Writing Picture Books

Books for young children are usually short. Young children aged 0-7 are themselves short. This leads to an assumption that children have small brains and writing for them is easy. The reverse it true. Young children have active, lively brains, and writing for them is difficult.

Only the best is good enough—the best words in the best places, and the best characters in the best stories.

The essence

Classic stories have the quality of ‘difference.’ They are here today, here tomorrow, and here the day after.

They have:

• A universal theme that speaks to any child in the world

• Characters readers care about

• Trouble (if it’s a story)

• Strange, original, or unexpected use of language

• Perfect words in syllabically perfect places

• The delight of happiness

• No preaching or teaching

• An impact that affects the heart

• Rhyme, rhythm or repetition, or all three

• Children saying: ‘Read it again! Read it again!’ at the end of the book.

Ideas

The best ideas, in my experience, don’t come from our heads. They come from our immediate lives, or from our memories. Emotion is the key.

Stories created solely from the imagination have a flatness about them. They’re often about things that don’t matter much. They’re here today and gone tomorrow. No one remembers them into adulthood.

When we read the classic stories that make us laugh or cry, or shiver or feel happy, it is my hunch that we could track the main idea down to a pivotal moment in the writer’s life—or several pivotal moments. 

So, write from the compost of your own life: your feelings, experiences, hopes, joys, disappointments, and so on. If you do that, the reader will be able to connect with your story because it will be based on the authenticity of universal understandings.

To find an event that might be a good basis for a story it’s useful to write down a strong emotional experience remembered from childhood or even recently. Start writing with that event in mind. That way, the first draft won’t be drawn entirely from the imagination, and it will mean you’re off to a good, heart-felt start..

In order to write, first you have to have lived. Only in rare circumstances will young writers be published. So, if you’re under 23, think hard about doing something else for a while until you’ve experienced many more books, people, events, situations and emotions and … words.

A child’s heart should be changed between the first word and the final word. A heart that stays the same is the sign of a book that will fail.

Characters

If readers and listeners don’t care about the characters, or empathise and feel for them, the story will fail.

A picture book with a story (as opposed to a rhyme-and-rhythm book) needs well-drawn characters whose highs and lows and final triumph tug at the heartstrings of readers and listeners.

A famous maxim for writers is: ‘Show, don’t tell.’ So, rather than describing, explaining, stating, and enumerating, we need to show what’s happening and how characters feel about what’s happening, through what they say and what they do.

Themes

 Trouble isn’t necessary in short rhyming, rhythmic, repetitive picture books such as Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, and Whoever You Are, both of which have the theme of the sameness of humans around the round the world.

However, in a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, if there’s no trouble, there’s no story.

There will be a theme within that trouble, such as: ‘Big brothers are a pain.’ Or: ‘Will I make friends when I move house?’ Or: ‘Does my mother love me as much as she loves my siblings?’ Or: ‘What if lose a big game?’

Passion

To ensure we have something worthwhile to say we can test ourselves by asking ‘Is this a so-what?’ story, or will it be around forever?’

Sadly, many stories are ‘so what?’ stories, which is why so few picture books are published

Rhythm

Rhythm is the festering sore in imperfect drafts. It must be cured, totally.

Spend time on the rhythm of the first and last lines. The first sentence grabs and holds the listeners and readers. The last provides a sense of deep contentment.

The amateur writer believes rhythm can be almost right, but ‘almost’ is never good enough. Only perfect rhythm will do, and only reading aloud will show us whether the rhythm is perfect.

Rhythm needs to be in the marrow of your bones if you’re thinking of writing a picture book. I don’t mean rhymes, necessarily. I mean the perfect placement of syllables anywhere in a prose sentence, or in verse.

You’ll hear the perfection or lack of it when you read aloud what you have written.

I advise learning by heart something from Dr Seuss, Shakespeare, the King James version of the Bible, A.A. Milne or anything else in which the rhythm of the language is perfect. Get the gut-feeling of rhythm into your writing soul.

Syllable problems are solved by choosing a different word: a three-syllable word instead of a one-syllable word; or a two-syllable word instead of a three-syllable word.

Gustave Flaubert said: ‘All writing talent lies, after all, only in the choice of words.’ 

Rhyme

It is foolhardy to write a story with a plot (i.e. a text with a beginning, middle and end) in rhyme. Rhyme is fine and very good in books like Time for Bed, and Where is the Green Sheep? since neither is a ‘story’: the words aren’t accommodating a plot.

Rhyming stories are nearly always rejected by publishers because most would-be writers don’t know how to achieve the right number of beats in a sentence. 

Repetition

My advice on repetition is: Go for it!

Children love repetition. It helps them remember the words. They love because it’s so predictable and safe, and they can join in. 

Length

The biggest fault of wannabe picture-book writers is to write too much. Over 500 words means alarm bells should be ringing.  I admit that Possum Magic is 502 words and Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridgeis 629 words, but they are exceptions to the general rule. Where Is the Green Sheep? is 190 words.

A picture book is 32 pages. In printing, the pages are folded in half, then in 4, then 8, then 16, then 32, which is why the compulsory 32-page format exists.

Half the pages are pictures, so try to keep the word-count to a minimum and don’t explain anything that will be made obvious in the artwork.

When you’re drafting a picture book it’s useful to make your own 32-page mock-book, called ‘a dummy’, by copying all the features of a real picture book, such as the endpapers, the title page, dedication and publishing information page, and so on. The text of the story begins on page 3, a right-hand page.

Putting the text on each page will enable you to see how the page-turns pan out.  The page-turns are crucial to success, especially the final turn between page 31 (right-hand page) and page 32 (left-hand page).

Your best friends are the ‘cut’ and ‘delete’ keys on your computer. At any time, you can probably cut much of what you have written, crushing though that is.

Cut as much as you can from the beginning of the text. Put your hand over the first paragraph and see if you can start on the second paragraph.  If you can, try cutting that one also, and start on the third paragraph.

Why Read Aloud?

We’re writing a book to be read aloud so we ought to be reading aloud what we have written, all the time—each paragraph, each sentence, each clause and phrase, over and over again.  Read from the top every so often to assess the smoothness (or not) of the story so far.

Write in total silence because you’re creating music. If there’s a fly buzzing in the room, kill it. You have to hear the lilt of the words in your head, and then hear them read aloud. Read your drafts aloud a lot.

The words in every phrase or sentence have to be able to be read with syllabic ease.

The readers of our words should never stumble or have to re-read; neither will they jerk over the words, gabble, or fumble.  

Revision

Don’t be too discouraged over drafts that aren’t working. Why the hurry to be finished?

A picture book of 500 words may take two years or more to perfect and may have 40 drafts or more.

Put away the draft of a story that’s not working. Leave it alone for months. A fresh eye will reveal its faults immediately.

An essential quality in a writer is the ability to be dissatisfied with what she or he has written.

Dissatisfaction is the necessary discomfort that will lead us back to our manuscript to attempt yet another draft. 

The least effective writers are the most immediately satisfied. They don’t understand the need for dissatisfaction, nor do they know what to be dissatisfied about.

Good writing has been re-written. Many times.

Good writing is full of surprises.

Good writing is correct.
 

Good writing adds to our quality of life by revealing life to us.
 

Handwrite or type?

Writing on paper makes it easier to see the text/story as a whole, easier to edit, easier to put arrows to where a piece of text might be better placed, and so on. Writing on paper also means you always a have copy of what you have written.

If you only type, make sure you print every single draft.  Some of what you delete at one point may later be remembered to have been brilliant and perfect, and you’ll kick yourself if you have lost it.

What does it cost?

The only cost to a writer of getting a book published is— or should be— the initial cost of mailing the manuscript to an agent or publisher; or no cost at all, by emailing it. All the other costs are borne by the publisher. The writer is never out of pocket.

If a publisher asks you to pay for any part of the publication, such as the art, or the lay out, or the printing, you’re with the wrong publisher.

Self-publishing or not?

The decision to self-publish is yours, and yours alone, so the following advice can be taken or ignored, as you see fit...

Personally, I advise you that you don’t, under any circumstances, contemplate self-publishing, unless it’s only a few copies for your immediate family and friends. You’re likely to end up with a nasty debt and a shed full of un-sold books.

Self-publishing provides no market-research, no distribution, no publicity, no marketing, no warehousing, no advertising, and very few buyers. 

Bookshops rarely buy books that established publishers haven’t endorsed.  They don’t trust self-published books as they know they haven’t been ruthlessly edited or professionally designed and illustrated.

The artwork

Unless you’re an art-school-trained picture book illustrator don’t even think about doing the pictures yourself, even if you call yourself ‘an artist.’

Also, it’s pointless finding your own artist. Don’t do it. The publisher will choose the illustrator, according to the theme and tone of the text.  

You will have little or nothing to do with the illustrator. You many never meet her or him. Don’t interfere. Let them get on with the job since they have the talent, not you.

If you send original art with your story, the publisher will probably reject the pictures that have been executed so painstakingly by a talented friend, but they may love your story. And then who rewards the artist financially for the time he or she has wasted doing your book? It’s not fair on the artist.

Of course, if you’re already a trained picture book artist and you are also the author, then send everything you have created.

Agents

It’s crazy not to have an agent to guide you through the intricate bastardry of publishing contracts.

Agents prevent you from being exploited and scammed.

An agent will take 10-20% of your earnings in commission. It may seem a lot, and even unfair to the uninitiated, but they work hard for the best publishing deal for you since the best deal for you provides them with more commission.

They’re worth their weight in gold. They fight for you all the way.

Find an agent through Google.

Editors

Once your book has been accepted, you’ll be assigned an editor. She or he may ask you to make many changes. If you’re lucky you may sit side by side with your editor and work together closely.

The book you sent in will not be the same as the book that’s finally published. After it’s been worked on by an editor it will be much better! Editors know best. Don’t argue with them too much. They have vast experience, and they do know what’s best.

On the other hand, don’t give in to their every suggestion, every time. You are a writer, after all.

Now what?

Send your manuscript by mail or email—it shouldn’t be more than three pages of typing in 12 font, double spaced—to one editor at a time, or to an agent if you can find one who will take you on.

Don’t be cute in your covering letter or email. It drives editors wild, and anyway they’re not influenced by it. Just say you have enclosed a story for consideration, with the date, your name and your contact details.

You may have to wait up to three months for a reply.

Rejection

Rejections from publishers are devastating. They send a message that the book isn’t ready and needs more thought. You have to be resilient.

Many a famous author has been turned down over and over again before becoming an ‘overnight’ success, so don’t be too discouraged.

Possum Magic was rejected nine times over five years before it became a publishing phenomenon.

Do bear in mind the dreadful statistic that 97% of picture books written by eager writers are never published.

(Perhaps they didn’t read my hints first. Hmmm.)

Earnings

A picture book writer earns half the royalties. The other half goes to the illustrator. Typical royalties on a picture book are 10% of the recommended retail price, shared equally between the writer and illustrator. So if a book sells for $20 the writer will receive 5%: a dollar for each book sold. Royalties can rise to 12.5% if a book sells well.

Writers are paid twice a year, six months apart, such as in September and March. Writers pay at least 10%‑15% to their literary agent. They also pay taxes.  In the end it’s never even $1 dollar per $20 book, it’s much less.

This adds up to the fact that most writers don’t become millionaires. Just saying…

Writing Do’s and Don’ts

Writing Do’s

1. DO read recent picture books over and over again.

2. DO make friends with a bookseller or librarian or storyteller: their advice and guidance can be enormously helpful.

3. DO be original: try not to copy the ideas or structures of recent well-known books.

4. DO become familiar with the nature of rhythm. Understanding brevity, rhythm, and cadence in prose will keep rejections at bay.

5. DO ensure your story makes an emotional impact: the reading should change the reader.

6. DO ensure that the content of the story will interest both children and adults, not just adults—a common fault which might well lead to publication but will never lead to best-selling status.

7. DO write with narrative tension: solve a problem.

8. DO ’show’ and do not ‘tell’: try to reveal action and character through what the characters say and do.

9. DO keep the text under 500 words if possible. Minimise description. The fewer words the better, since the pictures will provide many of the visual details.

10. DO remember that the secret of good writing is re-writing.

11. DO constantly re-read drafts aloud during the drafting process: hearing is one way of perceiving what’s wrong in the text.

12. DO send the text to agents or publishers without any accompanying artwork unless you are both the author and the illustrator.

13. DO ensure the text is written grammatically, and the spelling and punctuation are correct.

14. DO remain confident and up-beat after rejections. Re-write, re-think and send the story off to another publisher.

15. DO stay out of the illustrator’s way. Interference by an overbearing author is rarely appreciated.

16. DO retain humility, even after a best-seller. Success may not last, and you may need the comfort of friends. Those who boast have no friends.

17. DO find a literary agent before you rush off on your own to try to find a publisher.

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Writing Do Not’s

1. DO NOT write down to children. Write for clever, well-adjusted, lively children. Young readers appreciate the compliment.

2. DO NOT write about inanimate objects such as shoes, a coin, a kite, an ice-cube, a piece of sausage or similar. Stick to people, toys, animals, birds, engines, etc.

3. DO NOT use alliterative names or titles, such as Izzie the Ice Cube, Kenny the Koala or Tommy the Tired Teddy. Use names, which reveal something of the character.

4. DO NOT write your story in rhyme. Most editors detest rhyming stories and will reject them.

5. DO NOT assume that plot is the most important element in a story: character comes first. Then trouble. Next comes the precise choice of words and their correct rhythmic placement.

6. DO NOT find an illustrator yourself. That’s the editor’s job.

7. DO NOT forget that the rhythm of the text is the element that will or will not bring the reader back to the story again and again.

8. DO NOT write things like: he gasped, she spluttered, etc. Use the word ‘said’. The gasping and spluttering, etc., should be obvious from the situation, if the writing is effective.

9. DO NOT forget that if the writer couldn’t care less about the fate of the characters the readers couldn’t care less either and the book will fail.

10. DO NOT write stories that end: ‘…and then they all woke up.’ Dreams as stories are frustrating and are rejected.

11. DO NOT write to teach. Children and publishers detest heavy morals.

12. DO NOT attempt to bring up other people’s children through your writing.

13. DO NOT get the name of the children’s editor wrong (if you send a manuscript to a publisher yourself, without getting an agent first).

14. DO NOT forget that a literary agent will ensure you earn you far more than you can earn by yourself, even though you will pay them 10-20% of your royalties.

15. DO NOT forget to send a brief covering letter (that is, if you don’t have an agent to do it for you) and do not be ‘cute’ in this letter.

