If podcasts all about children’s literature are your jam, then you might be interested in this. I was very delighted to join Mark Carter on the Children’s Literature Research Podcast recently to talk all things children’s books. Our conversation covered imposter syndrome in academia, How To Be Brave, How To Be True and the magic that is picture books. It was an absolute pleasure and I hope you enjoy!
Some updates
My second children’s book is out in less than a month (what a sentence! forgive me for having a moment over that!). How To Be True can be pre-ordered directly from the publisher here. It’s the second book featuring the characters from How To Be Brave and if you’re after buns, adventures, and a particularly Parisian flair, then you should do alright đ
I am also pleased to say that recruitment for my course on Blogging And Writing For Online Audiences is now open! The course starts in September and runs for seven weeks. If you can’t make that, then I’ll be teaching more throughout the next academic year. I enjoy teaching this course because I get to see students really kick their creative work into the next gear – it’s a privilege to witness!
And finally, I was down in London this week for some meetings and took some time out for doing a little bit of sightseeing. Along with walking far too far on a very hot day and signing some books at Waterstones Piccadilly (a delight!), I managed to make the detour to visit children’s literature royalty. If you’re ever at the Victoria and Albert museum then I recommend making the trip because he’s really very breath-taking in person.
How to be edited (and how to edit)
I’ve been thinking a lot about editing recently, not only in terms of my own books and academic work but also in terms of the teaching I offer to others. It was interesting to realise that a lot of my approach can be summed up as: “get to the choppper” which, for those of you unfamiliar to the term, roughly translates to “get to where you want to be as quickly as you can”. Now, this isn’t necessarily to argue for cutting out the entirety of the story (because there’s value in everything and what do we have if the eagles simply drop Frodo and Sam off at the mountain?) but rather to emphasise the necessity for deftness. Get in. Get out. Find your rhythms. Embrace your patterns.
When it comes to the work of others, you have to flip that and recognise their rhythms and their patterns. Not everybody writes the same (nor should they). I am a firm believer in everybody being on their own journey when it comes to writing and the destination that you may be heading to is not necessarily the same destination I, or one of your colleagues, may be off to. My job is to make sure you and your work get to where you’re going in the best shape possible. It’s not about making everybody Dostoyevsky (because, dull) but rather making everybody the best version of the writer that they can and indeed should be.
One of the things that I’ve learnt about being edited is that, when it’s done well, it’s never personal. It’s not. It’s very easy to take it as personal because we are humans and that’s what we do. It’s all about trying to shape and craft the piece of work. The bones are always there already, every piece of writing has them. It’s all about putting the flesh onto them and building it up from the inside out.
For me, the thing to recognise is that when people spot something that needs fixing, it’s up to you to provide a solution. You don’t necessarily have to agree with the solution that they’ve proposed or do it quit in the way that they want to but you do need to fix it. You also need to pick your battles. It might be that certain things are very deliberately the way they are and you’d like them to stay the same. It might be that other things, if you change them to fit, really don’t matter in the bigger scheme of things. Editing is a conversation.
When I’m editing, I’m trying to figure out what that best might be for you. It depends of course as to the context I’m working in but I’ll think about things like the final goal of the assignment, the other assignments that you’ve shared with me, and the things we’ve talked about in our discussions. I’ll think about the writer that you’ve told me you want to be and the books that you read and the writers you enjoy. We are all stars when we write and all of this tells me whereabouts in the constellation you want to be. My job is to help you to get there.
I like editing and being edited. Can you tell? I think there’s something deeply exciting about being able to get your hands dirty with words, about being able to pull the sticky stuff apart to reveal the clean and shining underneath. Sometimes I think we forget how intimately text is connected to textuality, that all of these little marks on the page and screen are stuff we can feel and move and touch, that we can control and move and remake everything here, that we can find one shape and then the next. Writing is never still, never static. There’s always something else to find within it.
A few updates
It’s been a busy few weeks and I’m long overdue an update here. So let’s do precisely that!
First up: How To Be True is out in July and I am so excited to share the next adventure at the School of the Good Sisters with you all. This book focuses on Edie and delves further into her background and family life. Let’s just say there’s a lot of (wo)manning the barricades. You can pre-order through this link and I’m so grateful if you do.
