Launching a Course in Writing for Children: At the Two Year College
Even though the subject has an enormous following, few college English faculties today have attempted to offer a course in writing for children. Most parents and teachers would love to write for children and see their work in print. Yet many colleges who attempt to offer this subject fail. The course is scheduled, but enrollments falter, and the course closes. Since the desire is so universal, why is it hard to fill such a class?
I currently teach English full time at University of Cincinnati— Clermont, a two–year access college of about 2,500 students. I served as English coordinator and chair as our English department recently received approval to offer a course in writing for children for the first time. In the past, I have taught the subject in several settings: off–campus writing workshops, an M.A. program in writing, summer conferences, and a correspondence school. For about ten years before I returned to full–time college teaching a few years ago, I was steadily writing for children. My eleventh book for children is forthcoming in 2004, and I’ve published articles, reviews, and studies as well as a dissertation related to children’s books. As I worked in this exciting world, I have come to know many other authors for children and how they have learned their craft. Overall, few new authors of books for children studied the subject of writing for children in college because for the past few decades colleges did not offer the subject. Yet authors benefit from knowing markets and publishing houses, genres, and the networking information about this large industry that helps authors figure out where they may fit in this varied field. However, special training in how to write for children is offered today in primarily noncredit and off–campus settings–– workshops at libraries and bookstores, summer conferences advertised in children’s review journals, and the work groups organized by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, a grass roots network with 10,000 members. If colleges are to succeed in this field, they must comprehend how unaffiliated instruction works, in both free and for– profit channels, and then apply these observations to their new credit courses or writing certificate program.
The primary vender today in writing for children is a correspondence school that is not part of a college or university but which is the largest program in writing for children in the United States. It is a for–profit school called the Institute of Children’s Literature (ICL) based in Redding, Connecticut, near Danbury, offering only two courses and drawing 29,000 students per year. The business originated in the 1960s, with guidance from a small group of entrepreneurs, including editors from New York and two marketing experts who were renegades from the ranks of Proctor and Gamble. They liked children’s books and understood how people could be motivated to study the subject without credit of any kind. The Institute of Children’s Literature, or ICL, bought the buildings of a former school for wayward boys, set up a headquarters and mailing and editorial center, wrote the course using consultants working for hire, hired published authors as independent contractors to teach, and finally organized a mass marketing campaign. The program gradually succeeded and today dominates the market. Every year, about 29,000 students nationwide enroll in a single course, costing about $700, consisting of ten lessons, and taught entirely by authors who have published for children. Annual gross revenues of over $10 million support not only the pay of teachers and administrators but also production of substantial market guides and course manuals. There is no campus, no full–time faculty, and the course is not on the Internet at present. Instruction follows the old fashioned mail–based correspondence plan, and the institute is not affiliated or accredited by any institution of higher education. In fact, ICL is licensed as a trade school only by the state of Connecticut.1
Where were the colleges and universities during the forty years that this correspondence school came to dominate the field of teaching such a popular subject? Colleges and universities made three moves which effectively cut their potential for offering people significant instruction in this type of writing. First, the colleges and universities undersold their courses when they did offer them. Writing for children was usually relegated to adult and evening courses, rather than being offered in the regular college curriculum. While this attempt made it affordable and accessible to some citizens, the move also marginalized the subject, made it seem less serious, and caused the course to be unsupported by either marketing efforts or by course materials that organized and sequenced the study process into lessons. The University of Cincinnati is no exception in this regard. The Cincinnati campus offered a course in writing for children only through the College of Evening and Continuing Education, a college currently being disbanded and absorbed by Arts and Sciences. The instructor was usually a local free-lance writer. There was little or no special advertising except through word of mouth and the normal adult catalogue. With over 27,000 students, the Cincinnati main campus offers one course in children’s writing out of 11,000 other courses. This pattern is typical of many universities in Ohio.
