I wanted to take the time to reply to an article published in ‘Intelligent Life’, which a Facebook friend of mine mentioned to me recently.

The article, written by Malika Browne, and theatrically entitled ‘Why there’s no French Harry Potter’, is an extremely uninformed opinion piece, of the ‘as a parent, I…’ type, about the assumed ‘dearth’ of ‘good’ French literature since Astérix, The Little Prince and Babar (which apparently were adult books anyway).

She also deplores ‘a baffling number of books about wolves’. (here, Claude Ponti)

The following response might not be devoid of snark and sourness, but I hope it addresses fairly the points raised by Ms Browne. I recognise that of course my point of view is biased, as both an author of French books and a children’s literature scholar, and since I’m not a parent, there’s clearly some mystical misunderstanding of children in there too. But please bear with me. You may pick and choose the points I’ve addressed, since the whole post is quite long, and I’ve tried to sum up Ms Browne’s arguments so you don’t need to refer back to her article all the time.

At the end of the post you will find a whimsical and subjective selection of what Ms Browne says doesn’t exist, i.e. funny, witty, sweet contemporary children’s books in French.

– As a parent, I…

You know an article is going to be of excellent journalistic standard when it begins with a paragraph explaining that it stems from the journalist’s children not liking something, thereby sending their investigative-minded genitor on a quest for a rational and universal explanation for that dislike.

In this particular case, Ms Browne’s children apparently do not like French (picture)books as much as The Tiger Who Came to Tea. A justification for this dislike has to be found and formulated in absolute terms, omitting to mention the strange correlation with the fact that Mummy doesn’t seem that keen on those books to start with.

The ‘as a parent’ argument (argumentum ad having-successfully-reproducedum) is one of the most hopelessly boring, relentlessly repetitive argument we hear in all conferences and seminars. There might be a thousand and one reasons why Chloe and Lucas don’t like something, but since there’s no way the little cherubs can ever be wrong or influenced by other people, their dislike has to be subsumed by some intrinsic flaw in what they don’t like. This is the narcissistic premise of Ms Browne’s whole article, and it’s a tiresomely predictable one.

– ‘French children’s books seem aimed more at adults than children.’

Oh hello argumentum ad this-is-an-adult-bookum. It perfectly sums up Ms Browne’s whole article, which is scintillatingly anti-intellectual and relentlessly ageist.

She points out that France has some nice classics, like Babar (she finds it ‘patronising’ and ‘colonialist’, though, which are, ironically, two adjectives I’d gladly apply to her own article), The Little Prince, and Astérix. She then asserts categorically that The Little Prince is ‘rendered … opaque by its abstract philosophising’, and that’s the end of the story. This is one of the many occurrences in the article when it is clear that her literary standards are quite low, and/or that she does not believe children to be capable of reading complex texts.

Her ‘argument’ about Astérix is incorrect, absurd and frankly quite insulting:

“Asterix” is different, with its uncharacteristic, word-based wit and self-deprecating Frenchness. But it belongs to the bande dessinée category—a quite different sector, distinctly Francophone and mainly aimed at adults. Its writer, René Goscinny, may have written in French, but he was born to Polish immigrant parents and only moved to France at the age of 25. So perhaps it is the exception that proves the rule.

No, the bande dessinée (comics) category is in no way a ‘different sector’, ‘mainly aimed at adults’. Kids avidly read comics, and of course they avidly read Astérix, but also the Smurfs, Tintin of course, and more contemporary ones like Titeuf. The bande dessinée industry relies greatly on the child part of its audience.

No, Astérix is in no way ‘uncharacteristic’ because of its ‘word-based wit’ and ‘self-deprecating Frenchness’. French children’s literature is full of ‘word-based wit’, if she would take the time to look. Every child of my generation in France has read Le Prince de Motordu, by Pef, which delightfully plays on words that sound the same. The Fantômette series by George Chaulet is full of wordplay and humour. The Little Nicholas series by René Goscinny and Sempé is not only hilarious, but also a decidedly ‘self-deprecating’ look at the middle classes of the 1960s. And nowadays, French children’s literature is more playful than ever with language – cf. the list at the end of this blogpost.

Her final ‘argument’ about Goscinny being Polish (and therefore native French children’s authors can’t be funny) is so despicable that I won’t even deign comment on it.

– ‘When I ask French friends if they agree, they respond in the same puzzled way as when I mention the French practice of no school on Wednesdays, of flunked students retaking the school year or the national fondness for suppositories.’

This sentence, among others, betrays particularly clearly how much the author is speaking from an Anglocentric position (I don’t know, by the way, whether she is French or not; but even in the former case it wouldn’t mean she can’t be anglocentric of course).

