Issue 25 Autumn 1998 Young Writer - Where The Readers Are Lois Beeson	Collections under which this       article appears:       Projects       Reading Related Articles or Resources Other Articles by Author

You can't miss Young Writer. The cover is bright and busy with photographs, strap lines and graphics. It might be possible to mistake it for yet another youth magazine on music and fashion. But study the cover and the real story emerges. When did Smash Hits last offer its readers a place on an Arvon writing course? Or ask, "How do they do that? (Using adverbs well!)"?

The magazine is quite simply what its title announces it to be - a triennial magazine for young people (by "young", we mean of school age) who enjoy writing - writing of any sort. Sixty percent of the magazine is written by young contributors who submit poetry, reportage, short fiction and articles. It is a platform for their work. It is also a skills resource for them, for their teachers and for their parents - there are regular features on drafting, grammar, style and vocabulary, but tackled in offbeat and entertaining ways. Many different competitions in each issue give a chance to young people of every taste and skill level to have a go. News from all over the UK about writing projects and competitions, courses and festivals encourages readers to look outwards and explore other ways of developing their skills and interests.

Adults appear only by invitation. If they have a particular insider knowledge or a skill to convey then the magazine will commission an article from them. The editor believes that it is important to open doors on to all the writing professions, to encourage young people to understand the full range of openings available to writers of every sort. So, there have been commissioned articles from professionals on writing for radio, for example, and journalism. Adults are also allowed to contribute once a year to the ironically titled "Grown-ups Corner", a nice dig at the condescension of newspapers and magazines who offer a few column inches for a Kids' Page. Young Writer is happy to turn a few tables.

Perhaps Young Writer's greatest mission, though, is to emphasise the interdependence of reading and writing - reading and writing as two sides of the same coin. Books are important for their own sake, of course, but it is also important to stress that a writer cannot make progress without taking care of the reader within. The magazine wants to help young writers avoid the mistake made by so many would-be authors. Most of us who have had anything to do with adult writing events or workshops know the prolific "poet" , pockets bursting with verse, who hasn't read a poem since leaving school; or the "novelist" with several thousand pages of a work in progress, stored in massed box files, who finds no time to read modern fiction.

The magazine encourages its young audience to be aware that reading is fundamental to the development of the writer. With a wide knowledge of all sorts of books, the emerging journalist, poet or novelist learns how much it is possible to achieve with the printed word: he or she may experiment with language, defy chronology, abandon punctuation or flout grammatical convention. The writer of this poem certainly plays with some possibilities:

              "Imagine a story where
                    Verbs have stopped doing things
                    Adjectives are boring
                    Adverbs are subract-verbs
               And the alphabet is mbludje!"

      and

             "Imagine a story where:
                   Headlines are shy,
                   Pronouns forget people's names,
                   Conjunctions have become unstuck,
               And speech marks have run out of things to say!"

David Pitts, from Absurd Words (Issue 4)

Yet at the same time, varied reading develops an understanding of the extent to which they, as readers, depend on sound structure, varied vocabulary, grammatical consistency and a fluent style in order to enjoy a book. Quite simply, they learn what they can get away with as writers.

With these aims in mind, each issue carries a two-page interview with an eminent children's author conducted by children. Authors featured so far are Jill Murphy, Michael Rosen, Anne Fine, Benjamin Zephaniah, Brian Jacques, Terry Pratchett, Dick King Smith, Roger McGough, Malorie Blackman and Robert Swindells. Significantly, the writers interviewed have made it clear how essential reading has been - and is - to their creative and linguistic development. It has been encouraging, too, that the author nominations and requests to put questions to them keep flooding in from schools.

In addition to the author interview, there is a regular book review page, also written by school children. As well as that, incidental recommendations of good new books pop up all over the magazine as space permits. In issue 10, for example, a short feature on Nick Toczek's two books of dragon poems, Dragons and Dragons Everywhere (Macmillan Children's Books) invites readers to write a dragon poem or short story of their own and send it in. Elsewhere, a passing reference to Bad King John notes, "you know he is bad from Robin Hood stories and from A A Milne" - which manages to fit in references to two authors and countless books in a dozen words! Quite simply, Young Writer is a very bookish magazine - bookish in the best sense of being delighted and enthused by books.