Meanwhile, here and there, various publishers sprang up who also delved into the instructional marketplace, for example, Writer’s Digest, based in Cincinnati, Ohio. They have offered a downscaled, shorter course that competes with ICL. Like ICL, Writer’s Digest hires published authors to teach the course part time, paying well above college part– time scales. The university–based evening course is hardly competition for the Writer’s Digest course or for ICL, however, because our local evening adult course is like a poor country cousin when compared to the resources that support the highly developed correspondence systems into which major capital expenditures were made in curriculum and advertising. Cincinnati exemplifies a major urban area in which an invisible player is on our home field, competing for the available talent who want to learn the craft of writing for children, charging more and delivering more—at least more paper—to interested individuals. With a national presence in both cases, both Writer’s Digest and ICL attract students through mass advertisements and charge far more for their noncredit courses than UC does for its own. The conclusion we might draw is that colleges and universities either have completely ignored the demand for the subject or else have underdeveloped and underpriced their offering and as a result are losing out to an invisible and silent giant.2
The second move that colleges and universities made in marginalizing the study of writing for children was to omit this subject from the curriculum requirements for teacher education. This failure originates at state certification level and is not a choice of the colleges. In Ohio as elsewhere teachers in training are generally required to take one three– hour college course in literature for children. Writing for children will not fulfill that requirement. In many large schools, literature for children is taught as an education course; in small schools it is an English course. In most programs, literature for children, or “kiddie lit” as it was called when I was in college, was taught by people with education degrees and not in literary study. As a result, the English Department does not have under its wing the feeder course that would help develop writing for children. And it does not have the force–feeding effect of state requirements.
The third move that colleges and universities made was not to charge students premiums and not to cater to highly educated prospects. The stigma attached to community college offerings for professionals may discourage participation. Meanwhile, a course that costs $700 and is taught by a published author who will work with students privately over time, with the mailbox as the only vehicle, is more appealing to this select audience because it is more individualized, as a tutorial, even though the student never meets the instructor face to face. It is also more personalized, an element that is stressed in the ICL program advertisements.3
Meaningful instruction in a growing area has been undervalued by institutions that presume they will be the primary deliverers using a classroom model. While the institutions put Cinderella to work sweeping the ashes from the grate, somebody out in the street took her to a party. Colleges neglected the writing side of children’s literature because the full–time literature and creative writing people in academia usually are not published in children’s areas and thus would not wish to teach writing children’s books themselves; so, they neglected to go out and search for part–time faculty who could do it. While that occurred among colleges and universities, not only the correspondence schools like ICL, but summer institutes like the one at Vassar College, or those at Indiana University or Butler University, or M.A. programs like National Louis University with its multiple, far–flung campuses, and grass–roots organizations like SCBWI, and conferences like the Tristate Children’s Literature Conference (Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio) drew editors and authors into their arms and organized opportunities for authors to lead workshops and classes. They took the reins of Cinderella’s coach and headed for the ball. ICL invested in course development and produced impressive manuals and market guides. Among the authors who taught for ICL in their early careers were Lois Lowry, later a Newbery winner, Kristi Holl, author of 24 children’s books, and many other award– winning authors. The colleges undersold their product but failed to invest in a successful structure and obtain crucial copyrights on the instructional materials. They miscalculated the mystique of the published author. With most Ph.D. programs actively discouraging a link to children’s books as too slight for an English dissertation, the blind spot is passed on, and planned ignorance is still the order of the day in English faculties. If asked to name great books for kids, most of us would mention J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and update the list to include J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, but most of us couldn’t cite many additional titles. A change in consciousness must occur in many parts of academia before children’s books become more than a cultural blind spot.
As well as these three steps that left writing for children off the college curriculum, perhaps colleges and universities were also recognizing a sociological fact on the student side, that college–age writers who are talented often are not interested in children’s books—yet. When I was in college, I wanted to become the next T. S. Eliot or Ernest Hemingway, but I was not thinking of the next Beatrix Potter, Beverly Cleary, or Judy Blume. Some of the best writers and best English students have not had the exposure to the world of children’s books yet. Exposure to children’s literature often comes only when students have children of their own.
A recent study in California by Karen Chapman Lenz found that the average age that children’s authors publish their first book is 36. The same study also found interesting facts about children’s authors. They married later than the general population and had slightly fewer children. A higher proportion were eldest or only children. About 65% of books for children are written by women, many of whom were tomboys. Obviously to have this high an average age of first publication, we are talking about women who discover in middle age or later that children’s literature is a rich field worthy of their attention and talents. It is not that ICL and others targeted the housewife and then that this age group began to dominate the authoring but the other way round. ICL marketing experts realized that middle–aged women were their primary target because they are the ones who want to and do break into publishing. With the figures we have, middle–aged women are the most likely prospects for a course. They find advertisements about ICL in the women’s magazines and newspapers and grocery store fliers. But they are unlikely to search out the listings of the local college. To help new writers flourish in writing for children, colleges and universities, too, have to catch the raw talent in the appropriate group and teach people what to do with it. Because the writer actually has more than one audience, it isn’t easy to create the successful book for children. It takes savvy, finesse, and perhaps the parent’s insight to please the gatekeepers– –the librarians and reviewers who will choose the books and also the children who will read them. Even though middle–aged women are the primary market for new authors, colleges do not naturally turn to this potential student group in their regular curriculum.
Finally, the California study has found that the average author of books for children has been in a long–term, supportive marriage. This observation stands to reason; it often takes commitment and perseverance, a spouse with a paycheck coming in, as well as the disciplined work habits implied in a college degree to give the sustained effort to break into publishing for children. No one can dip a pen into the inkwell and run off a few stories while the laundry is in the dryer and the children are taking naps. It takes hard study and time.
Still another obstacle to colleges taking a lead in this subject is that experts in the field of English composition accept the theory that outstanding writing is caught, not taught. Peter Elbow, a noted scholar in composition, was recently asked to comment on the talent vs. instruction issue. He said he is “unsympathetic” to teachers who believe that everything is raw talent because “this often goes with a kind of snobbery: the attitude that some people can write and some can’t.” However, Elbow also draws away from the idea that structures and techniques can be taught in specifics. “I don’t feel like I’m teaching skills or techniques, or the nature of good writing,” he says. “I’m using my authority and intelligence . . . to set up certain conditions” (199).
Elbow seems ambivalent about whether one could teach principles of good writing or answer the sticky question whether what editors accept is good writing or commercial glitz. Elbow’s doubts that defining what is good or offering sound advice on techniques will interfere with what students want in a course in how to publish for children. In my experience of teaching over 400 students over seven years for ICL, I found that most students had three questions in mind when they payed their $700: 1) Is the teacher an authority, to me? 2) Is the course constructed in such a way that I can understand what good writing is? 3) Will the teacher really care about my work? Over more than 30 years the ICL course, its student 800 number, its 400–page manual, and the individual letters of critique reassure students about these questions. Students do not pay any fees until they have reviewed the resume and writing credits of the specific instructor they will have.4 They can request a specific instructor or change instructors in mid–course on request. Under Connecticut state laws for trade schools, ICL must offer a generous prorated refund policy, one that would make universities flinch. Colleges may not feel that they have to provide the same options or refunds as an independent course does because they have had the security blanket of the credits, requirements, and accreditation attached to so much of the curriculum. When students are not looking for credit, then they are especially looking for a sense of connection to a working author and proficiency sufficient to publish. Planners of the college course need to have these facts in mind. At the end of the course, students want to have marketing advice and at least one piece of polished, well–targeted material ready to send out to an appropriate editor. ICL specifically makes this promise in its ad and fulfills it in the course.5 Colleges are not as used to making such specific goals. They have the comfort of offering, instead, credit hours the student needs to meet a certificate or degree requirement. ICL has understood outcomes and has built a successful business around them.
Other vigorous activity that colleges must recognize and either coordinate with or compete with goes on through the writers’ own societies and organizations. Bookstores have often formed interest groups of would–be writers, like the Blue Marble Children’s Bookstore in Kentucky, a model in this region. The Society of Children’s Book Writers (SCBWI) has a web site and helps local writers meet and form organized critique groups, supported by book lists, publishers’ directories, agent lists, and some instructional materials. There is no area of writing in America that is so well organized—certainly not the world of poets or fiction writers. In such groups, the appeal is simply that one will meet other writers striving for publication or that one will sit at the feet of a published writer. Very often the “master” does not read manuscripts. But if the author or speaker does read manuscripts, it is not at all unusual to receive 75–100 stories for every speech that one gives to writers.
Although ICL has a huge lead on us over the years in the marketplace, amongst all this activity, colleges and universities do have a certain natural advantage. But to realize that advantage, we need to clear away certain misconceptions. First, we need to understand that attracting education majors is problematic. They are very busy with requirements and writing for children is only an elective. We are probably more likely to draw working teachers or homemakers from outside than our own very busy and over–booked education majors. So we need some targeting off campus to reach them. Second, the course must realistically meet the needs and desires of its actual prospects. Only about half of ICL’s students are working or retired teachers; the rest are spread across many businesses and professions. Likewise, the California study has shown that about half of the new authors for children are trained as teachers. In general, most new authors are very well educated. Colleges must plan the appeal widely.
Third, the course textbooks and instructor must be drawn from those who have published steadily in the recognized markets, and they must confidently offer individualized advice, especially classic principles of plotting, pacing, polishing, and practical advice on how to study the publishers and genres and submit work. Along with three other books, the textbook in my class is James Giblin’s Writing Books for Young People (The Writer, 1995). Giblin’s voice as an editor and working author will be superior, both in quality and in appeal to students, to more academic or textbookish choices. The emphasis is on specifics, skills and techniques, audiences, and the effects the writer wants, but it is not lesson–centered. Developing lessons and building a course sequence is the teacher’s role. Giblin’s voice, however, offers a steady stream of advice on how to think like a writer. In the right book, students glimpse an exciting world of how books are actually created. When Editor Margery Cuyler of Marshall Cavendish Publishers spoke on our campus at a conference last winter, she gave a keynote to hundreds of would–be authors, and then her small group session on techniques and inside information was packed with seventy–five participants. Her tone, like Giblin’s tone, is not pedantic or merely theoretical, and she did not talk down to the audience. Editors who teach continually combat the two most common flaws of beginning writers for children–sentimentality and didacticism. While the right advice in never formulaic, talent and craft do go together.
Significant new work has gone into updating the old standby course for teachers in the literature for children. Glen Edward Sadler’s recent survey, published by the Modern Language Association, which has recently organized a subgroup on children’s literature, describes modern critical approaches, including mythical, historical, genre–based, and reader–response theories. Steps I have suggested can help departments to come into the modern world on the writing side. When the hunger in people to learn the craft of writing for children is nourished by intelligent, responsible courses given with the right tone, a wonderful result can emerge.
The two–year college may be the ideal home for such developments because of its natural growth thinking, its flexibility in designing certificates and special lines of study, its links to the wider community, its readiness to serve students who do not wish to enter a four year degree program or who cannot attend full time. A regional campus has the best of both worlds—both the link to facilities, libraries, and resources of the larger campuses, and the work that can be done in a smaller place. While capital outlays that launched the huge correspondence giants may be beyond the regional school, consortia can form synergy, and smaller programs can coexist with the giants. The smaller, two–year campus may be ideal for students who may already hold all degrees they desire. The four–year degree mentality of a main campus may actually work against the ideal program in writing for children. The intense focus on graduation rates that main campuses seem forced to deal with may be irrelevant to students interested in writing for children. The courses should be offered as a supplement to an A.A. or B.A., as part of an M.A., or as stand–alone work that does not require a college degree to begin. That approach would mirror the makeup of ICL. It would also mirror some successful regional programs like paralegal certificates which can draw people who already have a B.A. to a two–year college certificate. Whether the universities can adapt to such a procedure will be an issue. But, with a serious new investment, colleges and universities can join in holding the reins to Cinderella’s coach. We can offer credit, channel bright, creative people into the important world of writing for children, expand the college’s student pool, and offer the public something truly desirable.
The potential is enormous. Not only do tens of thousands of people each year desire to study this craft, but the doors of opportunity are wide. Over 5,000 new books for children are published every year. In addition, children are the readers for over 200 magazines which are largely produced from free-lance submissions. Textbooks and school publishers as well as Sunday school publishers rely on free-lance writers for assignments. Society needs not only the authors but also the future editors, reviewers, librarians, parents, and teachers who will share in selecting books for children. The mission is worthy, and the interested parties form an enormous artistic and economic resource for development.
Finally, we need to remember that authors, not schools, courses, or publishers create new books. Writing for children is finally not a trade but an art, and its cradle should be the university and college, simply because the world of children’s writing is filled with surprises and turns. The success of Harry Potter as a new book by J.K. Rowling, a thirty– something British mother who often wheeled her toddler into a coffee shop and sat for hours scribbling her notebooks full of plotting and characters, surprised everyone in the children’s book publishing. Her success disproved many assumptions educators have often repeated about length, grade level, reading levels, and age appropriate formulae. Through publishing sensations like Harry Potter, authors and their readers remind the public that we theorists, reviewers, and educators are only bystanders to the magic art of reading and to the imagination of children. The new author is never toadying to a curriculum guide but has a true liberal imagination educated in a wider framework and informed by the heart. Harry Potter is really a very traditional fellow, drawing upon English and American literary forbears. Beatrix Potter’s genius was fed upon Shakespearean themes and language; she would spend lonely hours in her room reciting whole plays to herself aloud and by heart. Her first book was rejected repeatedly by publishers who said it was too short, to small, too this, and too that. Yet Peter Rabbit tapped deep themes and has sold over twenty million copies. Respect for creativity and its infinite surprise and variety belongs on the campus where understanding of rhetoric, the history of art, and the history of ideas give it a context. While commercial ventures have filled a vacuum for the past forty years, the final misconception we must clear away is that instruction can be too easily packaged or canned. Help can be marketed, without being overly canned. A steady stream of my ICL students did break into publishing, as do writers who take advantage of the offerings in workshops and writers’ groups. Learning the craft is not easily done alone in one’s garret. Contact with other authors is invaluable, and formal instruction can address techniques and shaping. While Peter Elbow, with his doubts that technique can be taught, may lack the forthright instructional urge, yet there is truth that the ideal writing program organizes mentoring and expresses that mysterious nature of new inspiration as well as the perspiration that the author invests.