To a French person, there is nothing absurd in the idea of ‘flunked students retaking the school year’, because the whole school system is designed to allow for this possibility (students can skip years too). Ms Browne is here relying on a reaction of surprise and/ or mild condescendence, but this statement is only surprising for, guess what, people who aren’t used to this educational system. As for suppositories, you can shove that national stereotype in whichever bodily orifice you prefer. Only small children are administered it, it’s not exactly a daily activity for the over-6.

Anyway, ‘asking (random) French friends’ about contemporary children’s literature is a fairly idiotic thing to do. I don’t ‘ask British friends’ about contemporary British music or about contemporary British cars because there’s 99% chance that they’ll have no idea. And yes, even parents – it’s an amazing fact that becoming a parent doesn’t seem to endow you suddenly with a good knowledge of contemporary children’s literature. It has even been suggested that parents tend to go back to classics they read as a kid, or to pick randomly from what seems to be popular at the moment – incredible, I know.

It’s a rara avis in the land of parenthood who takes the time to read specialist magazines and blogs on children’s literature. And I don’t know who she’s talking to, but if Ms Browne doesn’t actually live in France, the friends she’s asking are likely to be fairly unaware of what’s getting published hic et nunc.

– Getting tense: French books tend to use the ‘difficult’ tense of the passé simple

Ms Browne is bamboozled, apparently, that people writing in a language that has a specific past tense especially designed to tell stories use this tense to tell stories.

It is a fairly difficult tense, don’t get me wrong. But you do have to learn it at some point, so why not earlier rather than later? And at six years old I had no particular problem with it, and later wrote stories using it. It’s depressing to hear, once again, such an anti-intellectual statement: something is difficult, therefore it’s not fun.

However, Ms Browne should be reassured to hear that – to the despair of many – the passé simple is used less and less these days in both adult and children’s literature. One day it will disappear, and Ms Browne’s happy land of absolute simplicity will be born, just right for her literary, linguistic and cultural standards.

– It is difficult to be poetic for children in French.

This is such a ludicrous argument – presented, to be fair, in the form of a rhetorical question – that I actually laughed out loud. But I am stunned that a magazine calling itself ‘intelligent’ okayed this sentence without raising an eyebrow. Ms Browne wonders out loud whether it could be that French, ‘with many words ending in a silent “e”, and a relatively small vocabulary (it is said to contain a fifth as many words as English), is less conducive to rhyme and puns and onomatopoeia’, explaining the ‘lack of fun in the writing’.

It is news to me that silent ‘e’s kill all the fun, but then there is one in my own first name, which could explain my complete lack of humour. As for the ‘relatively small vocabulary’, I will venture to argue that French publishing is much more tolerant of authors using a very big part of that vocabulary, while UK and US publishing tends to be more afraid of big words.

Anyway, I refer Ms Browne to my upcoming picturebook Lettres de mon hélicoptêtre, published by Sarbacane in 2014, which should do exactly the kind of thing she’s looking for in terms of wordplay, alliterations, assonance and rhyme. In the meantime, she is welcome to take a look at the list of picturebooks I have provided at the end of this blog post.

– ‘The British market is richly supplied without needing to import books’

No, that’s absolutely incorrect. The British market HAS DECIDED that it is richly supplied without needing to import books.

It’s not a fact; it’s a commercial decision subsumed by the very dubious sociocultural statement that the UK and the US are able to be culturally autarchic. French publishers, like, in fact, publishers from all non-English-speaking countries, import books in English and books in other languages, because beyond the commercial viability of this model there is also the assumption that children will benefit from encountering books from different cultures, and will be able to.

The hermetism of the UK/US market to books from other countries is something to be deplored and fought against, not something to be celebrated as evidence of awesome creative self-sufficiency on their part. This argument makes me weep.

– French children’s literature is didactic and dark

Absolutely, it is dark. I don’t think we’re on the same wavelength there, Ms Browne and I, so I won’t bother to argue, but when she says that many French books don’t have a happy ending, she seems to see it as a problem, whereas I dance around my living-room with aesthetic joy. But that’s a question of personal taste, and also something that probably gets modified once you have children who might wake up in the night with nightmares and monopolise half of your bed. But yes, French books are darker than UK/US books, I don’t deny it.

But Ms Browne then produces a magnificent argument from authority, using a quotation from an Irish mother based in Paris (note, again, the superb ‘as as parent, I…’), saying that classic children’s book Les Malheurs de Sophie ‘leaves readers with emotional despair’.

Let me resort to an ‘as a reader, I…’ argument. Les Malheurs is one of the most jubilatory books for children in circulation. Each chapter ends badly, yes – the tortoise dies, the little girl is whipped or sick, people do not abide by Health & Safety regulations and are punished. But the important aspect of it is that for the 20 pages or so of each chapter Sophie does whatever she wants – deliciously transgressively, deliciously cruelly, deliciuosly darkly. What’s a punishment that takes place in two lines when 20 pages of text and illustrations have shown us the crime?

