Why Tracking in Contemporary Children's Lit Makes it Harder For Good Books to See Print

Recently I wrote what I'm confident is a good book. When my agent submitted it I got the most glowing rejections I've ever received. It's not over yet, I'm still waiting to hear from a number of publishers, but it's a frustrating situation made all the more frustrating because of the praise its been receiving.

The principal reason the book was rejected? It didn't fit within their catalog. Too long for an early reader book, too short for a middle grade, they didn't know where to place it. Despite the fact that the format, vocabulary and length is no different than the perennially popular Beatrix Potter books that inspired it, they didn't know what to do with it.

I don't mean to sound bitter. It's not the editor's fault. This is the reality of the marketplace. It's how they sell books, and it's worked well for them. Adults use this system to find age appropriate books for their kids. And in the end, publishers need to sell books that parents want to buy.

These terms, "early reader" and "middle grade" are not arbitrary. They relate specifically to something called The Flesch-Kincade Reading Level Scale. It was a system first developed in 1975 to determine the readability of military technical manuals. The scale rates readability by grade level. It's been used in education for decades, and more recently, in marketing books for young readers. There's even a setting on Microsoft Word for determining a Flesch-Kincade score. It can be a great tool to determine the clarity of your writing if you're communicating to a specific audience.

Dr Seuss and Dick and Jane

Before Flesch-Kincade, Dr. Seuss created a book especially for beginning readers as a response to an article written by John Hersey in Life Magazine in criticism of beginning reader primers like Dick and Jane, a series of books that were notoriously bland. The Cat in the Hat used a vocabulary that involved the same repetition and single syllable words that the Dick and Jane books employed, but was anything but bland. The Cat in the Hat was released in 1957 and was an overwhelming success. It spawned not only a sequel but an entire series of beginning reader books from Random House by different authors overseen by Seuss. It was a groundbreaking idea.

The great P.D. Eastman did a number of them. Here's my favorite non-Seuss beginning reader, Go, Dog, Go!:

At the same time, Harper and Row introduced their I Can Read series with books like Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad are Friends and Else Holmelund Minarik and Maurice Sendak's Little Bear series. These books were longer, had chapters and had vocabulary that was a little more sophisticated. They were what would now be referred to as early reader chapter books, books designed for young children to read by themselves without an adult.

Both series resulted in a generation of enthusiastic readers.

Tracked Books

More recently publishers have created whole lines with the intention of further honing in on the developmental advantages of books tracked by age group and reading level. Some of them are great books. Some of them aren't. But in all of them, the word count and vocabulary are dictated by a strict set of guidelines established by Flesch-Kincade.

Here are a couple of examples:

There's a good deal of pressure in education to have kids advance from picture books to chapter books as soon as possible. Even older books like Frog and Toad have been given a developmental category.

So this:

Becomes this:

Over the years, many classic books have been abridged or altered or given new formats or new illustrations to appeal to younger readers. Beatrix Potter is no exception. Now even her books are subjected to this method of tracking. So this:

Becomes this:

Altering the text of a classic book like The Tale of Peter Rabbit to fit into a given track category not only compromises the quality of the original prose and the experience of the book as it was meant to be read, it's pointlessly doctrinaire. Since the original text is written in very simple prose the abridgment  for track purposes is about as hairsplitting as it gets. Up to a certain point, these kinds of changes don't amount to anything useful even for educational purposes.

A testament to the fact that quality lit can exist in this system is that the classic Frog and Toad Are Friends fits into this structure without abridgment. I'm sure there are many well written and illustrated contemporary originals that fit well within this track system. I'm not saying that the track system prevents any good books from being published, but it can, in many ways, tie an author's hands. Authors are forced to contrive their stories to fit within these standards if they want their books to see print.

This tracking method and vocabulary standard has permeated the entire industry. In children's lit, the Flesch-Kincade standard reigns all the way up to middle grade books like Amelia Bedelia and beyond, though less so the further you move up the food chain. Young adult books are immune, but there are still vocabulary lists on the lower end of the middle grade spectrum.

