Frydmania

It feels like the right thing to do to start with a post on beginnings – in this case, how to begin a children’s book.

Long long ago (there’s one already), I remember a class at school where the teacher was trying to get us to identify how stories start. Here’s what we came up with:

Once upon a time…

Once there was…

A long time ago…

It’s OK to have repeated ways to tell stories: in fact, it’s a way to draw in your audience.

“Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”

There is a certain magic in this phrase – not just the question followed by the statement (nice and musical that, good cadence to start the story on a definite note). It’s also in the rhythm of the second sentence, the contrasting straight syllables after the longer ‘comfortably’.

Those of a certain generation will remember “Jackanory”, the TV series on BBC that brought many into acquaintance with new books, authors – and fine actors reading them. But did you know that Jackanory is also part of a rhyme to start a story?

“I’ll tell you a story

About Jack A Nory

And now my story’s begun…”

You can read the rest of the rhyme here.

With children’s stories designed to be read aloud, there is much more scope for beginnings that are really incantations:

“In a dark dark town there was a dark dark street

In a dark dark street there was a dark dark house…”

You can read the rest of the rhyme (from the beginning of Funnybones) here – and even see some visuals.

Part of what I enjoy about this one is the contrast that follows. Yes, it is a book about a family of skeletons, but the mood is light, and the beginning helps us with it too. We move quickly from the spell-like verse to the lighter prose that introduces the characters of the piece.

There are of course the books where the title and the opening are the same: so requesting the book is practically the same as starting the story itself. (This tends to be fairly irresistible to those who need very little encouragement to read aloud. Ahem.)

In this category I am thinking of Mr Magnolia, Manfred the Baddie (who very much deserves a separate post), and no doubt many others.

Lest we forget the potential suggested by the title of this post, we also have the magisterial:

“In the beginning

God created the heavens and the earth.”

It’s such a good beginning, we find it again in a new guise, meant surely to remind us of the earlier usage:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

—

Novels often take a different tack. If the author wants us jumping us into the middle of the action (a trick I want to pick up on in another post), the opening sentence in particular has to effect this trick for us:

“It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

There are many other novel openings I enjoy (and I’m sure they’ll get their own post too, along with short story openings, which often have to pack even more of a punch). But the trick can apply to children’s books too.

One of my favourites is Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are – not just because it’s Sendak (see earlier waxing lyrical on the author), not just because it’s a classic tale, but because of the quirky sentence order of the opening:

“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one 

kind

and another…”

Maybe it appeals to my inner Germanist, where the main thrust of the sentence doesn’t just have to come at the start, but can appear much later. And in any case, though his mother goes on to call him “WILD THING!”, the focus is, of course, on Max.

I have a certain fondness too for the opening of The Wind in the Willows:

“The Mole had been working very hard all morning, spring-cleaning his little home.”

I love the economy of this. In one sentence, we learn of the main character who forms our audience perspective (for are we not rather like Mole, in awe of the bravery of others (like Rat) or the audacity of others still (like Toad)?).

We also learn quickly what the time of the story is; that Mole, although an animal character, is set to share many characteristics with human life. And, like Mole, we would happily say “Hang spring cleaning!” if we may escape our chores, discover new friends – and our own bravery along the way.

—

Our audience (if we are the reader) is likely to sit longer than one sentence – unlike newspaper readers, who may quickly skip to something else if the headline doesn’t draw them in. We are, after all, often the one holding the pages to begin with.

But a good opening, with words to swirl around the tongue, that tells us that an adventure is on the way:

“In the beginning of years, when the world was so new and all…”

Who would not sink into the story at that point?

It is the opening of the curtains, the lowering of the lights. We know that the characters will soon be on stage: and that their story is for our ear alone.

 

My interest in children’s books isn’t really big news. It gets mentions all over the shop – here, here and here, to cite just a few.

Occasionally I wax lyrical about just how much I love children’s books. The library visits. The second-hand shop bargains.

From time to time, writing about children’s books seems to strike a chord with others. It’s easier with the popular books, certainly, but it can happen on others too.

It’s not just the book itself, but what we learn about ourselves, what’s permissible as we move on from childhood ourselves.

—

In the best of ways, children’s literature is much bigger than the category suggests. It’s exploration of the world around us – and how different that world can be, depending on where we grow up.

It’s exploring what interests us – and what scares us. It’s philosophy, and it’s pragmatics for daily life.

It’s discovering humour, through pictures as well as through words. It’s understanding that there can be others out there like us – and others very different – and somehow, we find ways to understand each other.

It’s about being prepared to go against convention – sometimes to push against societal taboos.

It is often about questioning power. In children’s stories, children (those who often lack power in their own lives) find their positions reversed.

They take on the threat – and win. They help parents see that there are other perspectives to consider.

Children’s books may be moral – and many are, whether with a capital or a small ‘m’ – but they can also be deeply subversive of the status quo.

They are to lull us to sleep at night – and they are there to make us wake up.

—

In the last few weeks of thinking about this, I’ve looked at a fair few blogs on children’s books.

Enough to see that there are many others who share my passion; not so many that I feel compelled to follow a particular mode of writing about children’s books.

Back in the days of secondary school, I got to study lots of literature (my choice). The way of critiquing it was known as literary criticism, or lit crit.

At a critical point, I left the literature route behind. I picked a language module in my English studies; I discovered the wonderful world of linguistics.

So I have some ideas about what makes books work – but I hope these are not so entrenched that I can’t bring my own perspectives to bear on those questions now.

I want to think about how children’s books work: thoughts and techniques together. Because, so far, it seems to be a path towards identifying what I want to write for myself.

I could of course go off and pick up a book that does it for me. But I quite like the hard route too.

I want to learn through the experience of thinking about children’s books – and I want to share some of my finds too, the ones I keep going back to.

So this is where I’m going over the coming year. Welcome to Lit Kid – my take on children’s books.

New Year. New start. Of course, we can start (or restart) any time we fancy, but there’s nothing like an official clean slate from time to time.

I spent chunks of last year musing over how to change the blog – or how to move it on a bit more. I kept referring to a commitment to writing. Then I would bottle it and run off and do nothing for a month or two.

By the end of last year, things started to make a bit more sense. The thing I find I like writing about the most is: books, and reading them. The thing I really want to do is: write books.

Off and on, I found some ways to make a start with writing that was intended for books. Children’s books, to be precise. I also discovered how hard it is to commit to being creative, every day, in public (ie, on a blog).

So here’s the plan. A post about children’s books, one a week.

A post under the Moments category – that one can be a bit looser. A lot of experiences right now seem to end up tagged as moments.

And hopefully, one more – on a topic of my choosing at the time. (You can guess that food is probably not that far away in my online thinking – but not exclusively.)

The thing is, it is hard to keep writing – and publishing online – every day. I can do it –
I know I can, because I’ve had a few months where I did keep writing in that way.

But what seems to happen is that I get flurries of writing – do several posts – then stop for a bit. It’s OK. There’s a lot of blogs out there I admire that do just fine on three posts a week.

So that’s the aim. Three a week – maybe more if I get the urge to write more. A break from monthly series.

Part of the aim is to allow more space to write the more overtly creative stuff (fingers crossed).

Potentially to hone pieces a little more before they go out. And To Add Pictures (not my strength (I know, you noticed), so allowing a bit more time for that).

But I recognise that regular writing builds a sense of writer’s voice. A blog will do just fine for that ongoing verbal exercising, as well as whatever writing ideas I find myself pursuing.

So I plan to keep showing up. I hope you will too.

Up next: a bit more of the thinking behind why I want to write about kids’ literature. See you soon.