Authors Electric

Writing Children’s Fiction  by Yvonne Coppard and Linda Newbery  (Bloomsbury) ISBN 978 1 408 15687 2 Yvonne Coppard and Linda Newbery interviewed by Dennis Hamley When, a few month ago, I was asked to interview Yvonne and Linda for Armadillo, the on-line children's book magazine,  about their new book I was both pleased and slightly daunted. Yvonne and    Linda (herself once an AE blogger) are authors of high achievement and real quality - and also very different.  I knew there would be so much in this book and in the space of an 1800 word interview we were only going to scratch the surface.  However, just three days ago, on Wednesday September 11, Julia Jones wrote a superb review of Writing Children's Fiction on Eclectic Electric and, if you haven't yet seen the book itself but want a good taster before tackling this interview, you can't do better than to turn back to it. Don't go to Writing Children's Fiction thinking it's ...

Too big June and July have been the Month(s) of the Child as far as I'm concerned. You might expect that with five children of my own plus five grandchildren that every month would be Month of the Child – but that's not necessarily so. The older ones are now too old (youngest will soon be seventeen) and the younger ones are still too young (oldest is not yet six). At the risk of sounding like a grumpy Goldilocks (“too hard” “too soft” “too hot” too cold”) this leaves A Gap. My sailing adventure stories are intended for ten-year olds and up and – while I'm naturally thrilled to discover that nonagenarians enjoy them – if I'm not getting it right for the tens then there's something essential lost. Too small When I wrote first drafts of the three volumes of the Strong Winds Trilogy, my prime reader (Child Number Four ) was aged 10, 11, 12. He and his younger brother were still at the village primary school and our garden, especially in the summer afterno...