consider, when writing for kids, how much my audience knows, which is less, usually, than I know. And now the medium-sized difference grows large: the essential, inescapable fact is that when I write for kids, I am writing for someone I no longer am. I can’t write about things as I think about them; I’m obliged to translate into the language of children. But not everything is translatable, and some words and ideas are deemed inappropriate for translation by the parents and teachers who determine what children are allowed and/or encouraged to read. (This, too, is a difference: the person who reads kids’ book is not the person who decides to buy them.)
But the biggest difference, the gaping chasm, between writing for these two audiences is what they want when they pick up a book. Kids don’t want anything. At least, they don’t want anything specific from the book. They might want to get their parents off their backs about reading, but they don’t expect the book to be a certain way (unless it’s part of a series) or to fit into a known category. Most kids haven’t had enough reading experience to separate books into categories, much less to determine the category they prefer and judge a book on the basis of whether it succeeds or fails to properly inhabit the category they anticipated. They don’t, until they’re around eleven (girls) or sixteen (boys), conceive of books as emblems of self, shorthand for their characteristics and aspirations. Little kids are the great practitioners of negative capability—not only can they live in uncertainties, most of them can’t live anywhere else because they don’t command sufficient information, either about themselves or the world, to demand conformity with expectation. Lucky them. Lucky them, except this is precisely why reading is hard for kids: every time they pick up a book, it could be anything. Every time, the learning curve is perpendicular (unless it’s part of a series—which explains the popularity of kids’ series).
Grownups have learned a number of tricks to help them avoid this kind of labor: they select books by authors whose previous works they’ve enjoyed; they peruse the reviews on the back cover and the tempting flap copy; they assess the picture on the cover and the photo of the author on the back flap; without necessarily knowing it, they are allured (or not) by the typeface of the title. If, after all this, the book still remains opaque, the potential reader can break down and read the first page. Instead of having to read the book to know what it’s about, grownups often have to know what it’s about before they decide to read it. That way they know what to expect. And that, right there, is the problem. After all their detective work, adults are outraged if the book turns out to be different than they expected. In some cases, their criteria for judging the book is whether it conformed to their expectations, which is really quite odd when you think about it, and quite beside the point. If you extend the argument, you realize, in fact, that knowing how you’ll experience a story before it begins is antithetical to the purpose of story-telling.