Didacticism is difficult to evaluate. I’m not exactly sure what Ms Browne is referring to here. That there is a moral lesson in many French children’s books is absolutely true, but that’s also true of many UK/ US books, and of many adult books for that matter. I don’t have much time for dubious comparisons as to who’s being more authoritarian than whom internationally. Darkness doesn’t lead to didacticism, just like lightness doesn’t preclude heavy-handed moral messages.

– The French publishing system is very different: authors are paid very little, there are no agents, and children’s literature is respected much less than in the UK/US.

All this is absolutely true, as I’ve written about many times in French as well as in English, for example here.

– There is no French Harry Potter.

We get to the dramatic statement that gave the article its title. ‘There is no French Harry Potter’. Incredible, huh? Let me observe that there is no American Tintin. There is also no Swedish Barack Obama. There is a flagrant lack of Egyptian Miyazaki.

This argument once again evidences the shameless anglocentrism of Ms Browne. She quotes, once again, someone very sympathetic to British interests – the Editorial Director of Gallimard Jeunesse, Christine Baker, who lives in the UK. I have nothing against the idea of quoting Ms Baker, but Ms Browne doesn’t give any voice to other publishers who don’t do their shopping in the UK/US as much, and who privilege French creation. I could volunteer my own, very respected publisher Sarbacane, which doesn’t have the same ethos as Gallimard, and invests much more in French authors than huge international bestsellers.

Now let me set this straight: I adore Harry Potter. Have I ever bemoaned the lack of a French equivalent? No! because this is a British story, not a French story. The great Tobie Lolness (Toby Alone in English), by Timothée de Fombelle, which she mentions, has nothing to do with Harry Potter. It’s a very lazy comparison, of the kind that people do when they say that ‘Hunger Games is the new Harry Potter‘.

Here it’s worth mentioning, once again, the hermetism of the UK/US market to translated books and the lack of recognition of foreign writing. Ms Browne seems to be saying that Toby Alone is one of the rare success stories of French literature in the Anglophone world. It isn’t. Yes, it ‘got an award’, but she forgets to mention it was an award for its translation, by the (consistently amazing) Sarah Ardizzone. Despite critical acclaim,Toby Alone remains virtually unknown in the UK.

Anyway, what Baker and Browne are saying is that there’s no big adventure story saga like Harry Potter in France. It’s true. Is that a problem? Only if you see this type of book as the be-all and end-all of publishing for children. UK/US publishers love big fat adventure stories because it’s part of the historical and cultural tradition of children’s literature here, and also because of Hollywood. Readers are used to these books. Of course, we read them in France too, but we simply have other literary traditions. Discovery of the day: France is not the UK or the US.

– Bayard is the best. ILU Bayard! Bayard <3

There’s one thing Ms Browne loves, though: Bayard Presse. Bayard Presse, as she explains quite well, is a big publishing corporation for quite high-quality literary and entertainment magazines for children:

The other area in which the French lead the way is children’s magazines. Since the  1960s, Bayard Presse has published first-rate magazines that take children from the cradle to university. Widely available at newsstands and supermarkets, titles such as J’aime Lire, Astrapi and Okapi are as intrinsic to a French child’s life as their creaky old classics. They contain a healthy mix of story-telling, science and craft-based activities, all aligned to the national curriculum.

She is right: most kids in France have had a subscription to J’aime Lire, Astrapi or Okapi at some point in their lives. And it’s great – I have wonderful memories of opening the monthly J’aime Lire, reading the novel and doing the games, and now that I’m grown up I’d love to write for them at some point.

But what she sees as a ‘healthy mix’ of various stuff I can’t help seeing as the relatively bland poor relative of the amazing, dynamic, constantly dazzling contemporary French fiction for children which Ms Browne seems to have no knowledge of. Bayard is nice and cute, but it’s not very radical, exciting or interesting. I’m not surprised she likes it, mind you – it’s exactly the kind of benign literature she seems to be yearning for.

But for the more adventurous-minded amongst you, and who are hoping to raise Frenglish kids on a diet of not-just-Charlie-and-Lola, here is a completely subjective selection of fun, exciting, witty, sweet, wonderful contemporary (1980+) books for young readers (picturebooks + early reading) in French. 

NB: AS A GODMOTHER, I can testify that my goddaughter adores many of these books. She doesn’t prefer English picturebooks. QED.