16. DO NOT be surprised not to hear from a publisher for two or three months.

17. DO NOT be surprised to find yourself working on a picture book text for a couple of years

18. DO NOT lose heart after rejections—be resilient and tenacious.

19. DO NOT self-publish. You will find yourself out of pocket and without a wide audience.

20. DO NOT expect to be accorded real respect as a writer of children’s books. It will take forever, if it happens at all.

The Folly of Jolly Old Phonics

A phonics tale of three children (with morals for teachers of reading) © Mem Fox 2008

This piece was presented at a conference of Auckland principals in Auckland, New Zealand in April 2008

Thank you. It’s great to be here. My husband is hoping I won’t have free time to buy shoes since shoes are infinitely more interesting in New Zealand than they are in Australia. Many things are more interesting in New Zealand:

the scenery, the accent, the passion for rugby and the fact that for most of last century you led the world in the teaching of reading. Your famous educators: Sylvia Ashton Warner, Don Holdaway and Marie Clay blazed a trail for the world to follow, and we in Australia followed in your footsteps like grateful children learning from wise parents. Our school children benefited massively from your wise counsel.

On my last few visits to this country however I’ve heard murmurings of discontent from your very own teachers regarding the direction some New Zealand schools are taking in the teaching of reading. It appears that far from being confident leaders with brilliant theories and practices to share with the world there’s a feeling abroad that perhaps other countries like the United Sates, with its current heavily phonicated methods, have better ideas; that programs such as the Spalding Method, Accelerated Reader and Jolly Phonics—by the very fact of their being so expensive and so well-marketed—¬must be better than anything you had before; that you’re such a tiny nation you couldn’t possibly have the best ideas, and so on. What a ridiculous notion, for heaven’s sake!

I’m here today to beg you hang on to your old way of doing things in literacy education, to continue to be to be leaders still, not followers. Leaders think. Followers don’t. Leaders have a good grasp of their subject. Followers don’t know what they’re talking about. Leaders speak with confidence. Followers fumble. Leaders have status. Followers have no status: they’re pathetic. Leaders have authority. Followers have none. So why, after being leaders in literacy, would you want to follow anyone else? In particular why would you want to adopt a single idea about the teaching of reading from the United States, a country in which literacy standards has fallen drastically over the last ten years?

Before I burst a blood vessel over this let me take a short break and read you a book of mine that seems to me to apply to principals as much as it does to pirates: read Tough Boris.

To return to our former topic, the strength of New Zealand teachers was—and still is in the main, so let’s not panic yet—that they truly understood the nature of phonics and the role that phonics played in the teaching of reading. In this speech I’m going to revisit phonics, through three parables, as it were, as a sort of revision for those of you who might have become a little hazy on the subject. Those of you who know it all—and I do apologize because I know there are many in this audience who do know it all—might like to have a little doze from time to time. Here goes…

Once upon a time in Australia there lived three children. Their names were Sean, Justin and Josephine. Sean lived in Hobart, and still does. Justin lived in Melbourne, and still does. And Josephine lived in Adelaide—and still does, around the corner from me. Each of these children learnt to read before he or she went to school, without any lessons. How this happened is fascinating. And challenging. And ultimately, confronting for those of us in literacy education.

Let me tell you about Sean first. About five years ago I received this message on my website:

Your books hold a special place in our lives, wonderful memories of baby and early childhood. Our son was able to read grade two readers at 3yrs, two months and recently a national show was aired on him called ‘genius kid’. I read to him every day from five months on and now he reads to his baby sister and has done so from the time she was three days old. I followed your advice and think ‘Reading Magic’ is one of the most valuable books ever! Mem, we can’t thank you enough for making it so easy and so much fun. Hope we meet you someday, Angie, Sean and Sarah

Angie had provided an e-mail address so I wrote back and asked if I could phone her and talk about this amazing occurrence, and we chatted for ages one Sunday morning. Lo and behold: it was the same old read aloud story—a story that never ceases to excite me, no matter how often I hear it.

Angie told me she began reading to Sean—who is now nine—from three months and that Time for Bed was the first of my books she bought.

Angie couldn’t remember exactly when she first read Reading Magic, but she was fairly certain it was when Sean was almost two years old and she claims she was an instant convert. She said she couldn’t believe it could be so simple and told lots of her friends about Reading Magic, for which I could kiss her feet. Sean’s reading developed very quickly. At 3yrs 7mths he had a reading age of 7yrs 7mths and a vocabulary understanding of a child of fourteen and half and Angie says it was just from doing the things I recommended. (What a publicist! I should employ her.)

Sean appeared on Today Tonight, a tabloid TV evening program in Australia. The segment was called Genius Kid. He was also on the front page of the main newspaper for southern Tasmania, in an article entitled ‘Smart Sean in a class of his own’. Here’s part of it:

When Russel and Angelea Galloway have trouble with their computer they turn to their four-year-old son Sean for help. ‘He normally works it out,’ Mrs Galloway said at their home near Sorell yesterday.

Sean is a gifted child with an IQ rating of 147. He has already been accepted into the high IQ organisation Mensa…

Mrs Galloway said: ‘He just seems to be good at everything yet he is a perfectly normal loving child.’At fifteen months Sean could identify all the letters of the alphabet. His maths and spelling were also rated equivalent to a seven year old.

The Galloways call themselves as ordinary people. Mr Galloway is a free-lance cameraman while Mrs Galloway is a full-time mum. Their second child Sarah was born four months ago and Sean has been reading books to her since she was two days old. Sean reads up to ten books a day.

So that’s the story of Sean. I’ll skim over the story of Justin because his story is told in full in the chapter of Reading Magic called ‘Proof’

In brief, Justin’s parents, Allan and Donna Bartlett, read aloud regularly to their son with remarkable results. Justin was twenty-one-months old when they first contacted me.

He had been introduced to books at six days old. It had seemed to his parents like a good thing to do—it added interest to the daily baby-care routine—and he seemed to like books and being read to, right from the start. By three months he clearly knew which way a book should be held, and he could even turn the pages on cue, responding to the obvious pause in reading at the end of a page. By three months!

At twenty-one months he had a speaking vocabulary in excess of five hundred words, which his mother attributed to what he had gained from books. He could also sight-read about twenty words. Incredible: before he even turned two.

You and I know that most children learn don’t learn to read at home—they learn soon after they start school, when everything they already know clicks into place with the help of a teacher. But a growing number of children is learning to read before they start school and they’re learning quickly, happily and easily, like Sean and Justin.

I need to read you Koala Lou before I tell you about the third child in my Tale of Three Children. [Read it.]

I’m happy to have made the acquaintance of my neighbourhood wonder-girl, the glorious Josephine, who was able to read anything at the age of three which is when she and I met. She is now seven. She lives in the street that runs into mine, and on Boxing Day 2004 she and her mother Liz dropped by to introduce themselves and to show me how much Josie loved my book Koala Lou. She read me the whole book, self-correcting when she needed to. Her dad is an accountant and her mum is in human resources. Neither has been an educator. They told me they didn’t know how it had happened. When I asked if they had read aloud to her, they both said: ‘Of course. All the time. Ever since she was born.’

Josephine was read the same stories repeatedly, hundreds of times. Her mother told me that Josie taught herself to read using whole words. She did not use phonics to learn new words and is very confused if this method is thrust upon her. When someone tells her that hot is made up of the sounds: huh-o-tuh, Josie quite rightly hears her otter instead of hot. When she doesn’t know a word she asks what it is, and remembers it next time she sees it, because she sees it over and over again as books are read to her and as she reads them herself. From the words she already knows she applies logic to extrapolate what other words will be in the sentence she’s reading.

