Joe, I read Joyce at thirteen. Freaked my teachers out. But understand him critically? Nope. And still don't. I have precisely the same reaction to him now that I had then: a deep visceral giggling that is akin to being drunk. He leaves me emotional and happy, the same way Shakespeare does: it's in the rhythms, I think. My brother, on leave from the military, read an eight-year-old me to sleep with Cymbeline in German. It was all about the rhythms of the language, the same way music is for me.

I know I wasn't, but I also know I could feel--viscerally--the difference between a good book and a bad book. I knew Sendack was more fun to read than the cheap (though more brightly colored and shinier) books at the grocery news stand. I have huge respect for kids' taste and I think they are even LESS swayed by "crit" mind than adults are. A kid likes a book because they like it, not because it won a Caldecott. Classics of children's literature become that way because kids respond to them over and over.

Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes YES! You knew you dug reading it - or, if too young, hearing it read to you - and you knew certain buttons were pushed, whereas with other books, the buttons weren't. Is that it? JUST what I've been trying to say. My only caveat is that I personally never thought "good" or "bad" - I was "I don't like" or "I like". That's why I got so frustrated at being told I was making a value judgment. LAST thing I'd make on a writer. If I say "I think this sucks", I'm saying "I don't like it", not "this is bad."

I was very surprised on scoping out books that stayed with me--that I remembered and missed from my childhood--on the internet, that so many of them were classics and written by excellent authors. They stayed with me (as opposed to the other bookjs of the dozen or so I gobbled down a week) because they were good. That's why the authors were well-regarded, because they wrote books which could do that. I may not have known WHY I responded to them, I just knew I did.

YesyesyesyesyesYES. I loves me some Robin. Beautifully clearly put.

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True 'nuff. I don't think I began deconstructing books in any critical fashion until I started trying to write seriously. Even then, it's mostly for techniques to steal rather than for any scholarly analysis. I usually reserve my scholarly analysis for historical works.

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A kid likes a book because they like it, not because it won a Caldecott. Classics of children's literature become that way because kids respond to them over and over.

In first grade, Ben borrowed a book from the library because it had the Caldecott gold medal insignia on the cover. He was *very* impressed, but there may have been plans to harvest the gold for untold riches. I'll never tell.

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My experiences as a children's librarian tell me that children respond viscerally to things you can't predict, and often to things we all can agree are crap. I don't think that children automatically gravitate towards 'classics' because the classics are better, although they are; I think the reason for that gravitation is that the classics are works they can share with the adults and older children in their lives, and everyone reading the book gets something out of it.

Rather than the parents enduring yet another read-through of an incredibly bad tie-in picture book to the 70s Disney movie The Black Hole. (I had a toddler at my old library who was obsessed with that book, and the parents hated it, and prayed it was just a phase.) I think young kids in general tend to live in a soup of private knowledge, and can turn something pointless (like, a stick) into something pointful (a baby doll) with the application of imagination -- and they do the same to books.

When I was a kid, I "read" Tintin books in French, with zero reading comprehension. It was a totally different story from the translated versions I found when I was older.

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My experiences as a children's librarian tell me that children respond viscerally to things you can't predict, and often to things we all can agree are crap.

I can agree. When I taught middle school, I taught a few creative writing units. My approach was very much of the "write what you want to, but you have to write, " sort. I noticed that the kids tended to write what they read--not plagiarism (except in one case, and that was ug-lee), but mimicry. If they liked the "Redwall" books, they wrote about talking animals. If they read romance novels, they wrote romance. With a few exceptions, the writing itself was very, very bare-boned, of the who-did-what, who-said-what variety. The exceptions were generally long, list-like descriptions of things like dresses (usually the girls' writing. Usually.), weapons, spaceships, etc. There was very little thought as to the quality or poetry of the writing.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I think that while younger readers and writers may notice the difference between styles of writing, they haven't figured out how style plays into how the story works. They seem to be more interested in certain ideas (like the Black Hole reader, or kids who will devour every ghost story they can find) and in "what happens next."

The biggest disconnect between children as readers and writers, IMO, comes in the area of characterization. I do think that younger readers can appreciate well-written charcters and come to love them like their own friends, but it takes them a while to learn how to make their own characters have that effect on a reader.

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I do think that younger readers can appreciate well-written charcters and come to love them like their own friends, but it takes them a while to learn how to make their own characters have that effect on a reader.

Having read some crap written by grownups, I'd hardly think of it as a "younger reader" issue.

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I noticed that the kids tended to write what they read

The first thing I recall writing was a children's book for the "Written and Illustrated by..." contest, in third grade. It was called The Disastrous Dino War, and it was about some dinosaurs...having a war. They had names like Tyranno and Ankylo and that business. I think at the end some humans came from the future and killed them all. Or maybe it was the meteor. The book's got to be lying around somewhere in the house. I think mine was the best from my class or something like that, so I got to go to the little ceremony/convention dealie and meet Dennis Vollmer, one of the kids who'd gotten his book published.

In fourth grade, I wrote K.E.E.T. and the Invasion of the Insectoids. K.E.E.T. stood for "Kids with the Entomology Expertise of Tomorrow." I think that one had a gun which turned people into insects, and one of the kids ended up with a fly leg.

Anne's right in that the stories were more this happened and that happened, though I don't have the actual text with me. I know I didn't know much about writing a character until my first creative writing class in college.

I'm not sure whether using the word "entomology" in fourth grade makes me precocious enough for Deb to want to go back in time and throttle me. I would have been about...nine.

Huh, now I'm remembering something from maybe fifth or sixth grade, where I heard one of my teachers commenting on some sort of card we had sent to someone who'd had some trouble. I had written, "I'm sorry your [house? store?] was burglarized and vandalized thrice." I sure did like big words.

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Can I make a request?

I would really like to get back to talking about our own writing again, only because I know that when we have gone down this path in the past it has caused dissension among us...and I value the harmony we normally have in here. (I fully include myself as one of the natterers, btw.)

I'm sorry; I don't mean to be a pain.

t waits for thwapping

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I'm standing quietly next to Kristin, because I've been writing up a similar post since yesterday, and then closing the window, because I didn't know how to say it.

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I'm talking about my own writing!

...Almost fifteen years ago.

But no, I get you.

then closing the window, because I didn't know how to say it.

I find that hard to believe. You're very good at saying.

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