I’ve just finished writing the synopsis for the third novel in the Sesame Seade series, Scam on the Cam. Those things are never easy, especially with very intricate plots (I like very intricate plots), but they’re as necessary to a novel as IKEA furniture is to a new house. And that’s not the only thing they’ve got in common. Here’s more, in 20 ‘easy’ steps.

1. They require fitting together lots of bits and bobs that you had lying around in different places and had no idea what went where, before you read…
2. … the instructions – also known as: your jotted-down notes on a tiny Moleskine – gleefully illustrated, that must have made sense some time in the faraway past but don’t anymore. Therefore you’re going to follow the most understandable ones, but for the rest…
3. … improvise. Especially as that tool that screws something into place on Step 3 doesn’t work at all for Step 9, unless you sort of hold it at a different angle and help it fit with an old kitchen knife…
4. … ouch. Erm, what the hell are all those random pieces that fit nowhere?
5. … and why the hell has that flimsy thing on Step 6 completely gone loose all of a sudden?
6. … dammit, it’s bigger than I thought.
7. … except that part, which is surprisingly short – I’m sure that’s not what I had in mind…
8. … I know – what if I started with the last steps and then worked my way backwards? YES, it works!
9. … nope, it doesn’t. Ah, wait, now it sort of does: it’s a bit wobbly, but let’s say it’s fine…
10. … except that I somehow need to move that piece I’ve already used in Step 21 back to Step 4.
11. … *huge racket signalling the heavy collapse of something studded with metal*
12. …That’s it, I’ll never be able to salvage it. Why, why? Why am I so useless? What basic motorskills do I lack? What part of my brain has stopped working? I knew I wasn’t ever made to do this; I knew it was too complicated for me. I’m such a fraud. O cruel object, I had such grand designs for you… Such wonderful ideas of how to decorate you, how to make you mine, how to get people to like you! It’s all gone now, gone! I’m going to chuck you in the bin! *kicks it feriously*
13. *clunky noise* Oh, what’s that piece?
14. Could it be the one that was missing from Step 3…?
15. YES! IT WORKS!
16. IT WORKS! Look at it! Look! Look! I’ve done it! DONE DONE DONE! Ta-dah!
17. Can now go and sleep. The work is done, my friends.
18. Except the whole place is in a huge mess. Will deal with it tomorrow.
19. Next day: damn. The work is not actually done. I now need to put things in it, and on it, and decorate it, and make it mine. This is just the… *gulp*… beginning.
20. God. The whole structure’d better not crumble down on me the minute I try to put a tiny little thing on it. Let’s see…

… Oh, a monkey in a coat. Wait, what?

Clem x

Note: this blog post follows from that one.

Back to our conversation on the death of the author. Last time, I’d left you with a breathtaking cliffhanger:

What happens when the critic enters the scene???!

This question is at the heart of a recent academic article by Catherine Butler (a British researcher in children’s literature) published in Children’s Literature in Education and entitled ‘Critiquing Calypso: Authorial and Academic Bias in the Reading of a Young Adult Novel’. It’s accessible here, but only if you’re logged in through your university (grrr… don’t get me started on the topic of access to academic journals).

In this article, Butler, who happens to be both an academic in children’s literature and a fiction-writer, analyses the analysis of one of her novels (Calypso Dreaming) made by four Olympians of children’s literature criticism in an academic volume.

Butler rejects the Barthesian notion that the author of a work is the least well-placed person to talk about it critically – ‘not because authors of fiction lack bias or a stake in promoting
certain ways of understanding their texts’, she says, ‘but because bias is the universal condition
of critical reading.’

As she demonstrates, very detachedly and with careful argumentation, there’s no reason to believe that the writer’s opinion on their work is any more biased than the critic’s. The death of the author, which, as Barthes wishes, gives rise to ‘the birth of the critic’, only signals the dawn of another supreme authority on the text. Criticism remains a non-neutral, creative form of writing.  Both writer and critic have an agenda.

It may sound obvious to anyone who’s ever done literary analysis, but it’s actually quite rarely spelt-out in this context. When we ‘debate’ critical readings of a text, we generally mean that we’re comparing two interpretations of a text by two different critics – not that we think that the author could have a say. A good author is a dead author. Repeat.

