Writing A Book With 300 Children
When I first decided to write a book with 300 children, I imagined it would turn out a bit like one of my Smelly Troll books, but perhaps with a different kind of monster. Reflecting on the book, it's not like anything I'd have dared write myself.
The book starts off with Simon, a sickly ten-year-old boy, taking a long walk to a city to buy some medicine for his grandpa. Meanwhile a tig (type of good monster) is beaten almost to a pulp by a bully. After heroically scooping the tig off the ground, Simon returns home to find his grandfather dead in his arm chair.
I would never have dared start a children's book with such tragedy. However, when given the choice of six or seven protagonists, many of whom were super heroes, the majority of children voted for hapless Simon to lead their book. Many characters were amalgamations of ideas but the character of Simon was submitted by one particular boy. Simon's original back story was even sadder - he watched his father burn to death in a fire and his mother die slowly of cancer. Naturally, I watered down the character before presenting it to the children, but when they voted for Simon, I decided to roll with it. I wanted to children to lead the book, even if it made me a little uncomfortable. Perhaps we shelter children too much.
The next factor that differentiates Monster Avengers from anything I would have written myself, is that it has many varied components, which the book swiftly switches between. This was partially due to the nature of the planning, with me trying to fit in as many ideas as possible. However, the children had no qualms about mixing genres - tragedy one minute, comedy the next, then a bit of action and adventure followed by a little horror, science fiction and fantasy ... They wanted a bit of everything. Genre was the last thing on their minds.
The children also dove into motivations in a very mature way. Tigs are good monsters - they only eat bullies. Eating people is wrong, but perhaps people do the wrong thing for the right reasons. I wouldn't have written a book in which a good character ate a boy, for fear that readers would lose sympathy with the character, but the children were happy to take the tig's mistakes in their stride.
I gave the children the chance to decide on the size of the book. I gave them four options from 5x8 inches (standard paperback) through to 8x10 inches, assuming they'd pick something in the middle. Nope. They decided that a book about monsters should be monster-sized, and picked the biggest size on offer. I would have been too bogged down by tradition to dare to publish a book twice the standard size, if left to my own devices.
Usually, when I write for children, I think about what adults will enjoy and feel constrained by the properties of the real world. Monster Avengers is truly child-focussed. Can 300 children predict what children really want? That remains to be seen.
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I hope it sells well, Rosen. It sounds fabulous (in the original as well as the modern sense of the word.) Maybe more writers should ask their readers what they want!