Know your audience

Hi everyone,

To follow up on yesterday, writers who write for children understand how much their audience changes from year to year. How often do we say, upon seeing a friend’s child or grandchild after an absence of a year or two, “I can’t believe how much they’ve changed!” Watching our own kids grow up makes us well aware of the ongoing metamorphosis of childhood. Kids can fall into and out of love with something — a certain toy, a nightly ritual, a pet word — as they discover, examine, and experience the world around them, sometimes at a dizzying pace. We know how that works because the same process happened to us when we were young. It’s still happening, though perhaps in a less exuberant fashion, today.

Now and then I find myself giving a workshop on writing for children. I have one coming up in May. For longer events of two or three days I get into the writing process but if I only have an hour or two, I focus more on knowing your audience. In my collaborations with educators to create books for the classroom, I must always focus on which classrooms, that is, which ages we have in mind. For one project, TIM RASINSKI and I wrote an early literacy program for the 11th largest school district in America, Fairfax County, Virginia. Nearly 190,000 students attend school in the system’s 223 schools. We focused on Grades 1 and 2.

My job was to write poems, 84 in all, based on repetitive use of the various sounds and sound families, for each grade according to target reading levels for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarter of the school year. Examples: here’s one for Grade 1, 1st quarter, demonstrating the short i. I chose a limerick.

In the faraway kingdom of Zit,
a turtle was learning to knit,
He said, “When I’m better,
I’ll knit a neat sweater
for the king of the kingdom of Zit.

It is hard for a turtle to knit,
and the sweater he made didn’t fit.
It was short by an inch,
which caused it to pinch.
“I think,” said the turtle, “I’ll quit.”

For a second example, here’s one for Grade 2, 4th quarter, demonstrating the sounds of es and est.

My brother is
the king of gases.
All the kids
in all his classes
compare the smell
to rotten fishes,
last week’s lunches,
moldy peaches
so overripe
it leaves them speechless.
Brother seems
to feel the proudest
when his gases
roar the loudest.
The oddest, rudest,
noise, alas is,
brother bravely
passing gases.

That was the most demanding task I’ve tackled, dividing the early reading process of six- and seven-year-old children into eight steps. Tim and I thought about each of my efforts, weighing the subtle growth in complexity of progress. I’m not suggesting that those who write for children in general must attempt such preciseness. What I am saying is that before we set out to write for children, we need to know our audience.