Worlds Of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children - Softcover

Fritz, Jean; Krementz, Jill; Prelutsky, Jack; Sendak, Maurice; Wells, Rosemary; Paterson, Katherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395901510 ISBN 13: 9780395901519

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1998

Synopsis

Six prominent children's authors, including Maurice Sendak, Rosemary Wells, and Jack Prelutsky, agree that to enter the worlds that children inhabit, you must possess the magic word - honesty.

About this title

Review:

"No kind of writing lodges itself so deeply in our memory," writes William Zinsser in his introduction to Worlds of Childhood, "as the books that we met in our childhood." Reproduced here are essays by six celebrated children's book authors that came into being as a series of talks at the New York Public Library in 1989. Children's book writing is often deceptively simple, and perhaps the one overriding theme here is the seriousness with which these writers approach their work. "Writing for very young children is the most difficult discipline I know," says Rosemary Wells, whose Max and Ruby books were the first board books. (Does Wells find it so difficult in part because, as she says, "all really good picture books are written to be read five hundred times"?) Poet Jack Prelutsky, inventor of the "gloopy gloppers" and the "addle-pated paddlepuss," says he never condescends when he write for children. And Maurice Sendak, best known for his fantastically fuzzy wild things, says he's "never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished ... do I begin the pictures." --Jane Steinberg

About the Author:

William Zinsser is a writer, editior, and teacher. His fifteen books include the classic On Writing Well, which is in the sixth edition, and Writing to Learn. He lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0395901510
• ISBN 13: 9780395901519
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224