• Gilles Bachelet, Mon chat le plus bête du monde, Seuil, 2004
• Gilles Bachelet, Madame le lapin blanc, Seuil, 2012
• Ramona Badescu & Benjamin Chaud, the Pomelo series, Albin Michel
• Sandrine Beau & Maud Legrand, La girafe en maillot de bain, L’élan vert, 2013
• Alice Brière-Haquet & Olivier Philipponneau, Le ballon de Zébulon, Auzou, 2010
• Alice Brière-Haquet & Lionel Larchevêque, La princesse qui n’aimait pas les princes, Actes Sud, 2010
• Alice Brière-Haquet & Camille Jourdy, Le petit prinche, P’tit Glénat, 2010
• Alice Brière-Haquet & Csil, Paul, Frimousse, 2012
• Jacqueline Cohen & Bernadette Després, the Tom-Tom et Nana series, Bayard
• Philippe Corentin, Plouf!, L’école des loisirs, 2003
• Michaël Escoffier & Kris Di Giacomo, La mouche qui pète, L’école des loisirs, 2011
• Nicole Lambert, the Triplés series
• Jean Lecointre, Bazar Bizarre, Thierry Magnier, 2012
• Magali Le Huche, Le voyage d’Agathe et son gros sac, Sarbacane, 2011
• Thierry Lenain & Delphine Durand, Mademoiselle Zazie a-t-elle un zizi?, Nathan, 2011
• Alain Le Saux, the Papa/ Maman m’a dit series, Rivages
• Alain Mets, Ma culotte, L’école des loisirs, 1994
• Nadja, L’horrible petite princesse, L’école des loisirs, 2005
• Pef, La belle lisse poire du Prince de Motordu, Gallimard, 2010
• Pef, Rendez-moi mes poux!, Gallimard, 2010
• Yvan Pommaux, John Chatterton détective, L’école des loisirs, 1994
• Claude Ponti & Florence Seyvos, La tempête, L’école des loisirs, 2002
• Claude Ponti, Okilélé, L’école des loisirs, 2002
• Claude Ponti, L’arbre sans fin, L’école des loisirs, 2007
• Domitille de Pressensé, the Emilie series, Casterman
• Grégoire Solotareff, Loulou, L’école des loisirs, 2001
• Hervé Tullet, Un livre, Bayard, 2010
• Séverine Vidal & Cécile Vangout, Je n’irai pas!, Frimousse, 2011
• Séverine Vidal & Elice, Léontine, Princesse en salopette, Les P’tits Bérets, 2011
• Séverine Vidal & Guillaume Plantevin, L’oeil du pigeon, Sarbacane, 2013

Feel free to suggest more in the comments section… this is a purely spontaneous selection with no rhyme or reason to it.

For more info on French children’s literature (in French), you can always trust the excellent review blogs Enfantipages and La mare aux mots. Ricochet is the reference website for French children’s literature.

à bientôt!

Clem x

—> Nothing.

Signing away my soul to the examiners

I was trying to come up with The Blogpost of What a Journey of Self-Discovery It’s Been and How It’s Transformed All My Fiction-Writing Forever, but actually, as I have now submitted the beloved PhD thesis, the only thing I can think of is – Gosh. This was nothing like writing a novel.

But maybe it should be. Maybe if I was a bit cleverer and more motivated, I’d take away some nice little life lessons from the 80,000-word unsatisfactory monster and pull them into the Zone of Fiction-Writing. Lessons such as:

1) You don’t wait for inspiration to strike. There is a deadline for chapter 2, and Prof. N. is waiting for the thing so you’d better send it to her or else she won’t have time to look at it before another month because she’s going to a conference in Ouagadougou and then marking thirty-eight MPhil theses and then writing a grant application for NASA to ship rival children’s literature scholars to the dark side of Pluto. There’s no musing around with the muse: you sit down and write the damn 11,000 words.

2) You do zillions of hours of research. Because it’s part of the marking criteria that apparently you should know something about your topic, and you can’t hide behind the claim that all factual mistakes are due to creative licence.

3) You don’t get attached to your words. No matter how lovely that last sentence sounds, it will probably get ruthlessly deleted alongside the 25,000 words that are over the limit. So you think of words like you’d think of useful little soldiers fighting for your argument and ready to retire if they’re not needed or not efficient.

4) You don’t say to critical readers “You just don’t understand!”. Because if they don’t understand, well, there’s a problem with your argument, not with their lack of artistic sensitivity/ sense of humour/ aesthetic vision/ appropriate cultural references.

5) You have to accept that it’s rubbish it’s never going to be perfect. And it has to be finished at some point, because the examiners aren’t going to wait for you to tweak it until the end of your life for it to correspond more or less to what you were expecting to offer bountifully to the rest of humanity.

Hmm? What’s that you’re muttering in your beard? that in fact it has taught me something about writing fiction?

Well, no. Obviously I’ll never be disciplined enough to transfer any of these lessons to fiction-writing. That’s the whole difference, you see, between theory and practice.

And my PhD thesis is very theoretical.

