Some Advice
How to Read Aloud Well
An American father once said to me, ‘So how do you do this read-aloud thing?’ I was almost too taken aback to answer. Wasn’t it obvious? Then I realised that it wouldn’t be obvious if he hadn’t been read to as a child. I wanted to say: ‘Well, you know—find a book, call your child, and sit down and read the book to the child.’ But it was so simple that I was too embarrassed to say it.
Writing Picture Books
Books for young children are usually short. Young children aged 0-7 are themselves short. This leads to an assumption that children have small brains and writing for them is easy. The reverse it true. Young children have active, lively brains, and writing for them is difficult.
Writing Do’s and Don’ts
DO read recent picture books over and over again.
DO make friends with a bookseller or librarian or storyteller: their advice and guidance can be enormously helpful.
DO be original: try not to copy the ideas or structures of recent well-known books.
DO become familiar with the nature of rhythm. Understanding brevity, rhythm, and cadence in prose will keep rejections at bay.
Should we teach writing well or badly?
Once upon a time—in 1992—I found myself in Donald Graves’ house in New Hampshire. Linda Rief, a friend of mine, was friend of his, so there we were, somehow, at his place, taking tea with God himself, and his wife, Betty. To put me at my ease, since I was so clearly awestruck, Don said lovely things about my book Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge and asked what I was working on. I told him it was a picture book called Time for Bed due for publication the following year.
The Folly of Jolly Old Phonics
Once upon a time in Australia there lived three children. Their names were Sean, Justin and Josephine. Sean lived in Hobart, and still does. Justin lived in Melbourne, and still does. And Josephine lived in Adelaide—and still does, around the corner from me. Each of these children learnt to read before he or she went to school, without any lessons. How this happened is fascinating. And challenging. And ultimately, confronting for those of us in literacy education.
Notes from the battlefield
I’m a writer. As such I often see myself as a bloodied and wounded soldier staggering around a battlefield in an attempt to conquer the blank page. As a soldier in the thick of it all I will try to explain from the battlefield why I write and why other write around me. I’ll also try to puzzle out, from the perspective of a war correspondent who stands back and observes, why there are so many deserters out there, refusing to take up their pens and write alongside me. Is it becausethe wages aren’t good enough? Is it because there’s nothing worth writing for? Is it because it’s only a pretend battle with pretend rewards for pretend winners? We’ll see.
Children’s Questions Answered
Question: Have you always been a writing sort of person?
Answer: Yes. I wrote a book about soil erosion when I was ten, although it was only six pages long; and I wrote another much longer book when I was seventeen. I used to like writing letters best of all, and long daily entries in my diaries. I wrote letters to lots of friends and relatives in Australia because I grew up a long way away in Africa.
The short road to happiness and the long road to failure
When a great story is read aloud listeners, even very young listeners, learn and understand new words that would normally be beyond them because they occur within a story they know and love, a story they hear again and again. I made up a story for Theo a few months ago in which I called a giraffe’s legs ‘spindly’. I used the word ‘spindly’ for some weeks and then thought that ‘spindly’ was really too grown up for a little kid so I one day I said ‘thin’ instead. He looked at me, puzzled and confused for a moment and then said, as if were an idiot, ‘You mean “spindly”!’
Parent Talk May 2013
If you knew anything about me at all before today it’s probably one of two things: that I wrote Possum Magic; and I race around the world begging people to read aloud to children for at least ten minutes a day, every day, between birth and five years of age. The question is: why would we want to do that? For fun! Fun for us, and fun for them! Read The Magic Hat.
Ten read-aloud commandments
Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud. From birth!