Which is exactly how our daughter Chloë learnt to read, two weeks after she started school, aged four and half. She’d heard the same favourite books read time and time again, had watched the print, and had joined in. And then, like the prima donna she was, she demanded that she be allowed to read the books herself, preferably on audio-tape so she could listen to herself later. When she didn’t know a word I told her what it was immediately so she was never held up, so she could keep the story going, so she could storm ahead with blind courage.

‘You will tell me the difficult words, won’t you, Mummy?’ she’d say, as she launched, pell-mell and fearlessly, into reading a story she loved. I remember two words in particular, in different books, which she hesitated on: cosy andinvestigation. I told her what they were. A few pages later, when the same words reappeared, she read them without any hesitation whatsoever. And of course she saw them again and again during repeated, joyful, shared readings of those same books.

When children learn to read before school without any lessons, they do so because they’ve been looking at the same print over and over again as they’ve listened to the same language, in the same stories, which have been read so many times that their parents are driven to distraction. Not only does the print become familiar, language becomes familiar.Learning to read is much more about learning language that it is about making sounds from the letters on a page. It stands to reason that it’s going to be easier to readdriven to distraction if we’ve heard driven to distraction over and over again, than if we’ve never heard that phrase. In certain situations, the moment we read driven to we’re going to expect a word like distraction to follow, and the print will confirm it.

Anyway, that’s the end of my Tale of Three Children and Chloë. What implications does my tale have for teachers of reading?

Most methods, at most schools, tend sooner or later to get most children reading. Research tells us it’s the teacher, not the method, that makes the difference. However, in the light of recent movements and arguments in the teaching of reading, it’s important to understand the intricacies and meaning of phonics which is basically the ability to sound to break words up into smaller pieces and sound them out, as in: c-a-t says cat.

And where does phonics fit into reading education? Before we go any further we need to ask ourselves a more fundamental question: what is reading? It’s making meaning—please hang on to that piece of information—it’s making meaning, not sound, from the marks we see on the page. Take this sentence: ‘There was a tear in his…’ We can’t say the sound of the word ‘tear’ unless we know its meaning in the sentence: is it a tear in his eye, or a tear in his shirt? Merely sounding out the phonics of t-e-a-r gets us nowhere: context is all important. Which is why random words lists are such a idiotic idea.

It transpires—and I find this fascinating—that children like Sean and Justin and Josephine, who learn to read without any lessons, and could read fluently at the age of three, never sounded out words phonically as they learnt to read. In other words advanced readers don’t use phonics, even at the age of three. They, and we who are fluent readers, use phonics only after we have learnt to read, when we meet difficult, multi-syllabic words that we can’t make sense of by the usual logical means: through print, or grammar, or a prior understanding of what we have just read, or through general knowledge.

We use phonics when we realise we’ve spelt something incorrectly, as I did earlier when I was writing the word ‘capability.’ I had to break it up into the five syllables to get it right. Phonics was really useful in that situation. In fact we can’t write without phonics which is why we should be teaching reading at the same time as we’re teaching writing—as we’re teaching reading—as we’re teaching writing—as we’re teaching reading—and so son..

Phonics is also useful when we come to a word we don’t know, such as the Polish surname that the Sydney entrepreneur, Richard Pratt was born with: Przetitzki, which is very difficult for English speakers to read, unlike: ‘The cat sat on the frigging mat.’

But a capability in phonics doesn’t mean competence in reading. It’s quite possible to read with all the correct phonics in place and yet not to be reading at all. For example, I can read phonically correctly the entire Indonesian edition of my picture book Hattie and the Fox without understanding a word I’m saying:

‘Ya, ya, ya!’ kata babi.
‘Peduli apa?’ kata domba…

Correctly sounding out the words is not reading, it’s barking at print, retrieving no meaning at all from the text. So it’s disappointing to discover that many parents, politicians and even a few principals think that decoding phonics correctly is indeed reading. I’m sure you’ll agree that getting the phonics right is completely pointless in the ‘”Peduli apa?” kata domba’ situation,.

Only 50% of the words in English are phonically decodable This is a a nuisance, especially for the mad keen phonic-ators among us. It’s my sincere hope that we’re able to go beyond a 50% literacy level in Australia and New Zealand. We have, actually. We’re always in the top four in the world after Finland, and sometimes Canada. The Finns have an unfair advantage over us: their language, like Indonesian and Italian, is phonically simple.

And if phonics is so important, so fundamental, so essential—as so many claim—and so crucial to our ability to make meaning from text, how come we can read the following with ease?

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteers are in the rghit pclae: the rset can be a toatl mses but you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae we don’t raed ervey lteter but the word as a wlohe.

So, hey, waht does this say abuot the improtnace of phnoics in raeidng? Prorbalby that phonics ins’t very imoptrnat at all. How apcoltapyic is that, in the cuerrnt licetary wars!

As if that weren’t proof enough that phonics is useful but not essential, here’s more: how can it be possible that the billions of people in China and Japan, Korea and Taiwan learn to read when there is no phonics possible in their written language, which is displayed, instead, in pictographs? Children in China have to be told what a word is and then learn to recognise it and memorise it. Amazing what they achieve, isn’t it? All those billions of people, deprived as they are, poor things, from the apparently essential benefits of phonics, becoming competent in literacy.

Sadly, let me say this again: phonics-mad literacy terrorists truly, madly, deeply believe that’s making sounds is all there is to reading. How sad. How pitiful. As if we’d lie in a bath on Friday night and read The Da Vinci Code aloud. Most of us read silently when we read at all. Within that silence meaning is made, and within that silence we’re able to read much more quickly than we do when we read aloud.

When we force poor little reluctant readers to read to us and when we tell them to sound out words they don’t know, instead of simply giving them the word, they tend to read so slowly that they make little sense of the print and receive no joy from it. (‘Giving the word’ is what the parents of young early readers are know to do.) Children who are reluctant, remedial readers may perhaps be able to complete a little book tortuously and phonically correctly, but there’s no reward in it, no excitement or passion, or emotion of any kind.

These unfortunate children don’t love reading because they’ve never been read to. They can’t see the point of reading, because they don’t receive meaning or fun or value from it, even though they can decode words nicely. How ironic it is then, that we tend to each phonics heavily to the very children who need phonics least: the confused children, the ones who can’t yet read.

Sadly, because of the money to be made from phonics programs, and the ease with which these programs can be tested and ‘researched’ phonics has been claimed in the USA in particular to have been ‘scientifically proven’ to be the best method to teach reading. If we scratch a quick-fix, sure-fire method of ‘curing’ reading difficulties we will often (but not always) find behind it a core group from an education publishing house, or a government department, or an institute in a university which stands to gain massively, financially, from their endeavours. Many expensive programs that you and I see in use in classrooms are earning bucket-loads of money on the basis of a flawed understanding of reading, and a wilful misinterpretation of research. It sickens me.

The current methods used to teach reading in the USA are causing such a worrying decline in reading standards that many American states have hired teachers from Australia and New Zealand who are working at this moment to improve literacy in failing schools. There are in 536 of these teachers in New York alone.

Why would you and I even contemplate changing from the best methods in the world to the least effective? In Australia, due to the methods we use to teach reading, 66% of Australian children list reading as one of their favourite pastimes. How good is that?! I feel inordinately proud of that statistic.