You may imagine, therefore, the delight with which the announcement of the National Year of Reading (NYR) was greeted by the Young Writer team. In partnership with publishers and booksellers (among them, Egmont, Hodder, Kingfisher, Orion, Oxford University Press, Scholastic and Waterstone's), they set about devising a National Year of Reading supplement. Young Writer will include a four-page NYR feature with each of the three issues to appear during the Year of Reading, starting with the current issue, number 10. Each publisher has devised activities and competitions to encourage children to read books, respond to and write about them: the writers of the best entries will win book prizes. The Year of Reading is not just confined to the supplement, however: references to it are slipped in throughout the magazine. On page 23 of issue 10, readers are urged to find and enjoy the Macmillan anthology Read Me - A Poem A Day For The National Year of Reading. And, in a footnote to the regular feature Spotlight on Words, there is a competition based on words and phrases relating to books. A prize is offered to the compiler of the longest list of book-related terms.

So much for the magazine and its mission. Who is its audience? First of all, of course, it is aimed at the thousands of children who write and need an audience beyond home and the classroom. Indirectly, of course, it addresses those adults who wanted to know more about children's writing - what and how and why they write. This is why the magazine has a wide readership. Teachers use it as a classroom resource and a focus for group writing. Many libraries subscribe to it. Writers in education find that it is a good way of encouraging children to carry on writing for themselves after the workshop which they have been conducting is over. Youth leaders buy it.

At home, the magazine appeals to parents who want to stimulate a particular writing talent in their children or who simply want to encourage constructive leisure reading. Parents who educate their children at home find that it is invaluable as a starter for creative work. Gratifyingly, a number of parents have written to report that a previously book-resistant child had picked up the magazine voluntarily and read a particular article or poem from start to finish. In one case, the same book-resistant child then wrote a poem in response to what he had read.

Another success for the magazine has been that many dyslexic and dyspraxic children have found a home for their work in the magazine. An editor who receives a submission through the post doesn't know if the writer has had difficulty putting the right letters in the right order, nor if she or he is clumsy or disorganised, nor if she or he reads painfully slowly. But with the script before her, the editor can judge fine writing, clever ideas, a good ear for language and a quirky and original mind. In issue 6, Young Writer ran a special feature on dyslexia and the editor was amazed at the high standard of entries from dyslexic writers which were submitted - "the highest of any I have judged" in her view. The only criteria at Young Writer are writerly ones. One writer described what it was like to live with dyspraxia in her poem, Blizzard, a powerful evocation of the distress and alienation of the condition:

"I am confused and angry. This blizzard is my native
Land, yet even I am unsure of where I am."

and

"It blocks me from the outside world, dooms me to be an outsider.
Only my understanding of these uncharted lands
Will give me a compass"
Katie Ayre (Issue 7)

Another surprise and a pleasure for the editor, Kate Jones, was to discover how readily young readers want to take responsibility for what goes into the magazine. As well as submitting original work and agreeing to review books for the reviews page, readers have been quick to offer ideas and suggestions and to submit copy for other regular features. Who could have predicted, for example, that Get Your Red Pen Out, the regular column on grammatical errors and proof-reading, would enjoy such unprecedented popularity? Contributors send in their own texts with ten carefully placed grammatical and spelling errors for readers to identify and correct.

Another regular feature, written in response to inquiries from readers, is called Troubleshooter. For issue 10, it's apostrophes, so the column carries the subtitle The Troubleshooter's Back! This time he's sharp-shooting Apostrophes! - the bullet points are marked by real bullets and the page is pocked with bullet-holes. This playfulness and the lightness of the editorial style - greengrocers are singled out for censure for apostrophe abuse - make it an enjoyable read, not a chore.

So, given the magazine's commitment to mechanical correctness, you may imagine the glee with which readers pointed out an error that escaped the editor's eye in one issue, a mis-spelling of 'simile' which inspired this splendid riposte from a 16-year-old reader:

Similes

Suddenly there, like a splinter of glass
Infiltrating an ice-cream, (or
More like a teacher with daydreaming class
Intending to see who's awake?)
Lying quite still, like a rake in the grass
Eternal blot on the cover -
Spelling mistake!

