Good For You Is Good Enough: On Chapter Books, "Reading Up", and Stressed Out Kids

I’ve been thinking a lot about Chapter Books lately. Actually, all books, ALL THE TIME, but since I wrote a Chapter Book that I’m querying and I read a lot of those books in particular, I think about them. And I think about the concept of “reading up”, and I think about stressed out kids.

I haven’t been at this writing gig forever, and I haven’t been a parent forever, so I don’t know everything. But I do know this:

There is a lot of talk, on the news and in magazines and in the media generally, about how we are currently raising a generation of stressed-out, high-anxiety kids.

At the same time, there is a lot of talk (usually in the same places, often within the same program or in the same magazine issue - the unintentional irony is amazing) about how to get our kids reading younger, how schools expect them to be reading at an earlier age, and about how to help your kid “get ahead” and start “reading at a higher grade level” than their enrolled grade, so they can “get ahead of their peers and get a head start on life”.

There are levels to the problem here. First, we have the whole expectation that EVERY CHILD will somehow be ahead of every other child in every area, which is ridiculous and unrealistic and also unnecessary. (America, in particular, has an especially bad case of what I like to call "First Place-itis", both on an individual level and also as a nation. Unless you have traveled, one could be excused, based on what we hear from the American Propaganda Machine, for thinking that other countries - the ones that are Developed Nations, but that aren't the Top Dog - lack basic things like central heating and flush toilets and traffic lights. Trust me, America - being Number Two or Number Five or Number Twelve really ISN'T the end of the world.)

But the other level to the problem is the whole idea of encouraging kids to consume media that was not intended for them. I wonder if the people who write the articles encouraging parents to get their kids to read Harry Potter at the age of five have actually read the books themselves. Because when I was five, reading about a kid being hunted by a bad guy and then (SPOILER ALERT!) burning the bad guy’s face off at the end would have freaked me the hell out.

I know that if you’re a parent reading this, or maybe even if you’re an author or a publisher reading this, you’re probably defending the whole “reading up” thing. This is understandable. Parents want success for their kids, and publishers want to stay in business. And maybe your 5-year-old kid really can handle watching a man’s face turn to ash and then slowly drop away from his still standing corpse. (I guess this is me coming out against the idea of showing your kid the movie to help them understand the book that was written for kids much older than they are. Because, DUDE: if you don’t think they’re ready to read it? The beauty of books is that the images to go with the words are formed based on that child’s experience. Movies? Not so much.) But given the frequency of reports that our kids are more stressed out than kids have ever been, it seems clear that maybe more of us are wrong about that than we think. Maybe some of the kids who seem to be “handling it” are actually freaking out inside.

ASIDE: No, I don’t think it’s good to “desensitize” our kids. I want violence to always be an abhorrent, shocking thing to my children. Because once they accept it, they are one step closer to practicing it.

It saddens me that, in search of books for their ten-year-old “voracious readers”, parents hand them books like The Hunger Games and Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars rather than handing them books like When You Reach Me and The Tale of Desperaux. Not because the first set of books aren’t good books - in fact, I think they’re AMAZING books. But they are books written for teenagers, with the interests of teenagers in mind. They’re books written with the understanding that the people who read them will be concerned with things like how governments can wield power responsibly and what that does and doesn’t look like, and whether smoking pot is as bad for them as their parents say it is, and whether they should have sex with their boyfriend or girlfriend this weekend. Whether they’re “ready”, and what being “ready” even feels like, anyway.

Is your ten-year-old thinking about that stuff?

I hear people in the publishing world say that kids should be able to read whatever they wish, and that they will put a book down if they aren’t ready for it. I don’t completely agree with that. Because you can never un-read something that you weren’t ready for.

I think a valid question here is: why do we bother writing “for children”? What are the distinctions between “chapter books” and “middle grade” and “young adult” for, if we are going to encourage people to flaunt them? Those labels are signposts, guys.

I do not advocate censorship. I do not advocate the banning of books, or the removal of books from libraries and school curricula. I DEFINITELY do not advocate the sanitizing of books. (My WiP is a YA about a school shooting. It’s not sanitized. But it’s a YA, and it’s not for ten-year-olds.)

I DO advocate parents taking an active role in choosing, with their children, what their children read, and I advocate parents talking about books with their kids. I advocate booksellers taking an interest in helping their customers find the right book for them, above pushing the latest blockbuster. (Independent bookstores are much better at this than major chains, I find.) Some young kids really are ready to read books written for older kids, because they are asking those questions at a younger age. Also, some books on the “teen” shelves really are great for older tweens to read, just as some books on the “tween” shelf are genuinely appealing to 7-8 year-olds. But those are the exceptions, and most of them probably are not.

I wish - I really, really WISH - that we who make the books and publish the books and sell the books could continue to be be a little smarter about and more considerate about emotional preparedness. I hope that we will continue to be more sensitive to the emotional needs of children.

I wish that we, as a society, as a culture, would place “emotional needs” higher up on the importance pyramid than “reads and does math at a higher grade level than the rest of his class”.

Little children need, above all else, to feel loved and safe. And while I have never been a great fan of the litany of formulaic, sappy chapter books about fairies and ponies and princesses and puppies - IVY & BEAN and CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS are much more to my taste than RAINBOW FAIRIES and PUPPY PLACE - it saddens me to see Chapter Books coming out that open with demons and angry monsters and danger. It saddens me deeply. Because I do not think that we serve our six-year-olds’ emotional needs well with these types of books.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks for stopping by.

