My 7-year-old kid expressed disgust at The Disgusting Sandwich and said she didn’t want to read it again, but she brought it to me again a few days later. This time, she knew what to expect, and managed to enjoy it. Most kids I know love to be grossed out. There’s a narrow window in childhood in…
Marina Warner has a great way of thinking about fairytale archetypes: Imagine them as pieces on a chessboard. We know all we need to know about them just from their appearance. Moreover, their position on the board limits the number of possible moves they’re able to make. If you’ve ever seen Tarot cards, the archetypes…
by Gerhard Glück drunk santa
You’ve probably heard of foreshadowing, but have you heard of back-shadowing and side-shadowing? These techniques have nothing to do with each other, other than that they all describe literary techniques and they all include ‘shadowing’ in the term.
“Where The Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak is the picture book that changed picture books forever. The picture book began to be understood, after Maurice Sendak, as something extraordinary – a fusion of images and limited vocabulary which authors such as Julia Donaldson, Lauren Child, Alan and Janet Ahlberg, Emily Gravett and more have turned…
The success of a novel is only five percent about the structure and ninety-five percent about the quality of the writing. Elizabeth Lyons, Manuscript Makeover Younger writers should be experimenting with form as well as material, like a water-seeker with a divining rod. We are “haunted” by experiences, images, people, acts of our own or…
Mice are widely represented in folktales, both as protagonists and as helpers. Apparently, there is a subconscious identification on the part of children’s writers of a small and helpless child with one of the smallest animals, also know—maybe without reason—for its lack of courage.
There’s a prevailing idea that we are all cohesive, single selves. Sure, we might change over time, but if there’s such a thing as ‘being yourself’ then we must accept our own absorption of the idea that ‘yourself’ (singular) exists in the first place.
Paralepsis*: (Faux) Omission. In rhetoric, paralepsis refers to the device of giving emphasis by professing to say little or nothing about a subject, as in not to mention their unpaid debts of several million, but saying it all the same. I know who farted but I wouldn’t want to embarrass Charles. In the name of anonymity,…
Carnival: In the Bakhtanian sense, “a place that is not a place and a time that is not a time”, in which one can “don the liberating masks of liminal masquerade”. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, 1974 Children’s literature academic Maria Nikolajeva categorises children’s fiction into three general forms:…
Why are there so many animal characters in children’s literature? A better question might be: Why so many humans? As Barbara Ehrenreich observes when writing about a 1940s discovery of cave paintings, early humans spent much more time rendering their cave wall paintings of animals. The humans are ‘humanoid’: crude stick figures. If the Paleolithic…
The underdog is very popular as a main character in fiction. But there are ways to write underdogs well as well as pitfalls to avoid. What Is An Underdog? The Three Assumptions Behind Most Underdog Stories It’s worth thinking hard about our own attitudes towards social hierarchy before writing an underdog story. In contemporary stories,…
WHAT HAPPENS IN THE CHASTE CLARISSA A twice-divorced philanderer holidays where he has always holidayed, on Martha’s Vineyard. On the ferry he meets for the first time a beautiful young woman who has recently married into a bird-watching, rock-collecting family of average Joes, but her husband won’t be joining Clarissa on the island, so our viewpoint…
The Wizard of Oz is in some ways the inverse of Winnie the Pooh. Whereas L. Frank Baum’s Oz series is so highly metaphorical every member of a thinking audience weaves their own symbolism into it, Milne’s Pooh series is so devoid of symbolism that it’s famous among specialists of children’s literature for precisely the…
In his story ‘The Cure’, Cheever comes pretty close to writing a supernatural thriller story, with a few typical thriller genre beats. The stars are ordinary heroes, or to use Northrop Frye’s terms, mimetic heroes.