Big day today for me: I can finally wear a dress without tights as it looks like it’s that kind of weather. And also, my ‘debut’ children’s book Sleuth on Skates, first in the Sesame Seade series, is coming out in the UK!

First things first: who won the book giveaway?

Well, I wrote all the names on pieces of paper (times two for some, who had shared/ retweeted: thank you!)

Then I put them all into a hat and drew one at random…

And it was… incredibly enough…

SOPHIE!

(which is Sesame’s real name). A nice coincidence to start the day. So well done to you, Sophie, supersleuth-on-a-Dutch-bike!

And thank you to all the other supersleuths: supersleuths on snowboards, jetpacks, stegosaurus, heely’s & cape, rolling desk, hippo, Jimmi Choos, skateboard, walnut shell, old Cambridge bike, go-cart, invisible camel, gargoyle, sneakers, sleigh and giraffe!

I have to dash – in spite of it being publication day, I still have to supervise students (!) but if you’d like to read the first chapter of Sleuth on Skates, and then learn more about Sesame’s universe, and then maybe decide to buy or borrow it, I should be very pleased.

More news soon!

Clem x

I fear that the abundance of Sesame-related stuff on this blog may result in my getting ranked first in oriental recipe searches. I promise normal non-self-promo service will resume shortly – but in the meantime…

1) Sarah Horne, a.k.a the person responsible for the zany illustrations in Sleuth on Skates and other Sesame books to follow, is doing a sale of original artwork on her website!

Today’s work on sale!

WHEN? WHEN? –> as we speak!

WHERE? WHERE? –> right there!

UNTIL WHEN? UNTIL WHEN? –> until it’s all gone! so hurry up and get your own original ink drawings from the scribbler girl!

2) The first chapter of Sleuth on Skates is now online. So get a feel of the whole book in just a few pages by clicking here!

3) The BOOK GIVEAWAY is still going! so far people have mentioned that they’d quite like to be supersleuths-on-stegosaurus, snowboards, go-karts, invisible camels… the list goes on. What would you like to be? Head there and tell me, and you might very well win the book.

And now I’m going to bed. Night!

Clem x

One week! Better rush!

The first book in my Sesame Seade series, Sleuth on Skates, is coming out in just ONE WEEK!

I’ve been told a week is generally composed of seven days, so that takes us to Thursday, May 2nd!

To celebrate, I have procrastinated to the max and postponed edits to my PhD thesis, and with my little fingers I’ve crocheted a cool sort of website for the series which can be found by clicking HERE. It’s full of info about the books, the author (that’s me), the illustrator (that’s Sarah), and Sesame’s world, friends and trivia.

For the massively lazy amongst you, here’s the blurb about the books, all copied and pasted here for the pleasure of your frankly quite lovely eyes.

And if you read to the end you’ll get to the part about the BOOK GIVEAWAY!

well, not really. You can just skip the long writing and get to the book giveaway.

__________________________________________________________________

Sesame Seade (her real first name is allegedly Sophie, but ‘Sophie Seade’ doesn’t make any sense, does it?) is an audacious, precocious, slightly obnoxious, roller-skating self-made-superheroine. There are as many connections in her brain as there are stars in the universe, which is the case for everyone, but not everyone uses them to save the world as regularly as she does.

What are the books like?

They’re pretty funny. According to a rumour, even Professors chuckle when they read them. And Professors are people who only chuckle when they have carefully weighed the pros and cons of chuckling (pro: rush of endorphin to the brain; con: distasteful noise). They’re full of action and adventure. They have quite a lot of animals in them, including: ducks, cats, grasshoppers, hornets, hedgehogs, toads, frogs, parents. They’ve got cool illustrations for eyes to take small breaks before the adventure goes on. They’ve got puns and jokes and references to things you’ve never heard of.

Who are the books for?

People who are very sad and need cheering up; people who are very happy and need even more happiness; people who are just at normal levels of happiness and want to be entertained. Of course children between 8 and 11 are the most likely to pick it up. But they’re also suitable for a lot of other people. For example, people who sneeze in the sun; people who work in banks; people who play the clarinet; people who have more than one dog; people who would like to be better cooks; people who smell bad in the morning; people who don’t think it’s necessary to carry an umbrella at all times; people whose parents have asked them as Friends on Facebook; people who constantly get their left and right mixed up; people who have dimples on their bumcheeks; people who don’t think they’ll like the books.

How many books are there going to be?

So far, three: Sleuth on Skates, Gargoyles Gone AWOL and Scam on the Cam. The first one takes place on land; the second one takes Sesame to the rooftops; the third one is on the riverside… And all of them have things in them that are not completely Health & Safety conscious.

And how can one read those cool-sounding books?

