WRITING FOR CHILDREN
Spell bound
International bestseller Cressida Cowell describes how to write magical books for children
Cressida Cowell
pic credit Debra Hurford Brown
I have spent twenty years writing the How to Train Your Dragon and Wizards of Once books, and over those twenty years I have lost count of the times people have asked me, ‘Have you ever thought of writing for adults?’
But for me writing for children is the greatest privilege on earth, and my quest as a writer is to play some small part in trying to get the children of today to read books with the same excitement and wonder that I read them when I was a kid.
There’s a wealth of research to show that the two key factors in a child’s later economic success (let alone their happiness) are parental involvement in education, and reading for pleasure.
However making a book that a child of today will read with the same amount of pleasure that I read books when I was a kid, is rather trickier than it sounds. When I was a child the telly was terrible, there was no internet, no playstation. Now the telly is glorious and incessant, and it is magically ‘beamed’ in to children’s heads without them having to do anything, whereas books can only be accessed by a laborious act of de-coding. Even if a child doesn’t have a learning difficulty, books can come to be associated with school and hard work, but if a child has dyslexia, it can be worse than that. In that case, books can sometimes come to represent something that actively makes the child feel stupid, and how on earth can you love something that makes you feel stupid?
So I have to work very, very hard to over-turn that impression, and make sure that the stories are worth the effort the child has to put in to access them.