It’s simple: children who arrive at school without any exposure to books, print, pictures, page-turning, and gorgeous stories that lighten up their lives need only that when they arrive in school: an enormous and intense exposure to books, the same books over and over and over again; an exposure to print through Big Books and to the details in the pictures; they need to experience page-turning; lots of chat about what’s going on in the story and about the funny things in the pictures; gorgeous stories that lighten up their often sad lives; and lively teachers who switch them on to loving books, and who create a longing to be able to read. A phonics-first-and phonics-only approach can never in its wildest dreams achieve the same effect. I mean, compare this kind of literacy-learning with a phonics lesson: read The Magic Hat. A multitude of explicit phonics lessons can be taught from the pages of joyful books by teachers who are excited by teaching—teachers who make children excited about learning.

Do we want children whose backgrounds (both rich and poor, let’s get that clear: this isn’t about monetary disadvantage it’s about a read- aloud disadvantage)—do we want children whose backgrounds have lacked books to be resurrected into literacy in our classrooms or crucified on the cross of phonics? I certainly know which I’d choose. [In my second presentation tomorrow I’ll be explaining in detail your vital role in making this happen.]

The funds currently directed into the miracle cures and quick fixes in reading—out of which publishers make billions of dollars—would be better used in schools by providing children with a class library of appropriate classics that have been adored for years, instead of the mind-numbing ‘readers’ currently in vogue. With this kind of action—who knows?—we might even wipe out illiteracy in a single generation. How about it? We could at least try.

Notes from the battlefield

Towards A Theory Of Why People Write

(This article was first published in ‘Language Arts’, Vol. 65 No. 2 Feb. 1988)

I’m a writer. As such I often see myself as a bloodied and wounded soldier staggering around a battlefield in an attempt to conquer the blank page. As a soldier in the thick of it all I will try to explain from the battlefield why I write and why other write around me. I’ll also try to puzzle out, from the perspective of a war correspondent who stands back and observes, why there are so many deserters out there, refusing to take up their pens and write alongside me. Is it becausethe wages aren’t good enough? Is it because there’s nothing worth writing for? Is it because it’s only a pretend battle with pretend rewards for pretend winners? We’ll see.

Research on how writers write has been illuminating. We choose our own topics, decide our own purposes, target our own audiences, take our time, draft and redraft, talk over our writing with trusted friends and colleagues, and publish our pieces if we’re lucky. As a teacher I’ve applied these writers’ conditions in my classes and I’ve noticed, of course, a consequent improvement in the effectiveness of my students’ writing.

What interests me now is not so much how writers write, but why we write. What drives us to do it in the first place? And then what makes us want to do it well? If I can find the answers to these questions I might dare to ask myself another: what are the implications for teachers of writing?

When I was still in the hunting and gathering stage of this book, lost in a wilderness of notes, my husband came in to give me a cup of coffee.

“You look really tired,” he said.

“I am,” I replied, “but I don’t mind. I like doing this because it matters.” I heard myself say “it matters” and my mind leapt to its feet in a single bound. So that was why I wrote: because it mattered. Was this already an answer to one of my questions?

I wondered immediately why it mattered. First, I’d been asked to write it by people whom I liked and admired, so I felt I had to demonstrate my worthiness. I know that an expert is anyone from out of town, but I wanted to prove it to my American readers. It also mattered because of the effect I hoped it might have on me, on you, and on our teaching. I wanted to make a contribution to our thinking, to create a reaction, to cause us all to shift our attitudes somehow, no matter how uncomfortable that shift might be. I wouldn’t have dreamt of stumbling into this battlefield and sweating over such an enormous project had I not ached with caring about the insights I wanted to share and the response I was trying to achieve. I had, clearly, a huge investment in this piece of writing.

I used three phrases in that last paragraph which I’ll be reiterating throughout this chapter. Whenever you read them, I’d be grateful if you’d think of yourself first as a writer and then as a teacher of writing, and ask yourself when you or your students last ached with caring over what you were writing, or wrote because it mattered, or wrote because you had a huge investment in your writing.

Let me begin to focus on caring by way of another story. I teach a compulsory preservice course in language arts to first-year teacher education students. For some years we set the following assignment: that students should write a letter to the parents of a class of imaginary children explaining the recent innovations and peculiarities in the teaching of reading and writing. It was never brilliantly executed. It was not a real letter, it was an assignment to be marked. It didn’t matter to the students; they had only a temporary investment in it which was to pass the course and they certainly didn’t ache with caring over the response because the audience was imaginary and the response therefore impossible. We don’t set that assignment anymore because something occurred which taught us a great deal.

At the time of this assignment, a literacy crank well known in the letter columns of our local press wrote yet another letter to the paper. This time it was in horrified protest at the slovenliness of the “process approach” to the teaching of writing. Three of my students were up in arms about it and decided to write a reply. They huddled together for hours drafting and arguing. They were in and out of my office all day reading me this sentence and that. I watched them do that T.S. Eliot thing of engaging in “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings”. They ached with caring because it mattered. They worried about the spelling and punctuation, not wanting the geriatric literacy freak to jump on them and say, “I told you so!” And then, bliss and heaven, it was published!. With a huge headline! It was picked up by talk-back radio and the lines ran hot for half an hour. What a response! What a real reason to write.

At the same time as that real letter was published the same three students handed in their pretend letters to the parents. I found it hard to believe that students who could on the one hand write so well could on the other write so indifferently. The development of their writing skills in their letter to the paper was palpable, but it didn’t flow over into their imaginary letter for the simple reason that “let’s pretend” isn’t real, doesn’t matter, lacks any investment, and won’t get a worthwhile response.

If, as this story might imply, language develops only when it is used “for real”, then might I suggest that we’re currently wasting a lot of time by setting unreal writing tasks in our classrooms: filling-in-the-blanks exercises, copying-chunks-from-encyclopedias exercises, make-believe job applications, “Answer-ten-questions-on-Chapter-Six” exercises, pretend-letters-to-parents exercises, and so on. You and I don’t engage in meaningless writing exercises in real life—we’re far too busy doing the real thing. And by doing the real thing we constantly learn how to do the real thing better. Giving unreal writing activities to our students is about as useful as giving occupational therapy for stroke victims to people who are in perfect health.

Among the various drafts of this chapter are sixteen different leads, one of which has currently ended up in my final paragraph because there it’s effective: it helps me to sum up and conclude on a powerful note. It would have been crazily unconnected to have kept it at the start of the chapter, but I might have left it there had i not cared about you, my audience, my readers. I wanted you to understand clearly the meanings I was making because they’re important to me. The result? I revised. I developed as a writer by developing my writing, which sounds tautologous, but isn’t. If the children in our classes don’t care about their readers, how can they develop as writers? They can’t, because they won’t care about what they’re writing, and they won’t want to revise.

Here’s another example of caring being the key to development. It isn’t about writing, it’s about speaking but I think you’ll see why I want to relate it. In their first semester at college all my first year students take a course with me designed to improve their own writing and reading, speaking and listening. For years they have told each other stories in class, recited poems in class, designed and performed choral speaking in class, and read aloud picture books and excerpts from children’s novels in class, always to the same audience: their peers. It was merely satisfactory. One year, in a blinding realization of my own stupidity at the meagre purpose of these “in-class” assignments, I organized twenty-eight groups of students, about four to six in each group, to visit twenty-eight different real classes in schools close to the college. Their task was to devise and perform a half-hour program of story and song, recited poems and choral poems, picture book readings, and enthusiastic raves about appropriate novels—anything, in fact, which would enhance their listeners’ language development. I called the assignment “Language Alive”.

