CALIFORNIAN BOOKSHOPS

While over in California for my son's wedding, I came across two great bookshops:

The Storyteller - a  large children's bookshop in a small Californian town, Lafayette, where the bookseller was very friendly, breaking off what she was doing to take time to chat with me. I noticed the picture books she stocked were exclusively quality hardbacks.

And City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco which was founded in 1953 by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and is a publishing house as well as bookstore. You can browse for hours in the nooks and crannies of its old rambling premises and sense the presence of great writers; their names are on the posters of past signings hanging on the walls and their words spring up at you from the paving stones outside in Kerouac Alley.

Cambridge would benefit from something like this where Town meets Gown.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

John Rowe Townsend seen here with his wife Jill Paton Walsh threw a big party for friends in Cambridge this week to celebrate his 90th birthday. In the photo, John was about to tell us all about his life going back to his wartime years. I was interested in the late 1950s when John was working as a journalist on the Manchester Guardian. While reviewing children's books, he saw how privileged and middle class the main characters were and decided to change all that by writing for children himself; stories like Gumbles Yard where there wasn't much privilege. It was all quite revolutionary at the time.

HANDWRITING

Writing with a pen will soon be a thing of the past. No longer will we be able to look at peoples' handwriting to learn something of their character from the curl, pressure and incline of the strokes.

This all dawned on me last week in my final RLF term at Essex University when a student asked my advice on how to prepare for his exams. What was troubling him the most was the thought of having to write the essays by hand. Only ever having used a keyboard, he said he couldn’t hold a pen for three hours without getting hand cramps.

I suggested he got hold of some of those small metal exercise balls – a traditional Chinese product dating back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) when they must have been holding their quills for considerable lengths of time.  

ALCS

An Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society focus meeting was held in Cambridge last week. Barbara Hayes (in the photo) and her team wanted authors’ views on the organisation that collects and distributes our monies from photocopying and overseas PLR. It was an hour’s meeting followed by a light lunch at Cambridge Central Library. A dozen authors were present.

I must say, my view of ALCS was changed for ever by the end of the meeting. What had been a puzzling acronym sending out puzzling royalty statements suddenly became an organisation all authors should know about. ALCS is helpful and friendly and is looking after our interests. They even offer authors the use of a room at The Writers’ House (between Aldgate and Tower Hill) where tea and coffee are served, where a laptop is available and where there’s a sofa. It sounds as good as having a London club. I’m definitely going to try it out.

UNAPPEALING MAIN CHARACTERS

“You can't have your little girl main character losing her temper and going off to sea without her dear old dog.” So said an editor on seeing the first draft of Zoe's Boat years ago.

So I duly changed it and, in this draft which incidentally was all in dialogue, had the dog recalcitrant and Zoe sad he wouldn’t go with her.  

But do you always have to have a faultlessly appealing main character for a picture book to sell?

David Fickling, in the case of Zoe's Boat, didn't think so. He said Zoe getting cross with her dog and leaving him behind felt true. (I do remember once leaving the family dog behind in a lay-by after stopping on a long journey because a child was travel sick, but that was a terrible accident and thankfully the dog was still there when we returned an hour later.)

 Relieved, I reverted to the first draft for, in toning everything down in order to make Zoe more appealing, I’d inadvertently toned down the dynamic in the narrative and lessened the crisis needed at this point to break up the long build up to the main crisis point. Being asked to change the emotion a little had upset the fine tuning of the whole structure of the story. This is the problem with picture book texts - they're not that straight forward - alter one small thing and something bigger goes wrong.

FOREST SCHOOLS

When I visited a Nursery school in quite a deprived area near Kettering this March, I did my workshop based on The Little White Sprite, which starts with me drawing an old hollow tree, and I was surprised at the children's vocabulary. I've done this workshop with older, less deprived children - Reception and Year 1 and they often struggle with words like 'twig' and 'bark.'

But these very young children, some only three years old, knew all about trees. Not just that, they were very receptive to the idea there might be a mysterious world inside an old hollow tree and magical creatures living there. I discovered the reason for this was they'd all participated in one of the
Forest Schools. These schools aim to 'develop a love of the natural world' and, more interestingly, to encourage an ‘understanding when to take risks and when to take responsibility.’ So my story, where a child goes through a hole in a hollow tree and plays the little white sprite inside, but then has to decide to return safely back home again, really struck a chord.

THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF THE BOOK

This event was organised by the History Department at Essex University where I'm one of the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellows. It was part of the Essex Literary Festival.

     I was interested in Nigel Cochrane's thoughts about e books. As an academic librarian, he sees them as here to stay but at the moment they are expensive; there’s VAT to be paid on e books unlike volume books and publishers are charging academic libraries very high prices for e books and then making them re-buy, having imposed a limited license.  

     The categories, it was agreed, that are unlikely to succumb completely to e books are cookery books (nobody wants their kindle covered in grease) and children’s picture books. There was a discussion as to whether very young children can retain information from a screen in the same way they can from a book.

     I firmly believe, from my observations at Waterstones signings, that there are enough discerning parents looking to foster a love of reading in their very young children for there always to be a niche market for high quality picture books.