First, one must learn to read, or find someone who can read and ask them nicely if they can read them to one, insisting that they shall enjoy the process very much as they are full of fun and adventure.

Then, the books can be either bought or borrowed. They can be bought online here (Waterstones),here (Heffers), here (Foyles), here (Amazon), or they can be bought in the actual stores, or in any independent bookstore.

They can be borrowed from libraries. If they’re not there, one can ask the librarian nicely to get them for the library, insisting that it will be for the benefit of everyone as general levels of ‘hahaha’ and chuckles will be raised and the world will be a slightly happier place. If the librarian objects that the library must remain a quiet place and not one resonating with loud laughs, one can insist that they promise they will be very silent ‘hahaha’s, of the kind that hurt one’s stomach quite a lot more than Toby’s dad’s cooking (e.g. chicories with lard).

They can also be borrowed from friends who have them; in which case one must make sure that one’s friend will be OK with one snorting one’s drink all over the pages from laughter.

__________________________________________________________________

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

I’m giving away one copy of Sleuth on Skates to spread the joy and happiness and good health and thus help the NHS budget, which should bring me extra bonus points for the day I’m finally allowed to apply for British citizenship.

‘What do I have to do to get this joy and happiness and good health?’ I hear you ask.

Just leave a comment on this post in answer to this question:

If you were a supersleuth, what would be your means of locomotion?

Shameless.

Personally, I would definitely be a supersleuth-on-scooter. Look at me at 12 with my little scooter, little sister (holding a Pikachu cuddly toy – oh the noughties) and terrible glasses and even more terrible dress sense.

Leave your reply in the comments! On the day the book comes out (May 2nd), I will put all the names in a hat and draw one at random.

And if you retweet/ share this post, you will get two entries in the draw.

à bientôt!

Clem x

The other day I went to a nice event by author Teri Terry at Heffers Children’s Books in Cambridge. Teri read from her latest book, Fractured, second in her futuristic trilogy which began with Slated.

When I arrived I talked to Teri for a bit and then sat down. There were already a bunch of people there, including three teen girls who were excitedly checking their watches and talking about the books and going, ‘She’s coming in one minute and forty seconds!’.

I chimed in: ‘You know, she’s already here.’

Girls: !!!?? WHERE???

Me: Over there in the pink top!

Girls: *squeals*

Teri came over and she talked a little bit to the suddenly very shy, very quiet trio of teens, and then one of them said, ‘That’s so cool! I’ve never met a famous author before!’

And Teri very modestly replied:

‘Me neither!’

Anyway, this cute exchange triggered many a memory of being asked the difficult question: ‘Have you ever met any famous authors?’

(Or its slightly more infrequent equivalent, which I got the other day at a school visit in Bordeaux:

‘Have you ever met any famous authors, like for example Jules Verne?’)

My bezzie Jules

The problem is, of course, that since I read quite a lot, that I’m on Twitter a lot and that I know quite a few contemporary authors, especially for children, it’s hard for me to tell who’s considered ‘famous’ and who isn’t, from the point of view of someone-who-isn’t-me.

So last time I was asked that in France, the conversation went like that:

Me: Yes, I’ve met Jacqueline Wilson.

Class: *blank stare*

Me: And, erm, I’ve met Malorie Blackman.

Class: *blank stare*

Me: And I’ve met, erm, Philip Pullman?

Class: *blank stare*

Me: Come on, Philip Pullman, you must know Philip Pullman?… His Dark Materials? No?

Half of the class: Oh yeah! him!

Me: THANK GOD. So, out of curiosity, who do you think is a ‘famous author’?

Class: J.K. Rowling.

Me: Ok, apart from J.K. Rowling?

Class: The one who wrote *title of bestseller*, or the one who wrote *title of bestseller*, or…

Me: Ok, but do you know their names?

Class: Hmm… (no) (random names) (names sounding a little bit like the actual one) (names of wrong authors) (names of other celebrities, popstars, politicians, fictional characters)

So ‘famous authors’ aren’t generally known by name even by the kids who are avidly reading their books. As a kid I didn’t care about authors at all, despite being a tremendously voracious reader. I never wrote to any author. Ok, I would have written to J.K. Rowling, but I knew that my letter would be read by a secretary and I was too proud for that. I never went to any book events or signings or fairs. I never saw any value in the idea of a signed book anyway and certainly wouldn’t have queued up for one (ok, apart from J.K.Rowling).

Jennings is Bennett in French. Things you didn’t know.

As for names, I only knew those of ‘my’ famous authors: my favourite ones. But it’s not as if everyone in France had heard of Anthony Buckeridge or Astrid Lindgren, which I pronounced wrong anyway, so if a random author had come to my school and said that they’d met either of them, I would have been the only kid going, ‘AMAZING! MOST FAMOUS AUTHOR EVER!’.

