Who benefits from writers visits to schools?

CAROLINE PITCHER,  author of  THE SHAMAN BOY, explains how working with children keeps her in touch with their reading interests:

Does working in schools help my writing? Yes, because it reminds me how varied and unpredictable children are. Their responses lift my spirits and make me want to write more and more. I write books across the age range and so each visit needs its own plan. Occasionally I dump this plan when I get the feel of the school and we do something different. Children won’t fit neatly into age-guides on books. I have found that Years 5 and 6 love picture books such as Mariana and the Merchild or The Winter Dragon. Warm responses to The Shaman Boy come from top infants through early teens to adults. When reading an `infant’ book, Don’t be Afraid, Little Foal, to a playgroup I found its perfect audience. Many of these children were experiencing their first separation from their parent, like the foal in the story. You could have heard a pin drop, and a sigh of relief when the mare returned.

I was named `Story-maker’ by a little boy in Derby and each story is the best I can make. There is no formula. Making stories involves a leap of the imagination, a guess, a hope. So I am delighted when my hopes are realised. For example, I love the sound and rhythm of words and I believe that children love them too. `Bit difficult for little kids, innit? Bit poetic’,  worried a twenty-year-old friend of my daughter when he read Lord of the Forest. I use the `right’ word and trust that children can understand it in context. They can always ask an adult, or even look the word up in a dictionary. I’ve heard children repeating phrases over and over; honey-coloured drum…. the little five-sided house.. or Joseph’s run in The Time of the Lion, past the wildebeest at the waterhole, round the elephants, zig-zag through the zebras, beyond the buffalo... So, reassured by this response, I’ll keep on writing the way I do.

I encourage children to write their own stories. If there is time, I get them to tell them to us. Some have wonderful stories to tell, but not the skills or perseverance to get them down on paper. They positively glow from the response of their listeners. Other children I have met will not follow up their own idea because they have not heard it anywhere before. They’ll battle with an idea from some hyped series because they think it’s safe, but are suspicious of their own off-the-wall, original idea. A little persuasion boosts their confidence….

I can’t always predict which parts of a story will be a hit. Children enjoy Luka’s shape-shifting to snow leopard, swallow, otter and wolf in The Shaman Boy partly because they do not feel their identity so fixed or rigid as an adult does. They have not yet erected barbed wire fences around their imaginations. A city teacher who has been reading a couple of chapters each day to her very challenging Year 3 class gives me feedback on the favourite bits. (How lucky are the children with a book-mad teacher or librarian in their school. And it shows, believe me.) Her class gasped at the moment when the ceiling in the orphanage splits open, and Aidan-who-has-to-be-carried-everywhere disappears under a pile of plaster and rubble. One of them said this moment made his hair stand up. Another boy wondered if Aidan was being punished because he had been spiteful to Luka. I had not considered this an especially exciting part of the story and certainly had not intended to teach poor Aidan a lesson. Each reader brings something of their own to the story, an unpredictable response. I’m fortunate and delighted to find out about them.

Write Away would  like to know if you have had an author in your school this year.  Please comment in the forum on the authors you ave used,  the children's responses, the writing that the visit stimulated.... etc.