Publishing

So What Is Your Reading Age? Believe Me: It’s All About Numbers

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On Saturday I had a very nice surprise. The usual post delivery person had been and gone at least an hour when along comes a courier with a neat, and quite unexpected package. Inside are my 6 author copies of the new edition of Mau Mau Brother. Yippee! Much jumping up and down in the kitchen. It’s always a thrill to have the freshly printed book clasped to one’s chest.

Some of you may remember that just over a year ago I was turning my brain inside out, cutting an already tightly written teen reader in half to make a new edition. The first version, bottom left, is a 6000-word, 64-page novelised short story aimed at struggling young adult readers with a reading age of 9-10 years. It is one of Ransom Publishing’s  Shades series of fast-paced, high interest teen fiction.

The new Sharp Shades 2.0 edition has the same number of pages, 3,000 words, larger font and the addition of several moody full-page, grey-scale  images. Its target audience are less able teen readers.

When it comes to reading age markers, it is worth pointing out that the average UK reading age (that includes everyone, adults and all)  is 9 years. The reading age for our best newspapers like The Guardian is 14 years, and the reading age for tabloids like The Sun is 8 years. But of course the ability to read, and the application of that ability, and using it to acquire information, learn or to nourish the mind, are not necessarily the same thing.

It’s quite simple too. Teens can struggle with the notion of actually picking up a book; are daunted by the size and word density of a 40,000 word novel. It can be tied in to a lack of self worth; some deep belief that if they attempt so big a book they will fail; that it will be yet another manifestation of their feeling of uselessness and inferiority; that so much dense text with no pictures is of itself BORING.

There are, after all, so many other more instantly engaging, loud and in-your-face-ears-eyes experiences to be had at the lightest press of a button, and every minute of the day. You can while away every spare moment on your smart phone with whatever teen version of TwitFace is currently cool. It’s like a continuous intravenous feeding – films, music, chat endlessly streaming into us. I think it was Margaret Atwood who, speaking of the addictive quality of the internet in the Observer, said that the problem is, every time you log on you expect WWW to deliver you an Easter Egg.

That’s it exactly. It’s how I feel. It must be how Margaret Atwood feels too!

All of which is to repeat that there is for many – adults and children alike – a big resistance to picking up a book in the first place, let alone losing themselves in it. Reading requires effort and application and being still. Which brings me back to my book. The aim of the Shades series is to engage teens with the process of reading; to help build a reading habit; to show that reading a story can deliver more than a tray load of Easter Eggs, something more meaningful that helps you grow within and without; to discover where your place is in the world. The stories, then, must be arresting, but their conveyance swift and affecting. Remember: we are up against competing intravenous streaming here.

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As you can see, I’ve taken some editing liberties with the covers in the intro photo. This is what the new Sharp Shades edition actually looks like.

The story is told in the first person, present tense by fifteen year old Thuo. And since the cover blurb already sets scene, I won’t say more. But to demonstrate something of the editing process involved in reducing one accessible text to an even more accessible text, here are excerpts from the two versions of Chapter 2. I think it’s anyway interesting to see what can be excised from a piece of prose and and have what’s left still carry the narrative. Of course in the process the whole tone may change. I actually found myself more engaged with the sparer version. But see what you think: the hard  pruned Sharp Shades first:

 

Bombers

The day we lose our home Mugo and I are taking our goats to graze. My little brother runs ahead, slapping the dewdrops from the grass. I stew on my anger.

Before the war, I was a schoolboy. I wore a smart white shirt and khaki shorts. I was studying hard to be someone. Then the British closed my school, and now I am a goat herder.

It’s another reason to hate Kungu.

I’m so busy fuming I don’t hear the Lincoln bombers. They come like giant birds.

Boom-boom-ker-boom.

Bombs fall. Trees fly apart. Hills sprout volcanoes. They are bombing God’s Mountain, bombing Mau Mau.

When the planes drone away and the smoke clears, Mugo grabs my arm.

‘Kungu?’ he chokes. ‘They’ve killed him.’

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And now the here’s the original Shades version:

 

Bombers

On the day we lose our home, my little brother Mugo and I are taking our goats to pasture.

It is January, high summer. All around doves coo and cornstalks rustle, and I think: how can there be war on so fine a day?

The sun is just rising and Mugo runs ahead, slapping dew from the grasses, so the drops fly like jewels through the sky. I remember doing that too when I was younger.

But I was not minding goats. I was hurrying to school, wearing the white shirt bought four sizes too big from the Indian trader so it will last for years. And I am wearing khaki shorts instead of my kidskin wrap. It is my first day at the Kikuyu Independent School.

Father has taken me away from the Scottish Mission, saying the teachers there teach Africans to be nothing better than clerks and house servants. He says I will have a better future at KIS.

I don’t. With the uprising, the British close my school. I have been minding goats ever since. It is another reason to hate Kungu.

Mugo goes on swishing grasses, but I am so busy fuming I do not hear the planes. Then the world shakes to bits.

Boom-boom-ker-boom.

Mugo jumps like a spooked deer. And we run. At the top of the ridge we see the Lincoln bombers like giant birds above the forest.

Down come the bombs. One, two…five, more…till I want to vomit. The hills sprout volcanoes. Trees fly apart. Our goats shriek.

We stand and stare as if turned to stone. The bombers do not target our farms, only the forests outside the Reserve.

When  planes drone away the smoke clears, we stare at God’s Mountain. The jagged snow peaks, the dark forest slopes, are still there. It is hard to believe.

‘Kungu?’ Mugo’s eyes dart round in case there’s anyone to hear. ‘They have killed him?’

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As you can see, nearly two thirds of the descriptive context has gone from the shortened version. It is easy to be sorry to lose these kinds of detail, but ruthless cutting of such passages was better than losing the story.

All fascinating stuff. I quite like seeing how many versions of a work I can come up with. And I really enjoy the challenge of a limited word count. After all, it’s not so much about how much you can hang on to, as how little you actually need to tell a well rounded and affecting story.

But there is a problem here for me as creator of fiction. If you produce work that is labelled for a specific purpose, then it is unlikely to be read by anyone else, i.e. those who consider themselves outside the target audience.  As a writer, I write for anyone who will read me, and tend to balk at categorisation of any kind. I especially dislike the category ‘educational writing’.

All the same, if the stories I write, and the different ways I can write them, will encourage unkeen readers to read and develop a love of reading, then I’m wholeheartedly for it. Not to read well is to be disenfranchised. Your options are shut down. You leave oneself vulnerable to those who would misrepresent, manouevre and manipulate the information-world we inhabit. Good reading promotes understanding, powers of discretion, a sense of autonomy; it strengthens mind and imagination, those attributes that make us keenly human; the very attributes we will increasingly need if we are to make something worthwhile of our lives on this planet.

In England we especially need to look to our laurels. In fact those laurels are down round our ankles like pants that have lost their elastic. We apparently have the lowest teen literacy rates, and second lowest numeracy rates of the world’s 23 most developed countries. Korea, Japan, Netherlands are respectively the first, second and third most literate and numerate nations. See The Spectator article HERE for more on this shaming state of affairs.)

In the meantime, more power to small publishing houses like Ransom who specialise in making books for struggling readers of all ages. Their extensive catalogue provides all the tools to tackle literacy. This particular writer is anyway proud to be a Ransom author: when it comes to better reading only the best writing will do.

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Ransom blog on WordPress HERE

Numbers  – go here for the Daily Post Weekly Challenge
#RansomBooks  #literacy #NickyMorganSecretaryOfStateForEducation #NationalLiteracyTrust #Proud2BeARansomAuthor #BestWritingForBetterReading

Early Edition: Mau Mau Brother

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An exciting little parcel arrived last week – copies of my latest quick-read for teens (or even for adults) in Ransom’s Shades 2.0 series. It’s a small, neat book. Pocket sized. As per the Shades’ format, it is a novelised short story, the text broken down into brief chapters, the whole designed for readers who find bigger books, and dense text too daunting to tackle. The pages have much white space, and the story’s 5,000 words are spread over 64 pages, which of course makes it easier for anyone to read. The aim is to build reading muscles and so (hopefully) nurture a love of books.

But if the books are small-scale, there is nothing ‘slight’ about their content. Their themes are of adult interest too. As a writer I can think of no bigger challenge than to woo readers who would probably rather not read. It unavoidably demands your crispest most affecting prose.

I knew, too, that historical fiction can be off-putting to many teen boys. In Mau Mau Brother, then,  I used first person, present-tense narrative to make events more immediate. The story tells of the 1950s uprising against British rule in Kenya as seen through the eyes of fifteen-year-old Thuo. This perspective on what happened is not widely known outside Kenya; the British authorities deliberately destroyed many records.  But for Thuo there many kinds of war – not only with the British, but also with the African Home Guard, and even with his own freedom fighter brother whom he blames for all his troubles. But in the end, the biggest war he  has to fight is with himself.

And now for an extract:

The British are bombing Kenya’s highland forests to flush out the freedom fighters. Thuo and his family have been driven off their farms and made to live under curfew in a fortified village. Their every move is ruled by the African Home Guard. Then one night Thuo’s elder brother, Kungu,  a seasoned fighter, finds his way to Thuo’s hut. He is wounded, and sick, and  Thuo is faced with the starkest choice – to inform on his brother, or risk detention and death to help him.

 

After the plane goes, Njonjo whispers that he’s overheard the Home Guards talking.

‘They know Kungu is near,’ he hisses. ‘Tomorrow the British soldiers will sweep this part of the Reserve.’

That night we sit in our hut ,weighed down with fear, expecting the worst. I am stunned when Kungu says, ‘I must leave now.’

‘But how?’ I cry.

This time I am more scared for him than for me. His brow glows with sweat. He still cannot walk properly.

‘The way I came, through the barbed wire.’

‘But the ditch. The stakes.’

‘I will roll down. Crawl out. Like a cockroach. Have no fear, little brother.’

‘But where will you go?’

‘A cave I know. I once shared it with a she-leopard.’

I shiver. A window on hell has just swung wide. I see the big cat’s yellow eyes, the white fangs. Then I see the falling bombs, hear elephants screaming, the rifles’ crack-crack, feel the breath of a pseudo-gangster on my neck.

The words fly from my mouth before I can stop them. But, once said, I cannot take them back.

‘I’m coming too.’

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

 

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copyright 2014 Tish Farrell

Meet Joe Sabuni P.I. aka Joe Soap

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Perhaps it is Jonas Kilimani’s choice of alias that makes things go so badly wrong in Mbogo sub-location. Or maybe he’s just not cut out to be a sleuth. Or it could even be his bad choice in suits. But whatever the cause, everyone is running rings round ‘Joe Sabuni’, and it all starts when his Uncle Micah sends him upcountry to track down a man who owes him money. It’s not much of a job, but Jonas is desperate to impress. He has college loans to pay back, and rich girlfriend, Keziah, to keep happy. And if he pleases Uncle Micah, maybe the man will give him a real job, as he’d long ago promised…

Cover artwork: Bob Harvey

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Okay, I am taking advantage of Frizztext’s JJJ-challenge for another piece of self-publicity. Also I think Jonas Kilimani deserves to be better known. He’s a really nice guy, and I’m glad I created him. He actually began life as a tiny notion while I was out on Kenya’s farms surveying smut-infected grass with the Team Leader. (For  more about smut see earlier post HERE). It’s amazing how one thing leads to another, and all apparently unrelated. There is no smut in Joe Sabuni by the way. Or maybe just a smidgeon – involving the dreadful Keziah of course.