Don’t forget, you can also ask your library to get a copy in! I know not everybody can afford to buy new books so do remember your library and think of them.
Second up: I’ve been working on some resources for teaching in and around the books. I’ll embed a quick video of writing tips below and I’m working on some more in-depth sessions about ‘what makes a classic’ when it comes to children’s literature, and also about writing the modern school story. Please do get in touch if you’d like to discuss a virtual / remote / in-person session! I’d love to hear from you!
Talking of World Book Day, I had the pleasure to speak to Joanita Musisi on BBC Radio York to celebrate all things bookish. You can catch up at this link (from about 1h10 onwards). The link only lasts 28 days so make sure you catch up sooner rather than later.
Finally, I’d like to mention the Book Aid For Ukraine auction. Like, I suspect, all of you, I’ve been appalled and heartbroken over what’s been happening and this felt like a positive step in an awful situation. I have donated a signed and personalised copy of How To Be Brave here – if you can, please do bid, and if you can’t, please do spread the word. It all helps.
Data analysis and craft
Here we are then, the data analysis chapter. It’s as much as a magical mystery tour as the rest of them are but I’m increasingly conscious that is simply the way that writing is. Some days you figure things out the moment that you begin to work and some days you don’t. There are moments in my books that haven’t got changed from first draft to publication and I know that they’re right because of how they feel. Is that helpful? To talk of writing as a textured, three-dimensional thing? I am not sure that it is and yet I want to for that is the only way that I understand it.
Perhaps it’s better to talk about craft then, that well-used phrase within the world of writing. The craft of writing. Crafting sentences. Crafting this and crafting that, but always kind of keeping that separation between the act and the thing. Writing is crafted. Crafting makes writing. Writing is an act of craft. But perhaps something happens when you ignore all of that and kind of just push the words together; writing is craft, craft is writing, writing is craft. There’s something interesting in that for me, something that kind of moves back to the ink and the quill and the marking of the page with the ink, the sort of something that makes me think here is a tangible thing that didn’t exist before and I have made it and it has made me and together, line to page, black on white, something had happened in the world and it is good.
Making, making, always trying to see what comes of it, and you know when it’s right and you know when it’s wrong, but here’s the thing: you can’t build when there’s nothing there. Making needs stuff, it needs you to be full and the world to be charged and ready and some days, that doesn’t happen, but when you’re writing something long and something big then it has to. You can’t wait for circumstance to allow it, you need to force the context and make it happen. You need to craft, you need to make, you need to will these lines into shape and form and meaning.
I talk a lot about muscle memory with my students, the training of the body as much as the mind, for writing is a muscle and you must work it. I am not sure where the muscle is based, I loathe, somehow, at locating writing solely in my head when walking in sunlight can tease the words out of my heart as much as a cold night in December; perhaps the muscle is simply us and writing is all about learning how to find that part of you that wants to craft, wants to make, needs it to happen.
Data analysis then, to data and the search for form and shape and meaning; an arcane act, a mysterious act, but it’s just writing at the end of it and you can’t have something good unless you have the bad, and so you write the bad and the poor and the wordy and the sentences that you know need to make better sense at some point but that point isn’t now, and you have to have faith in that and allow it to happen. The making, that first moment, it’s messy and it’s loose and sometimes it’s perfect and all you have to do is let that happen and trust in the process. (rewriting, rewriting, remaking, remaking, rewording, editing, deleting, questioning).
We all have a process, even writers who do not think they are writers, even people who doubt their every scratch upon the page, process is within all of us and what’s important is trying to figure out what that is, what works, what doesn’t, what is just fear made flesh upon the line, what is doubt, and letting yourself delete, letting yourself stop. Letting yourself be unafraid and deleting because the words will come back, they’ll come back and they’ll be better. Sometimes I worry about losing drafts, backing up, backing up, backing up, and sometimes I sort of long for it to happen because I know what I write next, how I replace it, that will be the good, great stuff.