Tracking Doesn't Work

The principal flaw in the track system is that vocabulary and sentence length do not dictate quality or depth. You can fill a book with compound sentences and advanced vocabulary but this does not guarantee that the book will be more intellectually complex than a book with a simpler vocabulary and sentence structure. The focus is on reading level alone. To some degree  this makes sense, since you can't objectively measure the quality or complexity of story, but you can't make kids better readers by advancing them from one reading level to the next in the same way you would advance them from multiplication tables to fractions. Literature just doesn't work that way. If kids are discouraged from choosing books that are considered to be at a lower reading level than their tracked reading level they could potentially miss out on a lot of great books. 

But this is now the contemporary thinking. Now kids aren't only discouraged but shamed for wanting to read books that don't have the right number on them. If the number isn't high enough, it makes them feel as though they're not achieving. But just because your kindergartener has the vocabulary and reading comprehension of a third grader does not mean you should discourage them from reading great picture books. 

 The best way for kids to become great readers is to allow them to choose their own books based on what interests them. The number of compound sentences or multi-syllabilic words has nothing to do with what makes a book great. Great literature, whether intended for children or adults, will always remain great literature.

Why "In The Night Kitchen" Made Me Want to Make Books

In The Night Kitchen made me want to make books.

In fact, you may notice a little similarity between Mickey, here, and the little boy above, floating in his umbrella, and I would have to admit that this is probably no coincidence.

Lately I seem to be in the habit of writing about artists who have made an impact on me after they die, and I'm beginning to think that maybe I'm waiting just a little too long to say what they mean to me. One thing that surprises me in this particular instance, is how the death of Sendak doesn't sadden me at all. I can't claim to know his mind, but from recent interviews, it seemed like he was ready. He seemed content to  have had the opportunity to meet the people he grew to love in his life, and to have had the opportunity to write and illustrate books that he felt had meaning. He got to do most of what he set out to do. Not only did he write and illustrate books, but he designed theater sets and costumes for musicals and operas for both adults and children. Of course his life was not exactly without hardship. But I don't feel a loss. I know I'm supposed to, but I don't feel it, no matter how much affection I have for his books, or for the person that I imagined him to be.

In the Night Kitchen made me want to make books. I didn't say "Maurice Sendak made me want to write books," because he didn't. As far as I'm concerned, In the Night Kitchen is my book, not his. The fact of its author isn't what makes me love the book. When I discovered the book I had no idea--or care--about who Maurice Sendak was. I was curious about Doctor Seuss, and what kind of doctor he might be, but otherwise, the author of a book would have been easily forgotten trivia to that kid who loved In the Night Kitchen.

When I say "make books" I mean everything about a book. A book with a binding, and with pictures, and with stories inside. I remember having a copy of Where the Wild Things Are that was falling apart, and seeing the sewing of the binding, one piece of the mystery of how it was made. I was always fascinated by the mystery of things that were manufactured, and somewhere, by somebody, books were made. The first book I made that I can remember, was a book about Santa Claus, also a person of a great fascination to me. I  drew all the pictures on colored construction paper,and stapled it at the side. I must have figured out that this would leave one blank page before each picture, just like a picture book, so that's where the words would go. I couldn't write yet, so I dictated to my brother what words I wanted written on each page, and he wrote them.

It's one thing to have a book read to you, and another to truly experience it for yourself, by yourself, and I remember when this happened with In the Night Kitchen. I remember it was very early in the morning. I remember feeling that somehow the book knew me and what I felt and wanted. The author, as he should not be, was not my book. It was my book, and mine alone. I looked a lot like Mickey at that age. With no modesty whatsoever, I will admit  that I was an extraordinarily adorable child. I looked like Max, and I looked like Mickey, and so these books very much felt as if they were about me. In the Night kitchen was pure sensation. It was about the feeling of night, and about the feeling of milk, and about the feeling of dough and of flying, and of saying "Cock a doodle doo!" and I really don't care to try to figure out what it was about or means, because what it was really about was me, the kid, and how I felt and who I was.