I began writing stories for the African children’s literature market while we were living in Kenya in the 1990s. I think it was fury that started me off. There had been an article in the local press about children’s books, and the lack of locally written ones. It included a quote from a school girl saying she did not know there were stories with African heroes and heroines.

My first reaction was bewilderment. (The fury came later.) I began to look along the shelves of Nairobi’s bookshops. I could see that the girl had a point. Most of the locally produced fiction comprised folk tales, which I, as an outsider, had until then been more than happy to see and buy.

Now I began to regard them with fresh eyes. If I were six or nine or thirteen years old what would I think about such books? The design was often minimal, the paper quality poor, the stories wholly unrelated to modern day living, since the texts had mostly remained frozen in some colonial time when an avid ethnographer had recorded them. And so by comparison with these dry looking tales, would not the imported British and American paperbacks seem infinitely more glamorous and slick?

And yes, for sure, there would be no African kids featured in the rows of Enid Blytons or the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries, or in the Ladybird versions of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. For these, I discovered, were at that time the mainstay of the children’s section. Even the school curriculum  English literature texts were books like Gogol’s Government Inspector or Dickens.

In fact, given the era when all these books were written, there would be no dark faces in them at all. That the stories were written in times long past would not necessarily be apparent to young Kenyan readers. I remember a ten-year old girl telling me that her dream was to ride her bicycle on country lanes and go wherever she pleased just as the Famous Five did. It was hard to know what to say to this. It seemed such a lovely dream.

Anyway, all this started me wondering what it might be like to only read books about children who were nothing like me AT ALL. How would that make me feel about myself: that I wasn’t cut out for hero-dom?

Of course the reason for all the imported revamped  titles was because they were far cheaper than mainstream market books, and parents were more likely to be able to afford them. There is anyway a resistance to buying fiction, since stories are considered an unnecessary luxury when parents have to spend so much on school textbooks every year.

And so we start getting to the heart of the problem. Kenyan publishers, like many others across the continent, struggle along producing textbooks, often in collaboration with British publishers like Oxford University Press, Macmillan and Longman. They can’t afford to produce much fiction, and that means there are not many local fiction writers. Classic authors like Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Meja Mwangi are few and far between, and Ngugi has anyway long lived abroad in America. The best Kenyan writing, then, is mostly to be found in the country’s excellent newspapers, and they are aimed at adults not children.

As a writer, though, I learned a lot from the late Wahome Mutahi and his hilarious Whispers column, and also from the trenchant political analysis of John Githongo. The end result was Joe Sabuni P.I., a humorous teen short novel set in the fictitious city of Greenvale, somewhere in East Africa. It is published in the Heinemann Junior African Writers Series, now a Pearson imprint.

One of my best moments came a few years ago when I learned that the book was also to be used in Zambian schools, and not only in English, but translated into 6 Zambian languages. This I gather was funded by the World Bank. Someone had the surprising idea that people learn to read best in their own language. I wonder how they came to think such a breath-taking thought.

Because that’s another thing, most African children who go to school do not learn in their vernacular, but in the language of whichever colonial power once ruled them. In Kenya the curriculum is conducted in English and the East African lingua franca, Ki-Swahili, although the vernacular may appear in the study of arcane oral literature texts.

I think this is what Ngugi wa Thiong’o means by ‘colonization of the mind.’

Of course you could say what on earth is an English woman doing writing for African kids in their second or third language? It’s a good question. As I said it was fury that drove me. I wanted to tell contemporary stories that showed Kenyan kids their own wonderful selves, and in situations they might recognize. That these stories have also proved popular in other English-speaking countries such as Zambia and Zimbabwe is a bonus. A couple have won prizes of which I am inordinately proud.

You can read a sample of Joe Sabuni P.I. on Google HERE. Please forgive the fact that Google copywriters can’t spell the word ‘rotten’. And nor can Amazon.

© 2013 Tish Farrell