Data analysis then, the chapter that needs to tell you why you came to the party and what’s in the party bag, the chapter that’s halfway through the thesis and kind of feels like it should be at the front, the chapter that’s built initially on sand and shale and water, all of it so soft and so friable and so dangerously brittle that you don’t even want to look at it for fear that it might fall and fade, the chapter that suddenly starts to find form the more you work it, the chapter that suddenly starts to feel right, the chapter that suddenly starts to sit in the world and work in the way that you knew it had to all along.
The denial of doubt, the assertion of order, the patterns making themselves seen, the knowledge that they were there all along; the form, the fit, all of it known, all of it flesh.
How To Be Brave has been nominated for the 2022 Carnegie Awards
I am so thrilled to be able to share this with you…
When I knew that How To Be Brave was going to be published, I made a little bucket list for it and this was one of those things. I still cannot quite believe that itâs happened. Thank you to everyone whoâs supported the girls in their adventures so far. Youâre the best.
Do take the time to have a look at the rest of the nominees as there are some wonderful titles and authors represented. I have to say that Iâm especially thrilled to see Hilary McKay represented in the Carnegie (I mean, canât we give her the freedom of childrenâs literature already?) and Harry Woodgate, Jessica Love, and Chris Mould in the Greenaway nominations. Honestly, I think I need to go and move into the picture book section in the library for a bit. So much inspiration!
Tales of analysing data : a PhD update
It’s hard, right? I think there’s a point in every PhD journey where you stop and go “wow, so … this is hard”. My most recent point came when I had to begin to analyse my data and really didn’t know where to begin. This isn’t because I didn’t know my subject (although the whispers of imposter syndrome always begin there…) but rather because it felt a little bit like I had a cake that I had to cut and all I had was a banana and a ladle. Torturous metaphors aside, this was – is – a question of tools and utilities. How does one cut the cake? Do you follow the patterns that other people have set (and if so which…) or do you slice transversally? haphazardly? Do you even slice the cake at all?
One of the things that helped me was looking at how other people have worked this. I thought Qualitative Text Analysis by Udo Kuckartz was immensely useful – not in the least, because it recognised how complex and messy this phase can be. It also recognised the kind of silence that exists about the step in this research. Analyse this! Yes, but how? What’s the way to cut the cake? And is it even a cake? Should I be scooping from the middle of it or putting more icing on top of it or what?
(I think the universe is telling me I need cake).
I also found Qualitative Data Analysis by Jamie Harding a very reassuring book, ditto: Interpreting Qualitative Data by David Silverman. There are of course others, but I think these worked for me because they reminded me of what I did know. I think that sometimes we forget the value of that for students – they are learning an immense amount of stuff at this point, and yet they already know a lot of stuff. The stuff that’s being learnt adds a new quality or dimension or texture to that which has come before. Everybody’s story – their personal journey, the things they’ve experienced or learnt or interacted with – influences their approach to that which is yet to come. Sometimes I think the PhD process can be a little bit like ‘well, you know nothing’ when in fact, it’s more of a ‘here’s how to look again at the stuff you do know’. Maybe. Sort of. And yet, here I am doubting even that assertion! Irony!
In between all of this, I have had my first book published. How To Be Brave came out in the US and UK this July, and it’s been very lovely seeing the girls find their feet in the world. How To Be True, a sequel featuring MYSTERIOUS THINGS I CANNOT YET TALK ABOUT BUT YOU WILL FIND A LITTLE CLUE AS TO THEIR CONTENTS IN THE BACK OF HOW TO BE BRAVE, is on its way and I am planning, plotting, dreaming the third book. It will be called How To Be ??? (the question marks are to indicate a kind of mysterious final word and not, as it might seem, a love of grammar). How To Be Brave has received lovely reviews from a lot of people including Kirkus and School Library Journal and I am so immensely grateful for that. How To Be True has been a lot of fun to put together and I can’t wait to tell you more about it.
And now, back to that data analysis. I am trying to pluck up courage to start formulating the chapter where I talk about it. Maybe writing this update will have helped. I think that sometimes writing is like that. You have to creep up on it and start before you’ve quite realised what you’ve done. When you’ve begun, the only option is to keep going. Let’s test that theory!
You can now pre-order signed editions of How To Be Brave
We are now officially on the countdown to 1st July when my debut How To Be Brave is out and I am very happy to have some news to share with you. If you pre-order through the delightfully lovely Book Nook in Hove, you will get your book signed! personalised! and also support a gorgeous indie bookstore in the process!