How can I describe the difference in my students’ attitude and commitment? It was as if I’d asked them in the past to potter along country lanes in some old Model T Ford and was now surprised to find them screaming down the straight in top gear in the Adelaide Grand Prix. Dreading the imminent and real audience galvanized them into quite a different sort of action: they ached with caring about the response and rehearsed for hours outside class times.

My students’ enjoyment of language was extraordinary. I was moved by how happy they were, astounded by how hard they worked, and stunned by how much they developed. I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development, and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine. It’s all so obvious that I feel rather shy about telling these stories.

I recall my daughter, Chloë then aged sixteen, being embattled with an important Matriculation assignment: a six-thousand-word reflection on her involvement in the Matric play, “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-moon Marigolds”. Every so often she would read bits of her piece to her father and to me. Being so caught up in my own writing must have made me a highly unsatisfactory audience. One evening she read this:

“We realized we had no live rabbit. The problem of the rabbit was one that was to hang over us—no! Not us, me—for what seemed to be an extremely long time. The production began to be divided into three distinct periods: B.T.R. (Before the rabbit); D.T.R. (During the rabbit); and A.T.R. (After the rabbit). I look back on the weeks B.T.R. with considerable affection.”

She stopped suddenly, looked at me, and said, “You’re not laughing enough!” I was chastened. Her purpose in reading it had been to make me laugh. I had merely smiled and it wasn’t anywhere good enough for her. I hadn’t noticed how much she’d ached with caring.

When she read sections of the same piece to my husband, it was to ensure that the content is sufficiently detailed and the writing sufficiently alive. “Is this what they want?” she asked. My husband was a Matric Drama moderator so from him she was looking for the response of an expert. From me she wanted the response of a clown. We provided these responses and she was encouraged to continue.

I wonder how often I’ve given my students an opportunity to write a piece which might have two or more purposes: to make someone laugh, for instance, as well as to fulfil the requirements of a formal assignment. Have I ever given any indication that I enjoy laughing and would be quite happy to roll around the floor in hysterics while I’m marking their assignments? Do I allow students to hear me laughing over their writing, so that they’re encouraged to write again? Yes, sometimes I do. I have a loud laugh and have often been asked to “shush” when I’ve disturbed other groups of readers and writers in my class by laughing over someone’s writing. But that disturbing laugh is important: it indicates to my students that their writing is effective and therefore worthwhile. My red nose and blotchy eyes are similarly important: “Hey, guess what, guys? Mem really cries if your writing makes her sad.” In other words, if they have ached with caring over what they’ve written, they know I will ache with caring over my response.

One more related story: my position as a published writer in the college means that colleagues view me, erroneously, as an ideal person to talk to about their own writing although I am acutely aware that anyone can respond to a draft in terms of what’s confusing, boring, missing, or riveting. Be that as it may, a colleague in environmental education came into my office once, so aching with caring over mining in national parks that, as he began to read the ending of his first draft of an open letter to the South Australian minister for the environment, he actually wept. I couldn’t believe it! He cared so deeply about the potential response from the minister, he wanted so much to transform the minister’s ideas and to alter the minister’s actions that he was in and out of my office all day with newly refined drafts. The final letter was tremendously powerful. I wish I could discover what sorts of things my students care enough about to make them weep with worry as they try to get their writing right.

Chloë, my drama queen, understands the thrust of my academic passions as a teacher of the teaching of writing and is wary of it. She looked up from her own writing one evening and said challengingly, “I’m not enjoying this, you know. I hate writing.” She was attempting to undermine my thesis, but I didn’t kill her. I have other ways of doing battle. Instead, I returned the challenge: “Well, how come you like writing to J.J. so much? You haven’t even met her.” J.J. was her New York pen friend. I had set the trap and she fell right into it. This was her reply: “Well, I’m making friends with her. We like each other. You get to know people through letters. She writes excellent letters and so do I. We’re friends.” Aha! She’d admitted to caring about the relationship.

Mitchell and Taylor (1979), in their pivotal and still relevant paper on audience/response model for writing state: “…the writing on the page is not a concrete object but one portion of a relationship.” All writing, that is, not just letter writing. I know, intellectually, that language is an interactive, social process but I’m only just beginning to understand what that means, emotionally. My writing, I’m realizing, nearly always has the socially interactive purpose of either creating relationships or ensuring that established relationships continue. I’m being terribly careful about how to behave in the minefield of this first chapter because you, dear reader, matter to me so much. Your possible reaction keeps me nervous and on my toes.

Whenever I write, whether it’s a picture book, or my journal, or a course handbook for students, or notes for the milkman, there’s always someone on the other side, if you like, who sits invisibly watching me write, waiting to read what I’ve written. The watcher is always important. I’ve discovered I never write for people of no importance. Showing my writing to that watcher makes me feel weak and vulnerable and almost incapable of battling on. My shakiness over the first draft of this paper for example, was so extreme that, while my husband was reading it, I had to leave the room. My only other responder was a woman friend and colleague whom I knew I could trust. I knew she’d still like me even if, in her opinion, I’d written rubbish. Our relationship was, thank God, unassailable.

The more I admire my potential readers the more carefully I write and the more often I revise. Recently I wrote a student handbook for the second semester aware, of course, that I was continuing a well-established and hilarious relationship with my students. Of much more importance, however, was the colleague with whom I was about to teach the course. I look up to her. I try to emulate her. I admire her. I wrote the handbook for her, battling over it for weeks. I wanted to bask in the warmth of her praise and gratitude. The handbook was an enormous personal investment in my continuing relationship with her. My writing was currency and her response was my dividend.

How often are our students able to receive a response from someone they particularly admire? Some of mine (but never enough of them) admire me. As their teacher I am temporarily important enough for them to ache with caring about what they write for me. Or am I fooling myself? They never write anything for me that isn’t also read aloud in class. Is it the response from that wider audience which makes their writing matter? I don’t mind what it is as long as someone’s response makes them care enough to write effectively, for without that caring how can their writing develop through revision?

I had been corresponding with the children from Hallam and Berwick Primary Schools in Victoria for years. In 1987 we finally met. I arrived armed with photographs of my house, my pets, and my family. We had established such an excellent relationship that the children were sad Malcolm and Chloë couldn’t come too because they felt they knew them. But Malcolm and Chloë had written them letters which I read aloud:

Dear Berwick and Hallam kids,

Please keep my mother for as long as you like. I only want her back for Christmas, Easter, and birthdays. Why do you like her so much?

Love Chloë

Dear Hallam and Berwickites,

I must have Mem back within twenty-four hours or she’ll turn into a toad. Please look after her carefully and return her in one piece.

Much love, Malcolm.

When I arrived home on the following evening neither Malcolm nor Chloë wanted to hear anything about my trip except the children’s response to their letters. Whenever I steered the conversation to more exciting matters, they demanded further, deeper, more fulsome news of the reactions from each of the twenty-six classes. They had written for the purposes of getting a reaction and maintaining a relationship. I was irritated until I realized they were providing me with data for my research into why people write.