And yet, when we try to ignore the author’s opinion on their works, we’re willingly setting aside a specific critical reading informed by specific, albeit partly non-academic, sources. But the author, as Butler argues, is largely considered in the Ivory Tower to be narcissistic, incapable of self-criticism, oblivious of what they’re doing. This vision might come from, as she notes in an earlier article, a traditional disdain of the intellectual for the ‘artisan’.

And let’s be honest, it’s true that when Stephenie Meyer says about Twilight that if she’s writing that a vampire wants to drink blood, that’s exactly what she means, and where are we getting all this rape imagery from?, well, we’re justified in thinking that-

But meanwhile, there’s Vladimir Nabokov, A.S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, J.R.R. Tolkien, Philip Pullman, Jean-Paul Sartre, and dozens of others who were or are both literary critics and fiction-writers and might have a few interesting things to say about their work – at least as much as the next Doctor in Literature who critiques it.

Plus, this realm of the critic since the second half of the 20th century isn’t exactly the clear, detached, passion-free enterprise that we’d like to think. It’s full of dark desires. Barthes was a frustrated fiction-writer, of course – there’s no book that yearns to be a novel more than The Pleasure of the Text – and by killing the author, he managed to promote himself magically as the new big authority.

Those who are both authors and critics know it better than anyone: whatever you do, you’ll always be trapped in the same themes and motifs. Childhood, power, time – that’s my own thematic triangle, which I reiterate again and again throughout both my academic and my creative writings. As Butler says, the only difference is that these obsessions express themselves with a slight variation from one type of writing to the other:

I write about this in academic texts, but I write through it in fiction

If the writer’s discourse on their books is intelligent, informed, pertinent, critical, then it’s not justifiable to leave it at the door of the Tower.

And anyway, this barrier between the critical and the creative doesn’t even exist anymore on the Internet. On my Twitter feed I can see Margaret Atwood answering readers’ questions, aspiring writers asking for help with character names or plot elements, established children’s authors commenting on their current project. The work is being critiqued as it is being written. The author isn’t a Stieg-Larssonnesque figure, brutally dying after leaving their manuscript on the doorstep of their publisher. They’re there all the time, before, during and after the writing, and their discourse, whether helpful or completely silly, is available in real time for everybody.

The author is the elephant in the room. And guess where the ivory came from to build that Tower?

You don’t mention the author’s intentions in literary criticism; it’s taboo. The Qwerty fairy is allergic to it. Try to write ‘what the author is saying here…’ and your mouse will bite you. The Text can say something; but the author is dead.

Yes, dead – we’ve got Roland Barthes to blame the murder on, but we’re all complicit.

Anyway, the big problem that we children’s literature scholars – and writers – face is that this convenient death of the author becomes extremely problematic when dealing with children’s books. A children’s book politicises, socialises, encultures the child reader – a reader almost devoid of powers on the public scene. With that in mind, can the responsible critic leave aside this aspect of children’s literature and not take into account the authors’ and creators’ intentions when studying a children’s book?

Two articles I read recently made me want to explore that question a little bit further.

But first, an anecdote.

Last summer, I was on a school visit in France to talk about one of my children’s novels, Les petites filles top-modèles, and the teacher in one of the classes had made them think really hard about the book. The young teens (they were 11-12 years old) had tons of questions – so many that I had to leave before they could ask them all. Just as I was getting ready to go, the teacher said to the kids:

It’s a shame you didn’t have time to ask Miss Beauvais all the questions you’d prepared. For instance, you were all very interested to learn more about the suicide scene.

Me:

The WHAT scene??

Just to contextualise things a little bit, Les petites filles top-modèles is a humorous teenage novel about a young top-model girl who wakes up one morning with a pimple on her nose. There’s as much suicide in there as there are homicidal maniacs in Spot Bakes a Cake.

At least, that’s what I thought.

Because – and I’m going to try not to spoil my own book, which would be a little bit silly – there is indeed a scene where my young heroine, Diane, throws herself into a canal. But…?!

Me:

But it’s not at all a suicide attempt, it’s like, well, sort of like a rite of purification, a, a… a baptism, a kind of rejuvenating ritual with a spiritual slant more or less inspired from St John the Baptist but more fun and girly… you see?!