Maurice Sendak died at 83. My Dad will be 88 in August. Maurice Sendak was an Ashkenazi Jew, second generation immigrant, and so was my dad. My dad's parents were socialists, and didn't practice, and as a secular and enthusiastic celebrator of Christmas and Easter, I didn't even know my dad was Jewish until I was about ten. My dad grew up in East Orange New Jersey, and as a teen, like Sendak, he lived in New York. he used to tell me stories about going to the movies for 25 cents, though my dad was more a fan of Flash Gordon serials than Mickey Mouse, the inspiration for Sendak's Mickey from In the Night Kitchen.


When my mother left my dad and took us from the small town where I grew up in Pennsylvania to California, more than anything, I missed my dad. I didn't have much connection to my mother, and my dad was my home. As I grew into my teens, I began to discover who Maurice Sendak was, and in my mind he became a connection to my dad and my childhood. Of course this man who made this book would be like my dad. I also discovered Sendak's other inspiration, Windsor McCay. McCay spoke to me as a teen as Sendak spoke to me as a little boy.  And sometime in my teens I decided I wanted to make comic books and picture books--and this was what In The Night Kitchen was--not just a picture book but a comic book, with word balloons and captions and a little boy who looked as much like me as he looked like McCay's Little Nemo.

As a teenager, I discovered Selma Lane's enormous book, The Art of Maurice Sendak, and hunted down every book I could find that Sendak had illustrated or written. I was surprised how few books he had actually written. The best of them: Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, The Nutshell Library, and The Sign on Rosie's Door. Some of my favorites that he illustrated: Grimm's Fairy Tales. The Griffon and the Minor Canon. Little Bear.  I loved that rich, engraving pen and ink style, and I remember working hard to try to emulate it.

Sendak's first book was by Ruth Krauss, A Hole is to Dig. Krauss and her husband, Crockett Johnson, served as mentors for Sendak, and as a 13 year old, while spending a very brief time in juvenile hall for a life changing but minor infraction, I discovered a rare paperback of Crocket Johnson's Barnaby on the book cart. It proved to be a great comfort and enduring favorite.

Maurice Sendak is a part of my family. Not the part that I was born into, but the part that I chose. I am a great believer and endorser of choosing your family if you ever have the option, and this, to me, includes people I may never meet and may never know who have gotten inside me and made a deep and indelible impression.

Now I'm 38, and I am so glad to be an adult, and I am so glad that I discovered In the Night Kitchen and so many other books by Sendak, and I'm so glad that now, I'm finally making picture books. So maybe it's selfish, but I can't say I'm sad at all that Maurice Sendak is dead. I'm glad that he was alive, and as far as I'm concerned, he still is. I haven't lost a thing. 

A Great Book Will Always Remain a Great Book: Why Your Kid Will Never Outgrow Picture Books

Your Early Reader Needs Picture Books, Even if You Think They've Outgrown Them


There is an increasing trend to get kids into reading chapter books as early as possible. The publishing industry has responded to this trend by making picture books less sophisticated and with fewer words than they had in the past. I think this is a mistake. Picture books are a pivotal and significant part of a kid's growth and development as a reader. Kids need to be able to read picture books as long as they have a desire to. 


I recently came across a post on a blog called the "Homeschool Classroom" that discussed this issue, expressing that their child, at four, had reached a "reading wall." Here's the original post.


And here's a slightly edited version of my response:

Your boy is four years old. Picture books are OK. I repeat: picture books are OK. There are plenty of challenging picture books for even the most advanced reader. Try William Steig. Try William Joyce. Or Chris Van Allsberg. Yes, there are less words per page. But you'd be surprised--the vocabulary is not necessarily less sophisticated. The stories are often challenging and engaging. Compelling an early reader to read books he's not that interested in is not going to make them a better reader in the future. Let him choose his own books, even if they are what you consider to be below his reading level. Picture books are a very important and critical part of a kids early development as a reader. At four he needs picture books.

There are also some very excellent lavishly illustrated storybooks in the slimmer, picture book format. And no matter what the age level, I don't think it helps to make reading a compulsory act. Give him books that he likes and he will seek them out. Read him books that are maybe a little more sophisticated but that engage him--books that he may not be able to read on his own but that he can enjoy, like Doctor Dolittle or Peter Pan. These are nighttime reading. Bedtime stories. And read him his favorites--even if they're below his reading level--over and over again if that's what he wants. That's how you change a reluctant reader into an enthusiastic one!


