Writing for Reluctant Readers #scbwicon

Janet Foxley

Following the excellent interviews with Mairi Kidd of Barrington Stoke and Barrington Stoke Author, Anthony McGowan, Janet Foxley gives us an overview of SCBWI British Isles Conference 2014’s Craft Intensive on Writing for Reluctant Readers.





It was all about High and Low. The High of getting one’s first book contract or the Low of receiving one’s hundredth rejection? No, this was about writing High/Low books: high interest level, low reading age.

Mairi is Anthony’s editor at Barrington Stoke, publisher of ‘dyslexia friendly’ books for young (and older) people who, for a variety of reasons, find reading difficult.

Barrington Stoke have designed their own font, with serifs, longer ascenders and descenders and subtly different shapes to some of the letters.

She started off by telling us about the appearance of their books. The text is easy on the eye, printed on a cream rather than a white background. (It’s not cream paper, by the way, but white paper printed with cream ink – I bet you didn’t know that.) The paper is thick, so the eye/brain can’t be confused by print showing through from the other side. They also leave more space between letters, words, sentences and paragraphs than normal typesetting. And they have designed their own font, with serifs, longer ascenders and descenders and subtly different shapes to some of the letters. It looks like this:

From The Fall by Anthony McGowan, Barrington Stoke, 2011.
A scan of Janet's own copy of Anthony's book
Click to enlarge

With the printing now made easier to read, it’s over to the writer and editor to make the stories easier to read. Mairi suggested that authors should write the first draft in their normal style and address the low reading age at the revision stage.

Children who have never been read to have no experience of running a narrative in their heads.

Some of what is required is the same as for any commercial fiction: a strong opening hook, a sympathetic protagonist, plenty of cliff-hangers. Then one must consider the struggling reader’s specific needs – short sentences, short paragraphs and if possible no words with difficult spellings that can trip them up: ‘-ough’ words, for instance. Concrete nouns are easier to understand than abstract nouns.

Children who have never been read to have no experience of running a narrative in their heads. The writer must help these readers by following a simple linear structure. A single point of view is best and description should be kept to a minimum as it distracts from the narrative. Care must be taken not to lose the reader’s interest by referring to things that fall outside their frame of reference.

The word order must be like natural speech, not literary language. 

The writing itself must be clear, with no room for confusion or ambiguity, no unreliable narrators, no word play, no clues which the reader would need to remember in order to understand what happens later on.

The word order must be like natural speech, not literary language. Dialogue should be tagged with the speaker more often than usual, using names rather than pronouns so that the reader doesn’t have to wonder which ‘he’ or ‘she’ is speaking. If the narrative is in the first person, the reader must be made aware of the narrator’s name early on. And double rather than single quotation marks should be used, as they give the reader a bigger signal that they’re dealing with speech.

Finally there should be a clear, satisfying and preferably upbeat conclusion – no open endings where readers could feel they have missed or misunderstood something.

You might think all these constraints would lead to stilted writing. They don’t. See for yourself – read Anthony’s The Fall, or Brock. Or both. It won’t take you long – Barrington Stoke books are short. Mairi gave us this table:

Click to enlarge.

 One writer I know said she knew she’d ‘arrived’ when she was asked to write for Barrington Stoke.

Someone then asked how to go about submitting their work. The answer was ‘you can’t’. Barrington Stoke invite only well-established authors to write for them. They aim to give their readers the same authors and the same quality of writing as non-struggling readers enjoy. One writer I know said she knew she’d ‘arrived’ when she was asked to write for Barrington Stoke.

“Tim said” is preferred to “said Tim”

The news that they’re not open to submissions may have been why a few delegates didn’t return for the afternoon session, in which we were given a bit of practice at high/low writing. We had to write a short passage and pass it to someone else for appropriate editing. Then Mairi and Tony came round to assess our efforts. “Tim said” is preferred to “said Tim”, apparently.

Many thanks are due to Mairi and Tony for this thoroughly interesting insight into a specialist arm of publishing. I was fascinated by the whole process of creating a Barrington Stoke book. As a writer, I felt that a lot of what I’d learned could usefully be applied to my writing of Early Readers and chapter books. And as the mother of a severely dyslexic son, I couldn’t help wishing that Barrington Stoke had been around when he was young.

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Janet Foxley was nearly put off books for life by a degree wading through German and French classics. She always preferred writing books to analysing them, and she started writing children’s stories when her own children were small. There was little help available for aspiring authors at that time and it took her 35 years to find a publisher. Then, ‘overnight success’, Muncle Trogg sold to 24 countries and was optioned for an animated film. Janet has since written two more books about Muncle, the third currently published only in Germany. She joined SCBWI in 2007.

