31 May - 6 June 2001
Issue No.536
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 31 May - 6 June 2001 Issue No.536 |
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Children's stories
I was deeply interested in the African conference on motherhood and childhood, organised by UNESCO and inaugurated by Mrs Mubarak with a number of African first ladies.
Yet I have never written for children.
Some people imagine that it is something any writer is capable of, or that it is easier than writing for adults. Not so. A child accepts no compromises, and is so easily bored nothing will compel her to keep going except genuinely good writing. A child is peculiarly honest, uniquely capable of spotting a lie.
A child of five, moreover, is radically different in every way from one of 12: what one of them likes the other fails to accept. Intellectually, children grow with incredible speed -- and this is something that the writer must take into account.
Writing for children is thus a very serious business indeed. It takes more than Goha's anecdotes or wild fantasies to satisfy children's imagination.
Children today are moreover entirely different from what they were yesterday, so the children's writer must avoid drawing on personal experiences of childhood.
Still, having said all this, if I never wrote for children I very often wrote about them -- perhaps to satisfy the subconscious compulsion to become a children's writer.
The Trilogy is the most obvious example.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
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