I think we tend to forget about this element of relationships when we teach writing. Are we aware of how much our students dread having their writing knocked back? Do we trample on their vulnerability when they limp in, unarmed from the battlefield? Do we remember how much the caring over their writing is often also an aching to make friends, with us, and with their mates? It’s hard to keep in mind the painful wounds of battle and the importance of mateship unless you’ve been wounded yourself. Teachers of writing who have been soldiers themselves, engaged in a writing battle, must be able to empathize more closely with the comrades in their classrooms than teachers who are merely war correspondents at the hotel bar, as it were, watching the battle from a safe distance, declining to get in there and write themselves.

When the refreshing ideas of Donald Graves swept through our writing classes in the early eighties, I believed that the ultimate purpose in writing was the response, by someone, that what had been written was worthy of publication and was then published. Since then I have become a published writer myself and I realize how wrong I was. It’s what happens beyond publishing that’s important: it’s the response to my work that matters. Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge has been published in both England and the United States. In America it is loved and I’m feted for it. In England no one seems to know about it, except for my sister, so I get no response, so I get despondent, and wonder why I ever bothered to write it. Then I come home again and a colleague comes into my office and sobs hysterically for two hours. She’s just read the book and is overcome because her own mother has Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a wonderful response.

Yet another story! When I left Australia aged six month, I was Miss Partridge. When I came back in 1970, I was Mrs. Fox. Friends of my parents called Mr. and Mrs. Bunney (yes, really!) looked after us in those first few months and helped us to settle in. Bronte Bunney later employed me and we worked together at the college for fifteen years, often laughing over the ridiculousness of our surnames. When Bronte retired, I wrote him a tiny book called The Bunney and the Fox. It was published. I “published” it myself. I couldn’t find him on that last Friday afternoon and I longed to find him to watch his response as he read the book. I was desperate. I’d heard he’d be clearing out his office on the Saturday morning. I went there. He wasn’t. I drove to his house. He was out. I was ready to scream. In the end I left it by his front door knowing gloomily that I’d never see his response, I’d just have to wait to hear it. Here’s the book:

The Bunney and the Fox

Once upon a time there lived a Partridge and a Bunney. The Bunney was beautiful and brilliant but never bashful. And he was always busy. One day, far across the world, the Partridge turned into a Fox. And not long afterwards she travelled to the place where the Bunney had his home. For a long time the Bunney and the Fox worked happily side by side. Not much changed except that besides being beautiful and brilliant the Bunney was also very kind to the Fox. He encouraged her greatly and said nice things to her face and behind her back. And the Fox became so used to having the dear Bunney around that when the Bunney went away—as indeed he did—she wondered, with a lump in her throat, whether she really could live happily, ever after.

I can’t imagine my students ever chasing anyone around the countryside in a desperate craving for a response to their writing but that is my goal.

There are responses and responses, some of which are financial. I wrote Sail Away partly to make money. I have earned such a sum from Possum Magic that I had been continually running after myself in order to pay the provisional tax. In fact, for a long time after Possum Magic I labored under the illusion that the financial benefits of writing were among my purposes for putting pen to paper. I’ve come to discover that this isn’t really the case.

Several years ago I wrote a long and passionate newspaper article for the on why we send our precious only child to the local state high school instead of to a private one. I was paid for this article in March. For some reason was never been published. Every Sunday morning I would stagger bleary-eyed down the drive in my battered blue dressing gown and ripped open the paper in a fever of anticipation.

Nothing! I realized two things: first, I wanted to be published more than I wanted to be paid. Second, it was the reaction to my piece that I longed for. Publication was merely the first hurdle along the road to response.

Nevertheless, knowing that cash can be a tremendous incentive, I did suggest at a crowded workshop at Teachers’ College, Columbia University that we pay children for what they write before we put their pieces into a class library. Wouldn’t you think that a writing seminar in New York, of all places, would be full of hustlers? But no! Lucy Calkins was speechless. Was it with horror? And Shelley Harwayne was in hysterics. In spite of that, I bravely paid eleven of my students for the privilege of publishing their writing in a booklet called “Picking Up the Pieces”, a booklet designed to demonstrate to other students what I believe effective writing to be. If royalties are a post-publication response which matters enough to make my students ache with caring, I think it’s worth considering, outrageous and grubby though it may seem at this moment. If it’s good enough for real writers, why isn’t it good enough for real student writers?

I think it might be safely said that in general people don’t expect to write much after they’ve left school, except when it’s absolutely necessary, as a tool, in letter writing for instance, or when it’s part of their work. In short, it’s seen as a chore. The view that writing might be fun, or amusing, or relaxing is not, I imagine, widely held, and we teachers must be to blame for that.

During the writing of this chapter a letter arrived from one of my publishers, exhorting me to write a poem for their forthcoming volume for children called “Vile Verse”. I put the letter away. But when the going got tough, the tough got going. In the same way as one searches for handkerchiefs to iron when the strain of ironing shirts becomes too much, I began to work on a poem, as a form of relaxation. I remembered with delight the groans of disgust from kids who’d heard my first putrid poem, “The Teacher’s Cold”, and set to with energy to write the following:

“Sweet Samantha, Unrefined”.

When sweet Samantha eats her food
She is exceptionally rude:
Her mouth is always open wide
So you can see the view inside.
It’s not a pretty sight, my friends,
To see how Sammy’s dinner ends-
Across her tongue the pieces float
Around her teeth, towards her throat:
You almost vomit while she chews
And tells you all the latest news!
It’s terrible when fish and chips
Come shooting forth between her lips
Or when she’s eating lamingtons
And bits of coconut grow wings
And catch you right between the eyes-
Your stomach soon begins to rise!
But scrambled egg is quite the worst:
It looks as though her cheeks will burst
With all the stuff which fills her mouth
From east to west and north to south.
My dears, it is a frightful sight
When sweet Samantha takes a bite,
So my advice is stand well clear
Especially when she starts to cheer,
And do make sure that you have dined
Before, Samantha, unrefined,
Attacks her stew and starts to chew
And sprays her food all over you…

As I wrote that very vile verse, I realized that my purposes for writing anything never come in ones but always in twos and threes or more. Firstly, I wrote it because it was fun. I also wrote it for Chloë because I knew it would disgust her and that we’d laugh over it together, thereby building on our continuing relationship. I also wrote it for Malcolm who was tapping away on a calculator looking very despondent over our finances. I knew it would cheer him up, not only because it was so revolting but also because it would earn a dollar a line if were published, thereby enabling him to pay at least $28 off the Visa bill. And lastly I wrote it for the children of Australia as an antidote to the honeyed sweetness of my Possum Magic and Hattie and the Fox.

I hadn’t realized how often I wrote for fun until my Malcolm read the first draft of this paper and said, “I’m amazed that you haven’t explained how writing is central to your life. It fascinates you. It rewards you. It fatigues you. Nowhere have you actually said you can’t live without writing.” Can’t live without writing? Had I heard correctly? I loathe writing! It’s so easy to do badly and so difficult to do well that I quail before each new writing task. I particularly detest the battle to produce a picture book story in less than 750 words. Of course I can live without writing—or can I?

One day when I was out shopping I met the deputy principal from Chloë’s primary school. She had, that very week, come across a letter I’d written back in 1977 about Chloë being absent from school. She’d kept it because it had made her laugh. Goodness knows which letter it was; I’d written so many for one reason or another. Chloë’s tenth grade maths teacher has a whole file of them, each attempting to be funnier than the last to distract his attention from her dismal performance and incomplete homework. It’s true I can’t live without writing. Every time the chance to write arises, whether it’s to the window cleaner about leaving the dogs in the back garden, not in the house, or to the lawyer about the proliferation of Possum Magic products and its ramifications, my aim is to enjoy myself. I love imagining the reader reading what I’ve written because, I suppose, I’ve had such terrific responses in the past. I just can’t resist messing around with writing.

