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Re: How Much Do We Tell the Children -- an author's decisions
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From: bookmarch_at_aol.com
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2011 04:56:13 -0500 (EST)
I'd like to reverse the question we have been discussing, and talk about it from the writer's POV. Any NF author faces choices about what to say and w hat not to say in a book for younger readers, and these choices are not cle ar or self evident. Just as a novelist has to choose, say, whether to inclu de curse words that her character would probably use in real life, or how g raphic to be in depicting a traumatic event, we have to decide which parts of the true stories we tell fit our readers. For example, when Marina and I were writing Sugar Changed the World, we came upon the notebook of Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer in Jamaica in the 1700s. This is the closest view we have of life on the sugar plantations, since no slave narratives were ev er collected. It was easy enough to deal with the extreme tortures he inven ted -- we could allude to them and select an example that signaled extremit y without turning stomachs, but he also kept track of every woman he violat ed, and how. Now what about that? Over t wo summers we shared our writing pr ocess with NYC public school teachers, most of whom taught 5th grade. There was simply no agreement on what to say about this. For some, it was too mu ch -- knowing their girls and their schools. For others it was absolutely n ecessary. We came to feel that there was no clear standard, and so we used our judgement and gave a number, 138 and general description. We feel that this was too important to ignore -- enslaved women did not own their own bo dies. Some reviewers have complained that the book seems too brutal, or see it as only for high school. Maybe. All I can say is that being true to his tory, or science, leads you outside of safe bounds.
In a way, CCBC friends, I suspect the question we have posed needs to be re phrased: not, what belongs in books, but how can you as teachers, librarian s, parents, match books to individual readers. Some 5th graders are ready t o read about the systematic abuse of women, some are not. We authors are on our conscience to weigh carefully, but there is no single rule. Instead it comes down to knowing books, knowing readers, making connections, and bein g ready to talk as the young person deals with what she finds on the page.
Marc Aronson
Received on Mon 21 Nov 2011 04:56:13 AM CST
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2011 04:56:13 -0500 (EST)
I'd like to reverse the question we have been discussing, and talk about it from the writer's POV. Any NF author faces choices about what to say and w hat not to say in a book for younger readers, and these choices are not cle ar or self evident. Just as a novelist has to choose, say, whether to inclu de curse words that her character would probably use in real life, or how g raphic to be in depicting a traumatic event, we have to decide which parts of the true stories we tell fit our readers. For example, when Marina and I were writing Sugar Changed the World, we came upon the notebook of Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer in Jamaica in the 1700s. This is the closest view we have of life on the sugar plantations, since no slave narratives were ev er collected. It was easy enough to deal with the extreme tortures he inven ted -- we could allude to them and select an example that signaled extremit y without turning stomachs, but he also kept track of every woman he violat ed, and how. Now what about that? Over t wo summers we shared our writing pr ocess with NYC public school teachers, most of whom taught 5th grade. There was simply no agreement on what to say about this. For some, it was too mu ch -- knowing their girls and their schools. For others it was absolutely n ecessary. We came to feel that there was no clear standard, and so we used our judgement and gave a number, 138 and general description. We feel that this was too important to ignore -- enslaved women did not own their own bo dies. Some reviewers have complained that the book seems too brutal, or see it as only for high school. Maybe. All I can say is that being true to his tory, or science, leads you outside of safe bounds.
In a way, CCBC friends, I suspect the question we have posed needs to be re phrased: not, what belongs in books, but how can you as teachers, librarian s, parents, match books to individual readers. Some 5th graders are ready t o read about the systematic abuse of women, some are not. We authors are on our conscience to weigh carefully, but there is no single rule. Instead it comes down to knowing books, knowing readers, making connections, and bein g ready to talk as the young person deals with what she finds on the page.
Marc Aronson
Received on Mon 21 Nov 2011 04:56:13 AM CST