Stickers, Crap, and Angst: Things That Make Me Cry

So, I've been doing a lot of reading lately. It might have something to do with the fact that my novel and I are sitting deep in the bowels of writerly angst - you know, that place where you know your manuscript needs a little work but you think it's promising, and then you open it up to work on it and you realize that it's awful, and the characters are flat, and you repeat yourself a million times, and this will never, ever, ever be as good as those books with the shiny award stickers on them, and it's not commercial and plotty enough to sell, so you might as well quit now and let The Hubbles carry the bills while you get fat eating bonbons and binge-watching Castle reruns and a loop of that Van Damme commercial on YouTube…

Maybe that's just me.

ANYWAY, when I know my work is terrible and I don't know how to make it better, I read. I read all the books with those nice shiny stickers on them. Because I'm masochistic that way. Why be satisfied with the knowledge that I need to improve when I can rub my own nose in it? Also, it's an opportunity to learn. And I want to learn from the masters.

So since my current WiP is a YA, I read a bunch of really good YA. I read John Green's Looking for Alaska, where I paid attention to things like how to structure the first chapter to introduce statement of theme without being too obvious about it (or how to be obvious and still get away with it), and how to incorporate backstory without making it feel like backstory, and how to make characters feel real, and pacing. I read it out loud to The Hubbles and learned about poetic prose and the importance of rhythm so that the words flow from sentence to paragraph to page to chapter and back again. I could get a whole writing course worth of learning out of that book. I cried a lot over the course of reading it, usually when I thought of my own sorry work-in-progress, but also when the story called for it.

I read Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, where I noticed how important it is to get the small details right, that the reason I knew I was in the hands of a good storyteller from the very beginning was that the sights and the smells and the sound of the wind just felt right. And I thought about archetypes, and Cinderella stories and Ugly Duckling stories, and how if I hadn't just read Cheryl Klein's essay on archetypes and plot in her book Second Sight, I wouldn't have noticed the archetypes in this book, but they were still there, and maybe it was my identification with those archetypes, my emotional response to them based on my own social and cultural context, that makes those kinds of stories so powerful for me as a reader. And I also learned about pacing. Again. There's another writing course in that book. I cried at the end of that one, too.

And then I opened my own WiP and I cried myself to sleep, because, you know. CRAP.

And then I read Eric Walters' The Rule of Three, because a kid in my YA book club picked it. And I have to be honest here - I didn't want to finish it. The dialogue seemed stilted (to me). The plot was predictable (to me). The characters were boring and stereotypical and, if I can take a minute to be arrogant on my own blog, pretty slow (to me). There was an interesting character, Herb, who showed up after about 50 pages or so, but he wasn't enough to pull me through the novel. I knew the publisher was excited about the book (because I had read it in an article in Publishers' Weekly or some place like that), but I couldn't figure out why. I thought it probably had something to do with the plot. And I know this stuff is totally subjective. So I did what I always do when I am mystified by a book's buzz: I passed it to The Hubbles and asked him what he thought of it.

He read the whole thing in a couple of days. He agreed with me on the dialogue and the characters, but he thought the plot was really interesting, and he loved Herb, and he figured that for the average YA reader, it was enough. It didn't change his worldview, but it diverted him for a few hours and gave him a distraction from bills and was entertaining. I learned a big lesson there, too: that just because a book isn't the kind of book I want to be writing right now, that doesn't make it a book that isn't worthy of existence. That there are different books for different people at different times. And that having an interesting plot is really, really important, no matter who your audience is.

I can't say that it made me feel any better about the state of my novel, but at least it didn't make me cry.

And then I read Vikki VanSickle's Words That Start With B, which isn't a YA, it's a Middle Grade, but which was delightful and welcoming and honest and wonderful in a wrap-you-up-in-a-cozy-blanket sort of way, and which filled my brain with real characters and a well-paced story. It was like rediscovering Judy Blume. And holy moly - the craftsmanship that went into making that book. I'm still figuring it out. There's another writing course right there. I'm mystified at the lack of buzz for this book. Or maybe I just missed it; I only recently got around to starting the Harry Potter series, after all. If my friends had to describe me, the phrase "late to the party" would almost certainly come to mind.

That book didn't make me cry, either - I take that as a good sign, that I can read a truly excellent book now without dissolving into hot, silent tears of self-loathing (although I can still feel them as I type, swelling at the back of my throat). I've been jotting down ideas for my novel, elements I can add that will strengthen a character, plot points I can change to raise the stakes and make things more interesting, scenes I should take out or rewrite. I'm not quite ready to look at the 58,000+ words that I wrote back in November, but at least I'm no longer battling the urge to just print the whole thing and set fire to it in a garbage can in the backyard.

Which brings me to the reason for this post, apart from letting you know what books I think you should read, which is this: reading is important if you're a writer. You need to read to learn how to do it right, and you need to read to distract yourself from your own misery when you know you're doing it wrong. You need to read critically, as well as for your own enjoyment. You need to read widely, both within your genre and outside of it. But you don't have to read everything. It's okay - even preferable - to put a book down when it isn't speaking to you. Just make sure you know why you're putting it down, and why someone else might want to keep reading. Get other people's opinions if you have to. Don't let a book pass through your hands without learning something from it.

And when in doubt, look for the stickers.

Thanks for stopping by.

Note: With the exception of Cheryl Klein's Second Sight: an Editor's Talks on Writing Revising & Publishing Books for Children and Young Adults, which is only available on Amazon and is thusly hyperlinked, the aforementioned books are all hyperlinked to their IndieBound pages, should you wish to buy them. But in case you can't find a local independent bookstore using the IndieBound search engine, or are a heartless soulless pathetic excuse for an individual who hates independent bookstores with every fibre of your being, here are those books again, this time hyperlinked to their Amazon or Chapters Indigo pages:
Looking for Alaska, by John Green
The House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer
The Rule of Three, by Eric Walters
Words that Start With B, by Vikki VanSickle