An Interview with Mairi Kidd

Continuing with our interviews for conference month, Celia Anderson interviewed Mairi Kidd, M.D. of Barrington Stoke, an independent publisher that publishes fantastic books for dyslexic and struggling readers.




Hi Mairi - it’s good of you to take time out of your day to answer a few questions for Words & Pictures. As MD of Barrington Stoke, there can’t be many free moments to do interviews! 

I’ve been reading the information on your website about your range of books for reluctant readers. How did your involvement in this area of publishing come about? 

Barrington Stoke’s founders Patience and Lucy are a mother and daughter-in-law team and Lucy’s husband - Patience’s son – is dyslexic. Lucy worked for Bloomsbury and she became aware that while children’s publishing was in a real golden era, many children weren’t benefitting because their reading fell below the level required to get through Northern Lights or Harry Potter. Together with Patience – who is a dyslexia specialist – Lucy cooked up Barrington Stoke’s unique approach, including our dyslexia-friendly font and tinted paper and our special edit process.

 I came to Barrington Stoke via many years of publishing (and producing drama, TV and radio) for children in Scottish Gaelic. In many cases children who are educated through Gaelic are actually second-language speakers and so a huge focus of the work I did was making sure content was accessible to them in language terms. I went hunting for accessible fiction to translate and found Barrington Stoke, although that was many years before I came to work for the company. The needs of Gaelic speaking children – who don’t have a chance to access much text even if they are fluent speakers – and those of the core readership of Barrington Stoke are actually pretty similar. In fact, when I’m working on texts for Barrington Stoke I find it useful to switch off my ‘English brain’ and switch on my ‘Gaelic’ one in order to spot especially complicated syntax or spellings that might trip our readers up.

As a teacher, I’ve come to realise more and more over the years how distressing dyslexia can be for children who are battling to keep up in class. Have you any personal experience of dyslexia, or is it something that you’ve had to find out about along the way? 

I’m not dyslexic and neither is anyone in my immediate family but I do know lots of people with dyslexia – children and adults. I’ve learned huge amounts about it during my time at Barrington Stoke. But my own experience in Gaelic is helpful again – I read Gaelic well, relatively speaking, but I wouldn’t reach for a Gaelic book to read for pleasure, and so I do understand what it means to see reading as something other than second nature. I also know Gaelic-speaking adults who cannot read or write the language at all, and so I’ve seen first-hand what that does to a person’s self-confidence. 

Has it been easy to find authors to take part in this project? 

We’ve been incredibly lucky and a spectacular range of authors have taken part; we’re very grateful for their support and for that of their agents and main publishers. Our aim is ultimately to create a bigger pool of readers across the board and hopefully that’s an easy aim to get behind.

How important is humour in books for reluctant readers? 

I don’t really subscribe to the belief that reluctant readers fall into a specific mould and therefore that we can say with confidence what they enjoy or don’t enjoy. Since some studies suggest that as many as one in two children find reading a bit of a chore and since dyslexia is as common as left-handedness and a lot more common than, say, red hair, we really are talking about a huge number of children and therefore a huge range of preferences and interests.

By definition, too, a lot of reluctant readers haven’t read very much at all and so any statement about what they ‘don’t like’ may be made from the opposite of an informed position. That said, it might be easier to ‘sell’ a funny book to a reluctant reader since most people love to laugh and a book that ‘will make you laugh’ sounds like the opposite of a ‘boring book’. One of my own favourite books is 1066 and All That; it makes me cry with laughter even when I’m thoroughly fed up. But I know reluctant readers who love misery memoirs, and military history, and gory crime – there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Thankfully – what a dull world it would be if we all liked the same books.

Do you believe that reluctant boy readers need more male role models for reading/writing, and if so, how could school help with this problem? There are so few men in primary teaching that we struggle to demonstrate that men love literacy too! 

Absolutely! I think it's very easy for boys to give up on reading when they perceive it to be a ‘girly’ thing. One thing I know, some schools try is to get local football players or other guys in that boys look up to, to get involved with literacy activities – the Premier League Reading Stars project from the National Literacy Trust is based on this principle. There are also a lot of inspiring male authors available for school visits or who feature in online materials such as The Great Big Book Babble or Scottish Book Trust’s Authors Live.

I think that the messages communicated about reading are really important in an environment in which women dominate. I’m not sure every school values different types of reading equally – short fiction, funny fiction and non-fiction can all be viewed as less ‘worthy’ than fiction.

There are always fabulously inspiring picture books for younger readers on the market, but how important are illustrations in books for older children and reluctant readers? 

For struggling readers, pictures can really help with comprehension and with visualisation. For some children, ‘running’ the action in their head as they read is a skill they need help to learn, and illustrations can help with this. But it’s not easy to find an illustration style that suits a book for older readers and doesn’t make it seem ‘babyish’ – and struggling readers in particular are likely to be sensitive to any suggestion that they’re being patronised. I think we’re really lucky at the moment in having some amazing artists producing really sophisticated work in black-and-white line – David Roberts in particular springs to mind – but we could do with lots, lots more.

I know there’s a bit of a movement towards having more illustration in books for older readers – I heard Sally Gardner speak recently about the sorrow she felt as a young person when she realised that the reward for reaching ‘grown-up books’ was the withdrawal of pictures. Hopefully books like her own marvellous Tinder or the gorgeous Jim Kay edition of A Monster Calls are challenging that.

What’s your view on graphic novels and comics as tools for helping reluctant readers to engage with the text? 

I’m all for anything that appeals to readers. From a dyslexia viewpoint, it’s worth being aware that graphic novels may present some specific challenges due to their typesetting. Text set in block capitals has less ‘shape’ on the page than text in sentence case and line breaks that leave fewer than seven or eight words per line can interfere with ‘chunking’, and graphic novels often use block type with lots of line breaks. For a seriously struggling reader, it may also be tricky to sequence and to synthesise speech/ thoughts/ narrative and pictures into a coherent whole.

How do you make the style of a book easier for dyslexic children to access? 

We tweak the syntax to reflect natural speech patterns and cut back on literary convention. The example I often use is a sentence with a hanging participle, such as ‘Walking into the room, Susan smelt smoke.’ A fluent, confident reader will have no problem with this - he or she will read at speed, recognise the structure and reassemble the jigsaw in the syntax almost immediately to make meaning.

A struggling reader will use much more processing power to read the words themselves – an individual with dyslexia may have less verbal processing power overall in any case – and may struggle to make sense of the two clauses and their relationship to one another. (Who is doing the walking into the room? Ah, it’s Susan, and she’s smelt smoke. Hang on, is she in the room?) If you think about it, you wouldn’t use this pattern in speech – ‘walking to work this morning, I noticed a nice jacket in the charity shop’ just isn’t natural. By tweaking the syntax – e.g. ‘Susan smelt the smoke as soon as she walked into the room’ – we can help readers bring their own knowledge of language to the task of reading, which helps their understanding and also supports them in decoding the words more efficiently as they can predict what’s coming next.

At Barrington Stoke, do you also produce non-fiction books with reluctant readers in mind? 

We used to publish a little list of ‘fiction with facts’ – the particular success was Alan Gibbons’s The Number Seven Shirt, about a young footballer who learns to overcome some seriously bad habits after a series of visits from his Man U heroes. We don’t publish any ‘straight’ non-fiction – there’s a huge amount on the market and a tiny house like ours can’t really compete. Plus we’re kept pretty busy with the rest of our list.

Which middle grade books from your own childhood would you recommend for reluctant readers, and why? 

I was obsessed with Enid Blyton and agree wholeheartedly with Joanna Lumley who once gave Barrington Stoke a ‘top tip’ for parents that no one should ever be a Blyton snob; hundreds of thousands of children have cracked reading with her books. I loved the Faraway Tree and the Secret Seven, the circus books featuring Lotta and Malory Towers (although secretly I liked Gwendoline much better than Darrell or any of the others, having already learned to read against type). I’ve read some of these again on bedtime reading duty and found them very different indeed but then I think that’s the key to Blyton’s success – somehow she can create magic for children that isn’t necessarily magical to the adult eye. Which, to my mind, is also true of a certain author of wizard stories…

Thank you so much for spending time with us, Mairi. I look forward to meeting you in Winchester and listening to your talk on the above subject.

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@CeliaAnderson1

When she’s not marking children’s work, or writing stories involving pants, Celia spends far too much time on Facebook and does a lot of walking to counteract the cooking, eating and drinking which form another of her hobbies. She's a Romaniac  and you can also find her on her own website. Usually sea-starved in the depths of the Midlands, she can often be found wandering happily around Brighton visiting her two daughters pretending to collect ideas for her next book.