I Missed My Picture Books


When I was eight years old, I moved from my home in Pennsylvania to California with my mother and brother. And I left behind my picture books. I had a wonderful collection of some of fantastic picture books, Babar, Maurice Sendak, Steig, classic fairytales illustrated by Dulac and some of the great illustrators of the past. At eight, I saw these as "baby books" and my mother asked if it was OK for my grandmother to sell them. I would get to keep the money. She sold the lot for $50, and my mother started a bank account for me. At the time, I thought this was a great idea. It wasn't long before I figured out what I'd done.


We no longer had any books in my house that I wanted to read. We had my older brother's Beverly Cleary and Judy Bloom books. I tried to read Ramona the Great which was supposed to be written for my age group, but I found it totally unsatisfying. I had always considered myself an enthusiastic reader, prided myself on my interest in reading, but there was nothing I wanted to read. Then I discovered comic books.


Comic books were picture books that I could buy myself. I could seek them out on my own, and buy them with my own money. At the time, the only thing I checked out from the library were hardbound collections of comics, like The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics and Origins of Marvel Comics and Flash Gordon. My parents thought: at least I was reading, but I think these comics were as sophisticated as any chapter book or young adult book. You see: when I was a kid, I liked fantasy, but there wasn't a Harry Potter. We had Roald Dahl, and later I'd discover Daniel Pinkwater, and John Dennis Fitzgerald's The Great Brain (not fantasy, but no less a great series). I loved a Wrinkle in Time, but didn't read it till much later. But we simply didn't have the wealth of young adult books, of truly engaging young adult books that we have now. Yes, there are too many vampire books, and the fantasy genre dominates, but they are books that kids want to read. And there are so many that are well written, and that have compelling characters, and that go so far beyond the The Hardy Boys and The Babysitter's Club in the sophistication of their content. But there has to be a transition point. Even when a kid's reading level is high enough for them to read a chapter book, or  even a young adult book, picture books can still be important. 


A Great Book Will Always Remain a Great Book


Maybe I was supposed to be too old for picture books, but I never stopped loving them. And I'm positive that even at eight, or nine, or even older, I would have still read them over and over, even if they were "baby books." These were, and remain important books for me. A great book is a great book, and if it's a truly great book, no matter how few words it has, no matter what age it was intended for, it should continue to be a great book, and kids shouldn't be compelled to abandon them. 

Toy Story 3, or How to Effectively Betray Your Audience

Last night I saw the movie Toy Story 3, and there was something about it that really bothered me. If you're going to see the movie and you're someone who doesn't like it when someone else gives away the ending, I'll warn you when that part is coming, but first I want to talk about storytelling in general.

At a recent Society of Children's Book Writer's and Illustrator's conference that I attended, an accomplished writer outlined for the audience the standard formula behind the majority of the stories we read: place the character in some kind of jeopardy--whether moral, emotional or physical, the character is placed in a situation where they are compelled to make a decision. How they choose to deal with the dilemma reveals something about their character or is reflective of who the character is. How they come to the decision, their journey, is even more important than the decision they make, because often in some of the best stories the answer to this dilemma is pretty predictable. So in the end, you have to justify the characters journey, give them unique decisions to make that reflect who they are. And then there's the other way that writers tend to keep their readers engaged: stirring the pot. Adding conflict that further complicates the dilemma. The author chose to describe this concept in a very dramatic way: jumping on chairs, shouting and gesturing to illustrate his point, as if the more dramatic his presentation, the more effective it would come across, but I couldn't help feeling that there was a certain amount of insecurity behind the act, that he was doing his own form of pot stirring.

Good Stories Don't Have to Follow This Traditional Formula

Not all great stories follow this path. One of my favorite stories is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through The Looking Glass. These stories are comprised of a series of surreal anecdotes. Alice responds to each vignette with curiosity, but her character doesn't fundamentally change. Kafka's the Trial is similar--the pot is definitely stirred, but K's responses to the dilemma's of the story are emotionally monochrome--while Alice deals with each dilemma with curiosity and frustration, K also deals with every conflict in the same way, with frustration, but also an unmodulated level of moral outrage. Each is a relentless surrealist drama. The journey and the nuances of the journey are significant, but no conclusions are drawn. The characters are basically cyphers, but using a cypher is an excellent way to engage the reader as a participant.

