editing

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.’

*

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?’

*

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

Help, Mr. King! My polytunnel needs editing

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I have written elsewhere how gardening and writing become mixed up in my life. But just see what happens when you don’t rein in your gardening writing, when you let your setting run riot. Words, like plants, need a certain space to perform well; to be the stars of the show; to say their piece effectively.

I never intend to over-create. In fact my internal critic warns against it, whether gardening or writing. The polytunnel mayhem is of course easily explained: I simply had to  plant out every last tomato seedling. How could I not, when I had nurtured each one through the cold spring months that seemed never ending?

All I can say if you write like this, and then don’t engage in some ruthless excision tactics, you will not be able to find the tomatoes for the overgrowth.

On the fiction writing front, Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir) would call this kind of chaos “a thicket of description”. It’s what happens when writers become too attached to the minutely researched details of their setting, and then feel they can’t sacrifice a single beloved element.

It can also happen when you start a story in the wrong place, and then flounder about trying to write yourself to the right place. It’s like planting all your tall-growing tomato plants at the front of the bed, and then wondering why you, or anyone else can’t see what’s going on behind with short varieties. This, then, is also a setting problem: you have not planned the planting scheme and stuck to it (more or less).

All of which is to say, there comes a point when you have to take out a whole batch of words and shoot them – this so the survivors have room to expand and thrive (the excess tomato plants you could of course give to someone else.)

Stephen King explains the situation further (pp 138-9). He gives an example of using a real location as his setting for a piece of narrative, in this case the Palm Too restaurant in New York. It is somewhere he knows. As he starts to visualize the place, he summons the first four things that strike him. These, he says, are likely to be ‘the truest and the best’ details. He also says he can  make up a few other things too, but there is really no need for more:

“This isn’t the Taj Mahal we’re visiting…and I don’t want to sell you the place…it’s not about setting, anyway – it’s about the story, and it’s always about the story.”

Put another way, you could say that fiction writing is never about the writer. To create, you need to GET OUT OF THE WAY. And the better you succeed in this, the better the story. This is not to say that the writer’s experiences and cast of mind do not inform/infuse the narrative, but think conduit and transit time, rather than compendium drag.

Words are fiction’s conveyance to transport readers out of themselves and into the lives of others in new/penetrating/exciting /inspiring ways. The words need lift, energy, vivacity. Anything that snags transition must be cut.

This is probably the hardest lesson for the starting-out writer to believe, let alone put into practice. But it is a truism: less is almost invariably more. Not believing this is one of the reasons we have slush-piles, and why publishers now mostly shut their doors to unsolicited submissions. It’s the reason why I have too many tomato plants in my polytunnel, when I could have made the best of, say, half a dozen of the strongest plants.

But then as Stephen King advocates, practice (lots of practice) will yield improvement. So I vow to improve in my prose and in my planting. For now I leave you with Mr. King’s brief words on the means to create viable settings:

“The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh imagery and simple vocabulary.”

100_6937 N.B.: use only the brightest and the best tomatoes, and not too many.

Happy writing!

 

Related: Errant muse? But there’s still life at the allotment

copyright 2015 Tish Farrell

Secrets, conspiracies, tragedy, dark comedy

– a fast-paced novella of interwoven tales

set somewhere in East Africa

Killing words ~ a case of verbal decomposing?

Shades FINAL COVERS Set 3_Layout 1

It’s all my publisher’s fault that I haven’t been writing so much on my blog. He, the lovely Creative Director of Ransom Publishing published my quick teen read Mau Mau Brother  in their Shades 2.0 series last summer. As with most of my stories, there are many earlier versions. The Ransom Shades edition is aimed at teens with a reading age of around 10 years. Its 6,000 words have been arranged into 11 chapters spread over 64 pages. The purpose of this kind of presentation is to keep an unkeen reader reading, and so give them the satisfaction of finishing a book.  And so yes – maybe they will then want to read another. ( I do have other titles in the series).

The story, though undauntingly presented on the page, tells of challenging times during the 1950s Kenya Emergency.  The narrator is 15 year old Thuo, and his story is one of personal conflict. His hero elder brother, once a British Army sergeant who fought in Burma, has gone to the forest to join the Land and Freedom Army. These are the men and women fighters whom the Europeans dub Mau Mau; their sworn aim is to drive the British from their land.

As the terrifying events unfold, Thuo finds himself hating his own brother: surely it is Kungu who is the root cause of all his family’s terrible troubles. But at the heart of Thuo’s hatred is another fear – that he, Thuo, is a coward. Only when the forest comes for him, does he find out what kind of man he truly is.

In this excerpt Thuo tells how he helps the wounded Kungu out of the fortified village-camp where Thuo’s family have been forced to live under the British Emergency regime. The village is surrounded by barbed wire and a deep ditch set with bamboo spikes. Kungu is now a wanted man and must escape back to the forest.

I haul Kungu from the hut. He half-walks, half-leans as we creep past our neighbours’ huts, across the compound to the ditch.

Behind us comes Mugo with a broom, ready to back off fast and sweep away  our footprints. Kungu flinches as I help him slide into the ditch.

Watch out for the stakes! Mugo throws me his sheepskin. I’m carrying a gourd of gruel in a sling, holding a branch to wipe away our footprints on the other side. I slither into the ditch behind Kungu. We edge between the spikes.

It takes a lifetime.

At last I push him up the far side. Then he pulls me up. Then it’s through the wire, our sheepskins saving us from the worst barbs.

Beyond the wire, a zone of bare earth surrounds the whole village. It is swept before the night curfew and checked  for footprints at dawn. We shuffle backwards. I hold Kungu with one arm, while brushing away our tracks with the other.

The sweat runs down my face like tears. Any second I think the watchtower searchlight will find us. The brushing takes precious times, but if our tracks are found in the morning the whole village will be beaten, or worse.

When at last we reach some cover Kungu stops dead. I am stunned when he hugs me.

“Go back, Thuo. God go with you. You have proved your courage. I was wrong to taunt you.”

I stand in the darkness, the wire, the ditch, the village-camp all behind me. I think of my mother and the promise I am breaking. I think of my father, maybe dead in Manyani detention camp.

I think of my real home that the Home Guards set on fire. But mostly I smell my brother, the unwashed forest warrior who is fighting for my freedom.

Again I make my choice.

And now to the reason for the lack of writing in recent blog posts. A few weeks ago Ransom suggested I might write a new version of Mau Mau Brother – this for their Sharp Shades series that caters for teens with a reading age of 8-9 years. The books will still have 64 pages, but half the number of words, plus some B & W illustrations.

Half the words – 3,000 instead of 6,000; 250-300 words per chapter. Heavens, that’s tight.

Yet the interesting thing is how much I’ve been enjoying killing off my words. I’ve done for about 1,200 so far, this in a story where I thought I’d already pared it right to the bone. And there’s a lesson here for all writers. Being pinned down to a tight word count can be good for your prose. Of course in this case, it’s not only about self-editing and the removal of all superfluous words. The original text had already been well edited. Now it’s more about re-composing the original into a shorter form.

At every point I must ask myself how I can convey meaning in the most vivid, yet briefest form, tackle the body with a forensic eye. Later, I will need to restore rhythm and check for any lost meaning.

And I’ve still a long way to go. There is also the lurking doubt that I won’t be able to do it without killing off the story completely. But then that’s a challenge too. Time, then, to get back to the bone-trimming and resuscitation department.

 

copyright 2015 Tish Farrell

Shades FINAL COVERS Set 3_Layout 1

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