Nope, they didn’t. Because for them, it was a suicide attempt – a failed one, a failed and funny one, but a suicide attempt all the same. That’s how they’d read it.

I was a little spooked, because suicide isn’t a theme I’d joke about, especially in children’s literature – I can’t stand the countless irresponsible teenage novels that present it as a glamorous add-on to adolescent crises. I’d never, ever do that.

But whether or not I’d intended to do it, that’s how they’d interpreted it.

Now, the Spooked Author has two ways of decoding the situation:

1) They didn’t read my book properly.

2) I didn’t write my book properly.

The first one is the more tempting, of course. In high school I had an English teacher who was also a cursed poet and kept saying things like ‘Readers are stupid, you know; they’re incapable of understanding what I mean when I say this or that.’ As a fledgling writer with no readers at the time, I would happily have strangled him with his eternal bow-tie. But I digress.

Personally, I tend to opt for the latter: that’s it, I completely failed to ‘make them see’ what I ‘intended to convey’. I didn’t have bad intentions, but I was misinterpreted. I messed up. What a loser.

In his academic article on ‘Intention’, in Keywords For Children’s Literature (edited by Philip Nel & Lissa Paul), Philip Pullman tackles this painful question. He notes that there is a huge chasm between the general public, who is constantly in demand of authorial intentions (‘How did you get the idea for this book?!’) and the English literature scholars who would happily disembowel themselves with their copy of The Riverside Chaucer rather than ask the dreaded question.

As usual, the right attitude is probably somewhere in between, and in this case, as Pullman puts it with his usual elegance, the author never really has intentions; it is probably more accurate to call them hopes.

‘All we can honestly intend to do is try‘

In short, whether or not we’re intending to do something specific, it’s very likely that it’s going to fail. But thank goodness that’s the case, because that allows the reader to emerge as an active participant in the reading event. The reader’s interpretation may be far-fetched or crazy or boring but it constructs the text. This interpretation depends on dozens of things, from the context of reading to the community of readers through to what basic background knowledge of the theme the reader has. It depends, of course, on the worries and desires of every particular reader, and that’s something the author can never anticipate.

So my teens who got all intrigued by the ‘suicide scene’ were probably predisposed to ‘see’ suicide in places that I would never think about.

The author’s intention can be ‘good’ but have disastrous results, and we can’t hide behind the notion that we ‘didn’t do it on purpose’. As Pullman says, in any other circumstance – if I accidentally drop a brick from my window and it falls on my neighbour’s car – whether or not I did it on purpose doesn’t change anything to the state of the windscreen.

Oh but I didn’t do it on purpose!

It’s also Sartre’s vision in What Is Literature?, and maybe one day I’ll get into that on this blog.

Anyway, the children’s writer, in my view, has a specific responsibility towards her readership and must think about this distance between intention and interpretation. But only to a certain extent. Because the reader, especially the young reader, can’t be seen as a monolithic, predictable entity. We have to accept – and celebrate – the fact that the reading experience, for better and for worse, will be full of unplanned interpretations.

That’s all for now. In the next blog post on this topic I’ll talk about the second article that made me think today- about the sometimes tense relationship between author and literary critic…

Considering it can get a little tiring to put up with the little coughs and frilled-up nostrils of an elitist snob fatefully sat next to you at a Formal Dinner once you’ve confessed to him that you like, read and write books for children, here are a few ready-made answers to help you counter his fearsomely annoying questions with awesome sprezzatura.

Snob: Ahem ahem, but then, well, as it were, do you intend, one day, to, one could say, start writing for adults?

You: Oh yes, of course, fret not! I mean, I’m barely past puberty now, but once maturity kicks in, I’ll be learning new vocabulary and sentence structures to appeal to adults. It’s like paediatricians, you know, they’re all waiting for the day that they get clever enough to cure adults, because giving medicine to sprogs isn’t exactly serious.

Snob: Oh, very well; nonetheless, all those books for, erm… what is the correct terminology?

You: Children?

Snob: Quite – all those books, they are simply detestable! That… that ‘Twilight’ thing, or whatever it is called, and which of course I have never opened, is utterly terrible.