The subject of writing for children belongs in the college curriculum. We have too often given children’s books a back seat on the great bus of higher education, and now it’s time to move them up front. As deliverers of instruction, we have real and formidable competition for instructional dollars, and we need to know what the course actually is and who our likely prospects are, or we will fail. Colleges cannot simply ignore competition from correspondence and for–profit ventures that have employed many smart people as teachers, payed them more than colleges do for part–time faculty, and developed a successful, student–tested curriculum over the years. As we develop college courses, we need to understand why the noncredit, correspondence model works, and then adapt it to our own strengths. There are no easy rules. James Giblin was once asked if he would be willing to read submissions that had talking animals in them. He replied, “That depends upon what they have to say.” Like good competitors in any marketplace, if we will know our competition, their strengths, and weaknesses, we will come to the lively American marketplace better equipped to meet the competition.
Notes
1Advertisements for the Institute course carry this statement: “Recommended for college credits by the Connecticut Board for State Academic Awards and approved by the Connecticut Commissioner of Higher Education.”
2UC had talks within the past few years with at least one of the major giants in correspondence instruction about merger or joint programs, but the talks foundered as parties could not agree on what figure the credit hour would be worth, and UC wished to have supervision over the course and hiring of instructors. The president announced to faculty that one day this kind of merger might be necessary or wise, but at the present time, it could not work.
3Kristi Holl, as a current ICL instructor and author of 24 books and more than 100 stories and articles for children, is featured in the advertisement currently appearing in magazines such as Country Living: “My fellow instructors—all of them professional writers or editors— work with their students the same way I work with mine: when you’ve completed an assignment on your own schedule, at your own pace, you send it to me. I read it and reread it to make sure I get everything out of it that you’ve put into it. Then I edit it line–by–line and send you a detailed letter explaining my edits. I point out your strengths and show you how to shore up your weaknesses. Between your pushing and my pulling, you learn how to write—and how to market what you write.” Country Living, October 2002, p. 73.
4Over the two years it normally takes to complete the lessons, students also have the option to pay in monthly installments of about $30 a month.
5“You will complete at least one manuscript suitable to submit to editors by the time you finish the course.” By lesson eight, students have used market guides to find appropriate editors, planned article ideas suited to age group targets, genre specifics, and specific editors whose needs are found in the ICL guide, and they receive professional input on the editing and correction of completed manuscripts, along with instruction on how to submit. Thus, the promise of a suitable manuscript is met.
Works Cited
Elbow, Peter. “An Interview with Peter Elbow,” edited by Kelly Peinado. Teaching English in the Two–Year College 24 (1997): 199–204.
Giblin, James. Writing Books for Young People. Revised and Expanded Edition. Boston: The Writer, 1995.
Lenz, Karen Chapman. “Women Authors: Age–Related Changes in Productivity, Life Satisfaction, and Multiple Roles.” Ph.D. Dissertation. The Claremont Graduate University, California, 1985. 195 pages. ProQuest Digital Dissertations, Publication Number AAT 8524022.
Sadler, Glenn Edward, editor. Teaching Children’s Literature: Issues, Pedagogy, Resources. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1992.
Biography
Linda R. Walvoord recently completed the Ph.D. in English at the University of Chicago, with a focus in American literature and a link to children’s books. Her study traced the image of Frederick Douglass from his death in 1895 to the recent past in biographies for children, with context on the standards of nonfiction writing and the cultural shaping of the black hero for children. She joined the University of Cincinnati— Clermont in 1997, where she teaches American literature and other literature courses, composition, and various writing classes. Under the name Linda Walvoord Girard, she has authored books and articles for children which appear in school and library collections. Her eleventh book for children, a picture book with a whimsical text entitled Razzamadaddy will appear in 2004 with Marshall Cavendish. Her previous books include Who is a Stranger and What Should I Do? (Whitman 1984), Adoption is for Always (Whitman 1987), We Adopted You, Benjamin Koo (Whitman 1988) and Young Frederick Douglass (Whitman 1994). She has taught at undergraduate and graduate levels as well as for the Institute of Children’s Literature, and her critical essays on children’s literature appear in journals, including The Horn Book, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, The Five Owls, and Publishers Weekly.