(I mean, honestly đđ)
A few quick updates
Hello! I’ve spent the last few months working away on my thesis and on several ‘mysterious yet to be announced’ projects, and I thought it was time for a quick update on this blog. First of all, I want to talk about how delightful it is to see all the libraries preparing to open up again after lockdown. There is very little better than a good library marching back into the world to do what it does best and so good luck librarians! You’re awesome! You change the world everyday!
I managed to get into my university library for the first time this year the other week and it was a delight. It’s been open as best as it could throughout and I did have the opportunity to visit before this, but I was being extra cautious because of family members. But the decreasing numbers of cases in my local area made me feel like I was ready and so I did. Such a delight. Honestly. It’s kind of difficult to not just grab everything off the shelves and hug them.
One of the things I particularly enjoyed was stepping outside of my normal subject area and going to some other places. My research pulls on things ranging from textual analysis through to post-humanism at the moment and so there’s a delight in following the paths that come out of this and seeing where they take me. That was a terribly convoluted metaphor but essentially I looked at new shelves and found some cool stuff.
I really loved Women, Art and Power by Linda Nochlin which is an absolutely searing collection of essays on / about art. Even though I work in creative writing and children’s literature, there’s something really interesting to me about the notion of the ‘gaze’ and how that applies to text (which is, after all, art in its own right). In a way, I think that you (ie: ‘The Reader’) expect to find something in a sentence when you encounter it and, in some senses, have to readjust that which the sentence gives you against your expectation. And, of course, that something you expect to find is coloured by your own positionality within the world and all that you embody / perform / enact within that space. There were some essays I liked a lot more than others in Nochlin’s collection (as is always the way, I think , but I valued them all immensely as provocations. By provocations, I mean text designed / desiring to have some sort of reaction within you (although, having written that, I realise that all text desires for such!). Perhaps a better way to phrase it is to describe them as ‘what if’ pieces; items which consider the possibility of the divergent, otherness of a scenario, and work to explore what they could / might / should be.
I am also immensely enjoying A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari. A lot of the work that I’m reading sort of pulls on Deleuze and Guattari as this kind of talismanic reference, and there’s always interest in going back to the original source and seeing what they actually say. So far it’s a delight. I’m always in favour of theory that actually tries to push towards the edge of itself and use the telling of the theory (ie: the words on the page) in order to help make meaning. It’s quite easy to forget how the page looks and feels in favour of simply getting the words out. And whilst getting the words out is important, the texture of them is equally important. That’s a lot of italicisation in a short space, but it is intentional. The look and feel of something matters.
Related: this sort of thing always reminds me about the best book review I ever read which was in Private Eye. The reviewer had written a substantial amount, several paragraphs about this and that, and then moved onto discussing the authors love of a one line paragraph.
“For chilling effect”, they wrote, in a paragraph of its own.
(Honestly, it makes me laugh every time I think of it).
I also have some teaching coming up which will be a nice change. If you’re looking to brush up on your blogging and writing for online audiences skills, another intake of my course at the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge is about to start. If you can’t make this one then there are later dates. It’s always such a pleasure to teach as it’s quite a short and intensive period – you can really see how people develop from one week to the next.
And finally, How To Be Brave is out in just under three months time! Publishing timelines are big and long things and it’s very lovely to think of my book being out on the shelves soon. I’m very grateful to the people who’ve read and reviewed already (from one reviewer to another: you rock) and I’ll put below some of the advance quotes below. You can pre-order here if you think it might be up your street.
How To Be Brave is now available to pre-order!
I am very pleased to say that my debut middle grade ‘How To Be Brave’ is now available to order (see below for all the info!). It will be published in the UK on July 1st with Pushkin Press.
What is life, eh? How To Be Brave is now available for pre-order, adding on Goodreads, reading and reviewing via Netgalley, and generally swooning over. (Let us all guess which one I am doing the most of). Thanks so much to the amazing Thy Bui for the cover and the team at Pushkin for making HTBB look so beautiful. Iâve been so grateful at every step of this journey.
Big boots and adventures 