I can’t not try because my sense of audience is so strong. It might result from having trained as an actress for three years in the Stanislavski tradition: I can see and hear my imagined readers very clearly. I can’t even sign a birthday greeting without going into battle with the blank side of the card. A feminist bookshop in Adelaide was having its fifth birthday so I signed a card but couldn’t seal it. I stood pondering in the post office. The bookshop is called “The Murphy Sisters”. What could I write? All I could think of was, “The boy stood on the burning deck…” The boy? For a feminist bookshop? Suddenly it came:

The girl stood on the burning deck
Her feet were full of blisters
She could not move-
Her head was in
A book from Murphy Sisters.

What does all this have to do with the teaching of writing? First, I wonder how often we demonstrate our crazy, private note writing to our students? It’s probably not much of an option in their lives because they don’t know that it’s possible, that such fun exists, and that it’s rewarding for its own sake, let alone for the glorious responses it creates. I’m wrong, of course. They do know. What about all those underground notes students write to each other in class? Why can’t we legitimize it? Wouldn’t it make our classrooms come alive if kids giggled and shrieked in the open about writing that was written in the open, instead of underground?

Second, isn’t it incredible how often writing means writing stories? I can’t stand writing stories. Honestly! I never write them from my imagination—only when an idea from life or books jumps into my head, not out of it. I have about four ideas a year and I’m a proficient, professional, published writer, yet we ask children to write story after story. What’s wrong with letters, for instance? Clarity and voice and power and control are much more easily developed through letter writing because, perhaps, the audience is so clearly defined and will, if all goes well, respond. Writing for fun is not just for fun—it’s for the long-term, conspicuous development of the craft itself.

Within the fun of writing there is also power. It seems to me that the most delicate transactions are best dealt with through a sort of self-effacing humor which makes one’s point without causing offence. But do we ever communicate the possibility of this kind of writing to our students so that they might become similarly empowered in their own lives? I shared the following letter with my students to demonstrate the kind of writing I have used beyond my schooling. It was to the architect of our home extensions, toward the end of the building project:

Dear Brian,

Here I am, home again, and eager to bring The Extension Situation to a close. The State Bank is satisfied with the work and will pay the builder as soon as we indicate in writing that we are similarly satisfied. A few things still require attention, however.

1. There are still no handles on the drawers in my office. This is, as you can imagine, an extreme hazard to my nails!

2. The toilet seat is so badly positioned that it will not stay up. I fear the intimate damage this may cause any male guest…

3. The bricks in the patio have not been replaced and, as it is unlikely that we shall excavate for buried treasure in the near future, I would like them replaced as soon as possible.

4. Although we do not see eye to eye with our neighbor (he is very short), I would be unhappy to see him killed by falling bricks when he leans over the fence to gasp in admiration at our extensions. The brick wall separating our properties could, at present, be pushed over by a child. The damage to the wall was caused during the initial excavations. Early rectification of this danger would be appreciated.

5. Otherwise the place is a perfection of taste and convenience—thank you! I love it. The State Bank mentioned that the builder was expecting all the rest of the money. I was puzzled because I understood that we would save approximately $2,000 by not having a retaining wall built. I have exquisitely good eyesight and search though I might, I cannot find a retaining wall! I hope that you can clarify this situation. I am a writer, not a mathematician.

With happy thanks, Mem Fox.

I am not at all surprised, considering the purpose of this letter that Mitchell and Taylor (1979) understand writing to be “a means of acting upon a receiver. Its success will be judged by the audience’s reaction: ‘good’ translates into ‘effective’, ‘bad’ into ‘ineffective’. Instead of a product, we are studying an interaction, a dynamic relationship with all the complexities that involves.” (p. 250) My letter to the architect was framed and now hangs upon his office wall among his diplomas. And the extensions were completed to our entire satisfaction. The letter was effective.

I’m anxious about the power or lack of it in school writing. Power is about being able to craft a piece of writing so effectively that its purpose is achieved. “Craft” means understanding the nature and importance of leads and endings; of showing, not telling; of sharpening and tightening; of structure and focus; of purpose and audience; and of the conventions. “Craft” means being able to put those understandings into practice. “Craft” means struggling in that battlefield between the brain and the hand until the best possible draft is achieved. Children won’t learn how to be powerful by writing identical letters to Mem Fox, as so often happens, alas. So depressing!

I use the power of my own writing regularly, to manipulate the world into granting my wishes. For example, I remember applying for and receiving vast funding to attend a conference in New Zealand at which I wasn’t even presenting a paper. The committee concerned had collapsed into unwilling giggles over my application and, hey presto, there was my air ticket! And best of all, in 1986 I jumped over five incremental steps in my promotion to Senior Lecturer, a feat so daring I wouldn’t have attempted it had I not had confidence in my own power to write a sufficiently stunning application.

Such power doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from practising writing for real reasons. It comes from having read powerful writing. It comes from having been taught, and I mean taught, the basic skills of spelling and punctuation in the context of real writing events. Those of us who write best have most power and therefore have most control over our lives. It seems to me to be a supreme arrogance on our part as teachers not to see that the granting of this power to our children is politically and socially essential. In the end they must be able to spell and punctuate; they’re powerless without those skills. Their power won’t come about without practice and the practice can’t come about without purpose. The hardest thing for me as a teacher is discovering purposes which will excite my students to such an extent that they’ll risk the trauma of the writing battle. It’s hard, but it mustn’t be impossible, for their sakes.
I haven’t given much thought to it yet, but I have more than a hunch that power in writing actually deteriorates the further ahead children travel in their schooling. Many of my teacher education students after twelve years at school come to me helpless and fearful as writers, detesting it in the main, believing that they can’t write because they have nothing to say because they haven’t cared about saying anything because it hasn’t mattered because there’s been no real investment for so long. How I wish we could change this situation. We must give power to our people.

Before I’m carried from this battlefield on a stretcher, let me rapidly summarize my notes. The insights I have as to why I write make me believe that as a teacher I must try to:

• help students to care about writing by making it real

• give my students opportunities for real responses from people they admire

• create situations in which students always own the investment in their writing

• be sensitive to the social nature of writing, and the vulnerability of writers

• demonstrate and encourage writing for fun and huge enjoyment and power

• respond after publication as well as before

• help to develop powerful writing so that my students can control their own lives

In my last will and testament I’d like to leave you this theory: children develop language through interaction, not action. They learn to talk by talking to someone who responds. They must therefore learn to write by writing to someone who responds. It’s not a new theory, but it’s one I keep forgetting even though it’s so clear and simple. Please keep it somewhere safe.
I don’t mind if you, dear reader, forget most of what I have written in this chapter except for one phrase: “to ache with caring”. If we as teachers ache with caring it will, perhaps, be possible for us to create classroom communities within school communities in which writing matters because it’s done for real reasons by real writers who “ache with caring” for a real response.

My hope is that through the grimy windows of my particularity we’ve been able to peer into a more generalized world; that we can now move into that world as agents of change so that our students write more, write more often, write more effectively and with greater willingness and enjoyment. I wish we could change the world by creating powerful writers for forever instead of just indifferent writers for school.

References

1. Mitchell, R and Taylor, M, “The Integrating Perspective: An Audience/Response Model for Writing.” College English, 41 (1979).