But anyway, that’s a very limited definition of ‘fame’. I was never really bothered to find out anything about them. I’d never seen their faces anywhere and would have been completely unable to recognise them in the street. I didn’t even know (I didn’t even think about it) that Astrid Lindgren was still alive; I only discovered it when I heard on TV that she’d died. I didn’t even know, for a long time, that Anthony Buckeridge was British (!). I just thought he’d set his stories in “England” just for kicks (for a six-year-old, any foreign country is no different to an imaginary land).

Mysteriously not-famous in the US.

On that matter, Jacqueline Wilson told us a funny anecdote when she was in Cambridge last time. She was once in the US at a book fair and was talking to a roomful of children who had never heard of her. They, of course, asked her if she’d ever met any actually famous authors. She said she’d met J.K. Rowling in Britain. The children had all heard of Rowling, of course, but were astonished to hear that she and, by extension, Harry Potter, were British.

So there aren’t actually many ‘objectively’ famous authors whose names can reasonably be expected to trigger appreciative nods in most children and/or adults of the audience. And even if those objective winners of the celebrity lottery of literature are mentioned, it’s quite likely that people’s ‘wows!’ aren’t really linked to the person per se. They probably know very little about them and care even less. As one supervisee told me, ‘I love Toni Morrison, his books are great’…

In general, I think that the only people who are actually likely to 1) remember the names of more than 5 or 6 contemporary authors and 2) be interested in authors enough to know things about them beyond their writing X or Y famous book are voracious, committed readers, interested in the publishing industry, and interested in writers. They are people who probably have a Twitter account which they use to follow authors and publishers and blogs; who read magazines about literature; who go to bookshops and libraries quite often.

So, yeah, most likely, those people are… other authors (and editors, agents, book reviewers, book bloggers, librarians, booksellers of course.) There’s always a huge discrepancy, as a result, between our expectation of which authors other people (‘normal’ people) will know, and which ones they won’t. I frequently get irrationally annoyed when I tell people about someone whom I feel is universally famous, and am met with polite ignorance.

Name That Academic

It’s like in academia. If I ask you to name a few famous academics (and you’re not yourself in the Ivory Tower), you’ll probably say Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and perhaps Noam Chomsky and Simon Baron-Cohen and then leave it at that. But of course the big famous names of each discipline are huge celebrities for the people in that discipline, and in some way we all feel like everyone even in other disciplines should know them.

Anyway, very few people are ‘famous’ enough to be floating around in the ether encompassing all the little bubbles of our specialised fields. Identifying those people is key to answering the ‘do you know any famous’ questions, but actually fairly useless on all other levels, because these huge names have far less direct importance to us than the people who are famous-on-a-bubble-level. Because while the former are untouchable and unreachable, the latter are accessible, and most likely to help the community, to open their mouths and to enrich the discourses of our fields.

And I just got it!

Can you see the little duck that says ‘Book Proof’? I thought that was pretty cool.

Full of Sarah Horne’s über-cool sketches! just a few months to wait (3, in fact) before the real one comes out.

Clem x

Leave me alone, Poppy, I’m in the middle of replying to a difficult blog interview.

1) I have written detailed backstories for all the characters. They’ll never make it into the book, but they’re there in my head and they constantly inform my writing.

Of course you have. Of course they ‘inform your writing’. You’ve definitely spent an hour poring over the calendar picking birth dates for absolutely everyone, making sure that the evil characters are Scorpios and that the one with the döppelganger happens to be a Gemini. Of course you’ve written paragraph after paragraph of backstory for Mrs Wiggins, Bobby’s mother, who appears on page 48 of book 4 and says, ‘It’s going to snow, Bobbykins, put your woolly hat on, the one with the stripes’.

The thing is, Mrs Wiggins when she was 8 had a cat called Merlin who died of cat pneumonia after walking through the snow – it was near Dover where she used to live because her parents worked there for the good reason that [insert Mrs Wiggins’s parents’ backstory]. So she is freaked out, Mrs Wiggins, freaked out that Bobby might catch pneumonia just like Merlin. She doesn’t actually remember Merlin. She’s repressed the memory. But it’s there in every word. ‘It’s going to snow’: o the trauma hidden in this prophetic half-sentence! A stripy hat. Why stripy? Because Merlin was stripy. He was a stripy grey-and-white cat that had been abandoned by his former owners because [insert Merlin’s backstory].

Of course you’ve written all that. And all of it is absolutely necessary to this one sentence by Mrs Wiggins, because it just wouldn’t work without it. The readers won’t know it, but they will feel it.

Decode the BS: ‘JK Rowling did that for her 7-book series, so it’s the thing to do. I want people to wonder about my characters’ backstories. I want them to think it’s all so much deeper than they think. I want them to ask me to tell them more.’

