BOOKS FOR CHILDREN? THAT’S NOT PROPER WRITING, IS IT?

BOOKS FOR CHILDREN? THAT’S NOT PROPER WRITING, IS IT?

By Sally Costelloe

When I began writing fiction a few years ago, after leaving a 20-year career in magazine journalism, I didn’t tell anyone; I wrote purely for myself. It was my private hobby, a way of escaping reality for a short while into the secret worlds I created. It took a long time to free my imagination after so many years of writing non-fiction but slowly, slowly a nascent novel began to emerge. To my surprise it was a story for children. I then discovered that I had an ambition for my writing – to create a book-length thing with which I was happy. That was all. I never had any thoughts of showing my work to anyone or, heaven forfend, trying to get it published.

That all changed in the summer of 2020 when, in a moment of reckless enthusiasm which I can only blame on the frustrations of various pandemic lockdowns, I entered the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awards. Once I’d pressed ‘Send’ on my entry, I more or less forgot about it, and continued tinkering with my manuscript and writing a few other bits and bobs. Imagine my shock when, a few months later, I got a phone call from the Scottish Book Trust to tell me I was one of the two winners in the Children’s and YA category. When the awards were publicly announced at the start of 2021, the cat was well and truly out of the bag and my writing was a secret no longer.

When people find out you are writing a book, it piques their interest; when you win an award, their interest peaks. ‘A novel!’ they say. ‘How exciting!’ they say. ‘What sort of book is it?’ they ask. ‘It’s a book for children,’ I reply. At this point, the interest is still there but, more often than not, I can see it has dimmed. ‘What’s it about?’ they ask. ‘It’s a story about a girl and a pony,’ I tell them. And just like that, I’ve lost them. Faces fall, smiles fade, attention wanders elsewhere and any interest in my creative endeavour has almost entirely evaporated.

Many people are intrigued and fascinated by the idea of someone writing a book. Tell them it’s a suspenseful crime thriller, a cosy mystery, a sweeping romance, a witty chick lit or a historical saga and the questions will flow. ‘Have I heard of you?’ ‘When will it be out?’ ‘Where can I buy it?’ But a book for children? About ponies? Well, ‘That’s not ‘proper’ writing, is it?’ as someone actually once said to me.

It is ‘proper’, of course and for me, writing for readers in the eight to twelve age range is exhilarating. It’s when a passion for reading can be born; a passion that will last a life time. And, if a child’s love of all things ‘pony’ entices them to read and get excited about books, then that can only be a good thing. As a horse-mad but horse-less child in the early 1970s, I can still remember the thrill I felt when I discovered books by the Pullein-Thompson sisters, show jumper Pat Smythe or the ‘Jill’ series by Ruby Ferguson.

They transported me to a world of gleaming ponies; long hacks across wild moors, unaccompanied and unencumbered by adults, of course; and gymkhanas where the rosettes were as plentiful as the ginger beer. Many of these stories had been written decades before I was reading them and were somewhat old-fashioned even then, but that didn’t seem to matter as these modest little paperbacks made me fall in love with reading. I devoured book after book, reading by torchlight under the covers long after my bed time, unable to resist reading just one more chapter. When today’s children find a book or genre of books that excites them like that, the effect is the same and it’s wonderful.

Books dismissed as mere ‘pony stories’ frequently deal with deeper, more complex issues. It’s not all gymkhanas and ginger beer! Indeed, my own novel mixes themes of childhood bereavement, grief and loneliness into a rollicking, crime-solving, pony-riding adventure story. One can’t underestimate the importance of a young reader seeing their own experiences, passions and emotions reflected back at them from the pages of a book.

Over the last few years, I’ve read a multitude of recently-published books aimed at middle-grade readers. And, much to my delight, quite a few of them feature ponies. It’s pleasing to see that there are agents and publishers who believe, as I do, that pony books for children are indeed ‘proper writing’!

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Sally Costelloe lives on the Isle of Mull in Scotland. She spent 20 years as an editor and publisher for tattoo art magazines, before leaving the world of monthly deadlines behind in 2013. In 2021 Sally won the Scottish Book Trust New Writers’ Award (Children’s & YA category. Her first middle-grade novel, Cloud Ride is currently out on submission to agents. Sally is on Twitter as @writingonmull

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing