"How To Join the Rowling Club" - Amanda Daignault
Channel: Bibliographical Society of Canada
Date: 2021-06-25

Amanda Daignault, University of Alberta

The authors of children’s books, perhaps more than those of any other genre, seem subject to a rather intense mythologization: that Alice in Wonderland began as nonsense stories Lewis Carroll told the Liddell children on a boat trip; that J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter novel in cafes, with her baby daughter in a stroller beside her – these stories and many others are practically common knowledge. Grenby argues that the impulse towards myth-making is foundational to our understanding of children’s literature; that the stories we tell ourselves about the stories we tell to children locate them in a non-threatening sphere (17). That may be how readers prefer to think about authors…but how do those authors think of themselves? How might they learn what it is to be a children’s author?

In this paper, I examine a corpus of how-to guides and manuals for writing children’s books published in the 20th and 21st centuries. In particular, I focus on what the manuals expect their readers to know and not to know about the publishing industry and the market for children’s books, as well as the content of their advice about manuscript length, subgenres, and norms of the publishing industry. Using de Geest and Goris’s study of romance novel handbooks as a comparator, I argue that aspiring writers of children’s books are constructed as not being knowledgeable about their target genre, but as having nearly an innate ability to write stories for children, by virtue of once having been children themselves, and due to the formal accessibility children’s books.

Works Cited

De Geest, Dirk and An Goris. “Constrained Writing, Creative Writing: The Case of Handbooks for Writing Romances.” Poetics Today, vol. 31, iss. 1, Spring 2010, pp. 81-106. DOI: 10.1215/03335372-2009-015. 

Grenby, M. O. “The Origins of Children’s Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, eds. M.O. Grenby and Andrea Immel, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009, pp. 3-18.