(The worst thing is probably when it’s not BS and the person has actually written that and wants to share. Oh the tedium of ‘character backstories’! It’s up there with having to listen to more than 10 seconds of someone else’s dream or latest game of Sims.)

2) There’s a soundtrack to my novel. It’s the music that inspired it when I was writing it. Here it is, just for you: Chapter 1: Leonard Cohen, Suzanne. Chapter 2: Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. Chapter 3: Gotye, Somebody that I used to know. Chapter 4…

Right, we get it, you listen to random bits of stuff. Me too, it’s called having an iPod constantly on shuffle. But it’s not just that with you, no – you’re the emperor of eclecticism: indie, classical, pop, there’s nothing that you don’t like and that doesn’t inspire your writing. You’re cool like that!

Ok, so what do you suggest I do now? Shall I listen to the appropriate song on loop while reading the corresponding chapter? … Let’s see… Wow!… look at what you’ve done – it’s like, I mean, it’s just beautiful. Radiohead’s Creep with that sort of tortured, depressed teenage boy who discovers that he’s an Angeling (it’s an angel that changes into a changeling that changes into an angel)… It’s profound. It’s original. It’s more than YA. It’s hyperlinked YA. It’s like every sentence is a melody, and, like, when the heroine inevitably starts stuttering and blushing, I can almost hear the guitar riff that gives it so much power. There are no words.

Decode the BS: ‘Stephenie Meyer did that for Twilight and eventually Muse wrote a song especially for her books. Ergo, task number 1 before I start writing: find songs made of cool for soundtrack.’

3) Writing this book wasn’t easy. But I did it. I wrote bits of it everyday, on my 25-minute commute, on the back of my Oyster card holder. No one knew I had that in me. But it just had to come out. It was hard.

I feel for you. Life hasn’t been kind to you. You’ve managed to write and get published despite all the difficulties: your high-flying career, two kids, elderly parents, and above all the fact that no one was ever on your side. No, no one – for who could ever have foreseen that you’d write that book you had in you? Your English degree and years of lyrical student journalism and compulsive Facebook posting of motivational sentences vaguely related to book-writing didn’t raise anyone’s suspicions. In these adverse conditions, no one knew you were writing it, you had to do it in secret. It was only slightly less dangerous than a mission for the MI6. What if your boss had found out that you were using your lunch break to scribble terrified notes for Chapter 16 on the only napkin that Prêt à Manger’s eco-friendly waiter had reluctantly agreed to give you?

Anyway, that’s so like you, you brave, shy, stoic little soldier, keeping focused like that when everything around you is conspiring to make it so difficult.

Decode the BS: ‘This book had to come out. It was a struggle. It possessed me. It won. Therefore it is important and will have meaning for everyone else.’

4) I never intended to get published, it sort of happened.

Of course, the book contract came as a huge shock. Firstly, you never believed that it was worth publishing; it was just a way of whiling away the hours for you, little stories you told yourself in your head. One day, just for fun, you wrote it all down and laid it all out on Word, justified on the right, 1.5 linespacing in Times New Roman 12 as it says in the Children’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook that you accidentally ordered from Amazon.

And it all went on from then, a series of incredible coincidences. You had no idea how anything in publishing works; one day you just happened to slip the first three chapters of your manuscript in an envelope to an agent with a personal statement and synopsis you’d typed by randomly banging your nose on your keyboard with your eyes closed, and six months and 17 submissions and one re-submission later, SURPRISE! You had an agent!

But you really thought it would stop there, since there was no reason at all to think that anything should ensue, until after checking your mobile phone 29 540 545 times a day for another six months you got The Call saying that a publisher wanted it. You were completely blown away.

Decode the BS: ‘Contrary to all those mercenary writers who have been trying to get published for years and flock to specialised websites and conferences, my publishing success is due only to ingenuous, disinterested talent.’

5) I never think of my readers: I just write for myself.

Judging from previous evidence that you are an incurable narcissist, I would be willing to believe you. But sure, you only write for yourself; because it is so endlessly fascinating to reread one’s prose that I never go on holiday without packing all of my own books in my suitcase and reading them on the plane, sighing at the tribulations of my protagonists which I always rediscover in a new light. That’s why you only write ‘things you’d like to read’, which as everyone knows is an extremely clear and monolithic category of stories.

Or do you mean that you only write for your own pleasure, and that you’re not concerned with public recognition? OK then, I’ll leave you to your onanistic literary pastime. That author over there sounds like they care a little bit about me as a reader, so I’ll assume that they’re more in need of people buying their books.

Decode the BS: ‘If I say I have readers in mind, it will make it sound like I’m selling myself to the public. But I want people to think I’m Independent and above that.’

What other BS have you heard writers utter?

BiSous!

Clem x

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?