Children's column: authors as performers

Nicolette Jones
Opinion - Children Friday, 8th May 2009

Nicola Morgan's upcoming Deathwatch Dash () - by which she will set out to break the world record for the number of schools visited in one day - and Anthony Horowitz's imminent virtual event, which will reach 9,000 children in 216 schools at once, make me think how much the life of a children's author has become about personal contact with children as well as contact through books. Michael Rosen and Andrew Motion, in their , remarked that they never saw an author in school. In my youth, we had the extraordinary experience of meeting writers only at annual Puffin Club jamborees. Yet plenty of children's writers now, and not only Laureates, spend as much of their time on school visits as on writing - some, who notch up 300+ performances at schools a year, probably spend more, and earn the bulk of their income from their shows.


The huge crowds that now buy tickets to see Jacqueline Wilson, Francesca Simon and Michael Morpurgo at literary festivals - or J K Rowling on those rare, lucky-draw occasions - surely constitute an audience the size of which even Enid Blyton never saw.
It will be fascinating to see how much this makes being a writer popular with the next generation as well as being a reader. Initiatives like First Story, which are putting authors into inner London schools to work with pupils on creative writing, and Booktrust's Writing Together campaign, are also nurturing aspiring writers. The book industry already knows how many more people want to be published than can be. Encouraging children to write is unquestionably a good thing, but will there be an outlet for the talent that has been stimulated? Will the great writers of the next generation be bloggers?
Have we lost anything since the days when we only knew writers and illustrators through their books? When we weren t necessarily sure what sex E B White, E Nesbitt, P L Travers, and L M Montgomery were, let alone what they looked like? (Though A A Milne and C'S Lewis and J R R Tolkien had got famous enough for us to know.) Was there something to be said for imagining an author through his or her work? P L Travers looked liked Mary Poppins in my head.
Is the standard of performance getting too high for authors who are 'merely' good at writing? So it is not enough to write a gripping tale: you also have to be Eoin Colfer in front of an audience. Or do these showmen do the whole profession the favour of giving it glamour, and making kids want to be in it, as they want to be other kinds of celebrities?
Maybe much of the good work done by so many authors in so many schools (not just the highfliers above), will be undone when the children come to some of their most popular questions: How much do you earn? Or What car do you drive? . Suddenly the career may not look so inviting after all.

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