Elizabeth Bullen (Issue 8)

One question that often arises when the magazine is under discussion is the extent to which young writers are 'influenced'. Someone will read the magazine, then sit back and say, with unflattering astonishment, "It's really very good - there are some stunning pieces in there - but they must have had a lot of help from adults." How do you begin to respond positively and kindly to such an observation which carries criticism, disbelief and discouragement in equal measure? How can young writers leap this hurdle of negativity and gain the audience they deserve, of children and adults (and not just teachers and parents) who understand the process of apprenticeship and can see and celebrate promise?

The answer to our critic lies in what people read, of course - it always does. Most children (and most adults, too) when they start to write for themselves, want to write for a complex combination of reasons. Stories and ideas buzz around in their heads; their imaginations bubble, stimulated by what they see and hear; they feel a need to record and celebrate their daily lives; they have ideas they want to explore and work out. What they read shows them ways in which they can make these ideas, events and imaginings take shape. They read and want to imitate - not the story, not the words exactly, but the way of shaping. As they grow older and read more, they take on board new turns of phrase, new skills, new perspectives. They look at certain writers and wonder, "How did they achieve this?" This is a legitimate process of apprenticeship.

In exactly the same way that writing by adults is not entirely innocent of influence, nor, too, is young people's writing. The difference is that we adults have grown more skilful at dissembling our borrowings, writing through a veritable soup of influences which it is harder to break down into the composite parts. It makes me weary when some beady-eyed person says, "It's good of course, but very derivative of The Thought Fox - or Pied Beauty - or Goblin Market." Not, "Hooray! This child has obviously read a lot of poetry and actually knows Hughes, Hopkins and Rossetti."

Silence

The boy stepped in to the silence
And broke it in half
The shattering quiet
The silence
Made him cringe
Under the pressure.

Tom Lewis (Issue 1)

Sometimes it feels as if children just can't win: they don't read enough, or they read too much; they don't learn from what they read, or they learn too well.

It has also been cheering to find that the reaction of many professional writers, on first seeing the magazine, is, "How I wish that that Young Writer had been around when I was growing up and first started to write for myself." They more than anyone recognise the importance for a writer to have an outside audience beyond family and school . It is interesting, too, that no professional writer has raised doubts about the authenticity of work published in the magazine. Most remember, instead, the period when they wanted to write like Noel Streatfield or J D Salinger or W H Auden. Now, the Young Writer team might say of a submission, "Well, she's obviously going through her Angela Carter phase - but, hooray! She's reading Angela Carter. What a girl!"

One of the secrets of Young Writer's success is almost certainly that it doesn't feel "good for you". It doesn't look educational, yet it undoubtedly is. Its sound pedagogic mission is skilfully camouflaged by a breezy editorial style, fizzing graphics in sharp colours, appealing photographs and snappy headlines. Yet it invites committed readers to pursue and develop their passion for reading, discover new writers and experiment with new styles and approaches. Its initial attraction for un-enthusiastic readers may be that it cleverly disguises its mission with visual jokes, quick-fire ideas and the lure of lots of prizes; however, the more long-term attraction lies in the fact that by publishing the work of young writers it speaks to their peers. It tells them that reading and writing are activities that people of any age can take part and excel in; that writers of any age are worth reading; and that this is something they can do, too.

To adults, the appeal is slightly different. Firstly, it offers them an another insight into what it is that children like to read. Authors write the sort of work that they enjoy reading. Young writers are no different. What and how and why they write for themselves, the writers they choose to interview and the books which they review favourably all tell us a great deal about what they enjoy reading, too. Secondly, the many writing ideas in each issue can be (and are) readily adapted for use with groups of children in the classroom and in library projects; the magazine is seen as a useful resource. Thirdly, the editorial response to each piece of original work published offers a model of how to respond positively to what children write: the comments celebrate good use of form, apt expression, tight structure, attentive observation and original use of language - quite simply, a great incentive to other writers to have a go. And, of course, it's a good read.

I started by saying that you can't miss Young Writer, and you may have thought I was referring simply to its jazzy design and a penchant for searing colour combinations. But, of course, you will know now that I mean the writers and their work

Young Writer costs £2.50 per issue, or £6.50 for a three-issue subscription. For further information and your free inspection copy, simply write to Young Writer, The Glebe House, WEOBLEY, Hereford HR4 8SD, or call 01544 318901 explaining where you read about the magazine.
The Young Writer Website is at http://www.mystworld.com/youngwriter.