You: How shrewd of you to judge a whole art form based on the one book that you often hear about in the media. Twilight is indeed entirely representative of the whole of children’s literature, just like Dan Brown is the shining symbol of adult literature.

Snob: Well, my dear, all I have to say is, when I was a… a… erm…

You: Child?

Snob: That’s right; well, no let’s say, at the time in my life when I was slightly less tall than this table, I barely read all that stuff, I immediately went on to reading Defoe and Dickens, I didn’t waste time with those stupidities!

You: My word aren’t you bright. I think I’m falling in love. Anyway, yes, you’re right: the purpose of children’s literature is of course to help children upgrade illico presto to adult literature. I’m thinking, actually, of organising intensive summer camps for young readers where they’ll read a book a day, of increasing difficulty, until they finally manage to get through Of Mice and Men and graduate. Minimal waste of time.

Snob: I certainly do not mean to offend you, but it saddens me, you see, that adults like you spend time working on those silly things. I mean, perhaps it might be time to grow up soon, mightn’t it?

You: Clearly. The causal link between level of maturity and interest in children’s literature is obvious. Similarly, I sometimes think to myself that paleontologists should evolve a little bit, because their interest in prehistorical things, well, it’s fun for a little while but we’ve reached a higher level of development since, haven’t we?

Snob: My dear, dear friend, what I do not quite understand is that you are so gifted! Why waste your talent in that? There are so many things you could do!

You: By Jove, that is true! Talent is, as everyone knows, available in limited quantities, and writing for children squanders it voraciously whereas writing for adults magically multiplies it. I’m going to end up bankrupt soon. Quick, let’s write a dark, nostalgic short story about the menopause to top up my account.

Snob: Well, anyway, as everyone knows, it is but a mawkish, tepid literature full of flowers, rainbows and little rabbits. Anyone can write a book for children in two minutes on the corner of a café table.

You: Indeed, and one wonders why some spend more than twenty minutes on such things! They must be profoundly mentally retarded. Here, have a napkin and a Biro. I just can’t wait to read your story. And then we’ll send it to Bloomsbury, ok? They’ll love the adventures of Pansy the pansy and Ben the Bunny in the land of Colours.

Hopefully those little tips will help you survive until dessert.

Clem x

Ah the joys of self-promotion. When my first book was published in 2010, I didn’t tell anyone on Facebook until the day it was published. That day I suddenly came up with a little Facebook status saying ‘Hey everyone, hi, how’s it going, well, I don’t like doing this at all, but, like, today I have a book out,  no pressure, but if you want to check it out, I’ve written about it on my blog. Sorry about the inconvenience!!!’. Or something of the sort.

People were understandably a little bit surprised.

But then I learnt. I became Facebook friends with other authors and illustrators. I opened a Twitter account. I started following blogs. And I quickly lost my innocence, shyness, humility and reserve. Forever.

Me, Before.

Me, After.

Because when 70% of all tweets, Facebook statuses and blog posts from your fellow writers and illustrators are about A New Review of Their Book, A New Interview of Them, A New Article about Them and A New Award They’re Nominated For, you quickly lose your little complexes and start doing exactly the same thing.

And we do it partly because we have to – because publishers these days see writers as prodigious multitaskers. We’re expected to sell our books, not just write them. We’re expected to get people excited about them, we’re expected to talk about them and we’re expected to be as visible as possible. It’s not just a question of money, it goes beyond that: if your books don’t sell, if you’re not visible, your future books might not even ever find a publisher. So get promoting.

But for goodness’s sake, within reason. I’m generally fine with the ocean of more or less humble bragging which I wade through everyday on my Twitter and Facebook accounts, and which I enthusiastically contribute to. I now find it completely legit to tweet and facebook new blog posts, interviews, big news, and big reviews. I know some people disagree, but I personally think it’s fair enough.

But there should be a special part of that ocean in which to drown those authors who outbrag everyone else in the most ludicrous ways imaginable.

1) Those who retweet every single snippet of praise they get.

Aww thanks! <3 <3 RT@randomreader hey i liked ur book

I’m so glad you did 🙂 RT@somereader your book is funny! I loled

So sweet thank you!! RT@readeranonymous looking forward to your next book

That is the equivalent of having dinner in crowded restaurant and sporadically shouting out at the top of your voice:

“So adorable!! Laura’s just told me ‘That’s a lovely dress you’re wearing!'”

“Ohhh thank you very much Sam for telling me ‘You chose exactly the right wine!'”

“I’m so so so SO touched by what Fiona’s just said! She said “You’ve always been a good friend to me”!’

People will look at you like you’re bloody mental. Okay, someone’s praised you in a public space where other people might overhear. But when did that suddenly become the equivalent of  ‘please take my praise and broadcast it to your 250 followers’? What even is the point? If I follow you, I probably like you already or think I might do in the future. Why would @purplegothreader1995’s cryptic and frankly quite uninteresting praise of your book make me like you more?

But there’s worse.

2) Those who share fan mail and emails.

You get an email/letter from little Zoe, 9 years old, whom you met a few months ago on a school visit. She says thank you for coming to visit, it was great to meet you, here’s a drawing, please come back, etc. Huge ego boost + mood enhanced for the rest of the day. But it’s not enough, oh no. Some people have to post it, the whole integral letter or email, to Facebook, Twitter and their blog.

What the? Hello?

I mean, it’s an email, right? a letter, right? you had to type in your password to access it, or open your postbox with a key, right? I know little Zoe hasn’t technically said ‘Please, Mrs Author, don’t use this private communication for means of self-promotion’, but what makes you think it’s ok to do so? And blurring out the name of the kid on the letter doesn’t make it right, you know. She wrote it to you, not to your followers and facebook friends. Is it fine to share it? Search your soul, if there’s still such a thing among the publicity-obsessed circonvolutions of your brain. You horrible child-eater you. You ogre.

3) Those who tweet and facebook about every single little thing.

12.31. Invitation to do a school visit! yay!

12.34. Fun to open email from editor and get new illustrations. Happy!

12.40. New blog post already has 12 comments 🙂

12.42. 13 comments now! 🙂 🙂

12.48. Email from agent – discussing next book series! exciting lol

12.52. Oh new review of my book here!

The truth is, every single day in the life of a writer has lots of cool little things happening in it. Little. Things. Not all of them tweetworthy. And all of them put together tweedious in the extreme. Save them up for a weekly blog post, select the best ones, or if you really need the sugar rush then write them in chocolate on a ribbon of marzipan and stuff your face with it, but for heaven’s sake spare us the incontinent bragging.

Or at least be clever and spread it out between non-self-promoting tweets.

I’m going to shut up soon. Just to say that’s it’s unbelievably, scarily, depressingly easy to become that kind of writer, and frankly quite distressing when you used to be a shy, introspective, humble person and all of a sudden you find yourself tempted to post to Twitter the contents of a private email you just got. I guess the thing to remember is that people aren’t going to love you less if you don’t post it; they just won’t know about that particular thing. It’s ok. They don’t need it to love you. In theory. If they do, you have bigger things to worry about.

Clem x

Just a short blog post to tell Anglophone children’s literature friends about Georges Chaulet, who, it was announced today, died a week ago. I can’t define him any more evocatively than by saying that he was the French Astrid Lindgren.

Georges Chaulet wrote a series of books from the 1960s onwards called the Fantômette series, starring a young superheroine – but not of the kind that has superpowers bestowed upon her; one who knows how to fight, use her brain, speak several languages, investigate, and hide her secret. Narratively speaking, the series is extremely interesting because although it is clear to the reader that the elusive Fantômette is in fact one of the girls in the main trio of characters, it is never spelled out and the other two girls are blissfully unaware of this fact.

Fantômette was the first truly feminist series for children, unobtrusively normalising the portrayal of a strong, decisive, fun, adventurous female character. It is also a truly hilarious series, and I mean ‘laugh-out-loud until your belly aches’ hilarious. Pippi, Jennings, Fantômette: the trio of characters that made my childhood ache with laughter.

I collect old editions of Fantômette, and the series built my identity much more than I can say. My little Sesame Seade, the heroine of my children’s series coming out with Hodder, is unashamedly inspired by Fantômette; in many ways I see her as a British version of Chaulet’s 1960s heroine.

Georges Chaulet was 81 and I’m sure he had a long and fulfilling life; still I’m feeling today as saddened by his death as I was by Astrid Lindgren’s death when I was still only a child.

Clem x