International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

Now I was no longer writing for a deadline or for money; I was writing forme, or

perhaps for the child I once was and in part still am. I dismissed allthought of the...

prize and I sat there with my back against the sofa and myhead in a private world.

Cooper 1990:20

There are dissenting voices, however. Betsy Byars:

Now I know that there’s a theory today that we must never write for children and,

after all, we’re all just big kids, but I don’t believe that. It’s partly because I refuse

to think of myself as a large wrinkled child, but also because, through my children,

I have come to see that childhood is a special time, that children are special, that

they do not think like adults or talk like adults. And even though we adults

sometimes feel that we are exactly the same as when we were ten, I think that’s

because we can no longer conceive of what ten was really like, and because what

we have lost, we have lost so gradually that we no longer miss it.

Byars 1982:6

Meindert DeJong develops this:

You may try to go back [to childhood] by way of memory, but that memory is an

adult memory, an adult conception of childhood for adults—and not for children...

When you write for children from adult memory, you satisfy only the other adults

who have also forgotten their inner childhood, and have substituted for it an adult

conception of what the child needs and wants in books.

Townsend 1971:75

Certainly there seems to be common agreement that writing with a particular aim or an
age group in mind is a route to disaster. Sheena Porter observed that ‘it is definitely
wrong to write any book with the conscious aim of making it suitable for a particular
type of child. The good book must make itself’ (Crouch and Ellis 1977: 132). Rumer
Godden concurs:

I think children’s books should be either information, straight, or else they should

be for entertainment. I think you find this worst of all in pony books —they teach a

child how to look after a pony through a story. And I always think that’s pretty

horrid... As soon as anyone tries to write a novel with a target, he’s bound to fail...

Wintle and Fisher 1974:293

Similarly, John Rowe Townsend:

I think insofar as one has any of the instincts of the artist...or craftsman ...one

must write first for oneself with the aim of making something. I think that the book

comes first and the audience comes afterwards... You are both a craftsman and

communicator, and you must carry out each function with proper respect for the

550 THE CONTEXT OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE