The twin golden rules of writing children’s novels, as the editors from the big publishing houses constantly remind us at writers’ conferences, are these:

• Spoon-feed ’em.
• Front-load the facts.

Apparently, the current crop of editors making the circuit all suffer from ADD and think that their audience does, too. The reader can’t be trusted to be patient enough to discover, in due course, everything from the color of the protagonist’s eyes to the precise date. All essential contextual information has to be presented — without, of course, resorting to omniscient “gentle reader” exposition or contrived “as he stood before the mirror” scenes — within the first two pages or you’re somehow letting the reader down.

“You need to mention the year early on,” I keep being told. But no matter how creatively I try to work it in, the result ends up being stilted. I’ve been able to get the characters to reference their location (Berlin), the time of year (spring), their ages (fifteen), and the general time period (one of the boys is wearing a Hitler Youth uniform). But they adamantly refuse to bring up the year in their conversation.

And then it hit me why they are being so stubborn, and it’s not just because “1937” means precisely squat to the characters as well as to kids today. The story is set in an ambiguous time, and I want the reader to feel the unease of that ambiguity. Is it wartime? Is it peacetime? There are times that it feels like one and then a page later it could be the other. There are uniforms and secret police and block wardens, but where are the bombing raids?

I want the reader to know that it’s not always possible to tell when you’re at war and when you’re at peace. Today’s kids are probably more keenly attuned to the tensions created by that kind of ambiguity than at any time since the late 1930s. And if Erich, my protagonist, found the strength to face these problems, maybe my readers can too.

Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything

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