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| From
the September/October 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine The Writer’s Page
We who write, edit, and publish nonfiction are caught between two opposite pressures. The Internet offers nearly limitless information. But the realities of book-making restrict ever more tightly what is possible for us to achieve in print — especially as cost-conscious publishers try to hold down expenses in books aimed at cash-strapped schools and libraries. Every decade or so — say, on the anniversary of Lincoln’s birth as it coincided with Obama’s election — publishers will put out a few lavishly illustrated books that swing for the visual fences. But that only makes it worse. The average nonfiction book is overshadowed not only by the Net but by its few cousins privileged by circumstance. More trouble: truthiness. The sped-up world of adult media has been through a sequence of scandals about memoirs that seemed to offer real depths of human experience but featured events that did not actually take place. We in the children’s book field have the opposite problem. For instance, I’ve heard tell of in-house lawyers insisting that YA coming-of-age memoirs be doctored (“Can’t you make the tall man into a short woman, the Asian chef into a black student?”) — so that no one could recognize him- or herself in print and sue. As well, guardians of fragile sensibilities argue that the harm created by stereotyping is so great that truth-to-experience is no defense, so that even if people actually used racial epithets frequently in a time and place we are seeking to make vivid to our readers, some critics warn us not to repeat them in print — as if we could travel back in time and wash people’s mouths out with soap. And while we envy the media attention given to sales of adult books that are almost true, and fend off the well-meaning lawyers and critics who insist that, in books for kids, caution is more important than verisimilitude, we face the pressure of educators who no longer see any need for nonfiction books at all. I recently got an e-mail from a library school student who has been working at a public high school. The principal decided to remove nearly all (80-85%) of the nonfiction in the school’s library in order to make space for a student café. The implication is that whatever information students need is out there on the Internet someplace — which means students need training in search strategies more than they need books on their shelves. Once again, digital sprawl seems to render the time-consuming labor of writing books irrelevant or, at best, insignificant. To add to this imbalance between Net expansion and print contraction, the informational TV networks — PBS, the BBC, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic — have been getting better and better at creating sites linked to their documentaries. Museums and archives — the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the British Museum — do similar good work supporting their holdings and exhibits. Paging through these thematic sites, with their audio tracks and video clips, is a cross between reading a small, focused book and watching an informative show. I admire those sites . . . and wish them a lifetime in hell. Then there is school. Textbooks squat like hippos in classrooms, their ugly immensity crowding out any other kind of text. Within an individual class, the textbook is kind of like a wallowing, snorting animal — so large it is oblivious to any other life form. But within the school system textbooks are more like kudzu, or those invasive sea lampreys that are changing the ecology of the Great Lakes: they are introduced from the outside, are highly adaptable, and kill off indigenous species that evolved under local conditions (i.e., trade books actually designed to be read). They come with worksheets that reduce knowledge to facts and with manufactured lesson plans that save teachers time and trouble. The most frustrating of all these Job-like afflictions is that even as we who create nonfiction books for younger readers are overshadowed by the Net, squeezed by the minders of make-believe, deprived of audio-visual bells and whistles, and crowded out of the classroom, we constantly hear complaints that kids don’t know history, boys don’t read, and teachers are required to teach content they don’t know. We live in a Twittering present that erases any sense of the past. While people don’t quite know what is missing, they sense that something — some grounding, some depth — is being lost. In other words, there is a need for what we provide, while it is ever less clear how we are to be noticed. What is to be done? I see glimmers of hope in the very ubiquity of the Net. After all, what we authors really have to offer is not the individual books we write but our approach to content and to kids. And there are ways in which the Net allows us to share who we are, as well as what we have written. As Betty Carter always points out, people make the mistake of associating nonfiction with being “true.” She’s right: nonfiction is an approach, a cross between scientific method and what the philosopher Karl Popper called “falsifiable” propositions — assertions that are subject to question and test, and that you are willing to adjust as new evidence requires. We are not aiming to be accurate — we know accuracy is a moving target. Rather, in diligently avoiding being inaccurate, we model a process of thinking, of engaging with the world. What is Pluto? It isn’t, or perhaps is, a planet — except that this very debate points out that there is no clear and accepted definition of a planet. A teacher can pose those questions. An author has to go the extra step of figuring out how to phrase them in a fashion that engages his readers. What the author does is suggest not just answers but how to think about the question, and if it’s even a good question to ask in the first place. We authors are starting to use digital resources to share how we research, think, and write. Vicki Cobb has taken the lead in doing school visits by video conference — so that a school can call on her not just for a one-shot assembly but as an ongoing resource. I have done something similar in working with a class through a Wiki, and then being embedded in the school while the ninth graders write research papers. Loree Griffin Burns has a feature on her website showing the research trips connected to her books. TeachingBooks.net offers schools many ways to connect with the author, not just the book. So there is hope — we can use the multimedia capacities of the Net to share how we work, even as we still write regular print books. And I see intriguing possibilities in the Kindle 2, with its text-to-audio toggle. For now the voice is a product of the machine’s own text-recognition software; it is not a separate audio file. But think of the fun we will have when we begin to use sound as illustration — an audio extract of Bobby Kennedy confronting Jimmy Hoffa, for instance, would allow you to listen to that clash as part of reading the book on a Kindle, just as you would look at a photo of Bobby Kennedy confronting Hoffa as part of reading a printed book. But here I go again. Back at my desk, I can find millions of sound clips, or even YouTube videos, of favorite songs, great performances, thrilling moments in history. And at this point the best I can do in a printed book is to include a link to a website or list them in the backmatter. The world is at my fingertips but — at least for the moment, until someone finds a better solution — excluded from the books I write. And that’s troubling.
From the September/October 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
’m working on a new nonfiction book, Sugar Changed the World (Clarion, 2010), which I’ve written with my wife, Marina Budhos. Sitting at my computer looking for images to illustrate the book is the best and worst part of my day. Best because I can simply glide over to Google Images and have endless choice — historically accurate images, color images, famous images, slide shows of captioned images. Worst because while any kid with a computer, any teacher preparing a PowerPoint, can copy and paste freely from this visual cornucopia, I, as an author, can’t. If I want an image to reprint in my forthcoming book, I have to track down the actual rights holder — not the Joe who cut and pasted it into his site. I have to pay print and permission fees that can run to more than $200 per image. I was recently quoted over $300 for a particular quarter-page image — and yet it is clear that the commercially available file was itself originally scanned from another book or a magazine. Additionally, since my book is for upper-middle-grade or YA, I will have to print the image in black and white. (Printing color pages in longer books leads to all kinds of extra costs: either you use very good paper that holds color well even on noncolor pages or you must have a separate signature of pages tipped in to every book; then there is the extra printing cost. Soon enough your pretty book costs so much no one will buy it.) The very access that makes the Internet in all its splendor available to me as an individual depreciates what I can create as an author. 
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