Songs, Nursery Rhymes and poems can also work this way, for example:

Hey diddle diddle,
The Cat and the fiddle,
The Cow jumped over the moon,
The little Dog laughed to see such sport,
And the Dish ran away with the Spoon

This is very striking narrative imagery, a story of sorts, and though it's more verse than story, I wouldn't discount the fact that there is a narrative, that there are characters, and there are situations, but they have nothing to do with traditional story conflict. This is as valid a way to tell a story as any, and it's not a new one. What used to be called, "nonsense verse" has virtually disappeared in contemporary children's verse in favor of literal narrative, and I think it's a trend that represents a great loss to children's literature.

Margaret Wise Brown's classic, Goodnight Moon is simply a story about a bunny saying goodnight to the world before he goes to sleep. Another one of my favorite books, In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak, is a journey of sensations, of flying, of playing in dough, and though the bakers in the story are sometimes menacing, it's not about a conflict between Mickey and the bakers. At least not in a traditional way. They threaten him and he escapes, but it's really not about this conflict. You never have a sense that Mickey's jeopardy is what we're focusing on in the story. It's about the journey in a much more personal way. Mickey is not fundamentally changed by the story in the same way that Max is in the more popular Where the Wild Things Are, but it's still an effective story. Mickey, too, is somewhat of a cypher, but he still is a character who makes decisions and has opinions, even more so than Alice and K.

Lazy Storytelling: Do You Have Something to Say, or Are You Simply Stirring the Pot?

But coming back to more traditional story structure, to stirring the pot: how much, and just how should you put your character in jeopardy?

There are two kinds of jeopardy in a story:

1. Jeopardy that enriches the character's dilemma, that reveals something about them and their interactions that is specific to character.

2. Jeopardy that simply pushes the readers buttons, that elicits an emotional response through some universal experience such as a physical or emotional threat.

The second variety usually involves loss or harm in the most superficial sense--the loss of something or someone valued, or the threat of death, or even better: both. I always know that a story is potentially in trouble when it begins with the death of a protagonist's near and dear loved one. This is a hard scenario to pull off without being emotionally manipulative, because it's at its core an emotionally manipulative situation. Before we know anything about the character we are asked to feel sorry for them. To turn that sympathy into empathy, you have to give us a reason to identify with the character and their dilemma that is specific to them. Otherwise it's simply loss for the sake of loss. So everything after that death must justify that death or you're simply eliciting a generic emotional response.

Put a character we don't identify with in jeopardy, and the audience is removed from the threat. Similarly, if you make the stakes too high, you may elicit an emotional response from the reader, but in the end, you don't fundamentally engage them. You simply engage them on a very primal, emotional level. You get them to feel, but you don't get them to think. These kinds of stake building stories tend to be effective in getting a reaction from the audience, and are often successful, but I don't think they're doing the best thing that stories can do. I don't think they engage the reader in a way that is truly meaningful. For me, this was the central weakness of the currently popular Hunger Games series--by book three the stakes have been driven so high, the character has lost so much, that it was hard for me to care anymore. The level of emotional button pushing had surpassed my ability to empathize with the character.



Betraying Your Audience

Which brings me back to Toy Story 3. Initially you have a conflict that involves all the characters in a way that engages them individually, and in the case of many of the key players, how they solve the dilemma, the decisions they make, reveal something about their character. Barbie betrays her love interest, Ken, to help her friends. Woody leaves a happy and comfortable life with the little girl who finds him and abandons his search for Andy, to save his friends. Their decisions are predictable, but it's how they make the decisions and how this process reflects their individual characters that's engaging, or at least, that's the general idea.

Typically, as in most stories and, unfortunately, most children's stories, it's about white hats and black hats. We've got good guys and bad guys, but the main antagonist is made to be the most intriguing because of his inner conflict. He's given his own journey, his own moral dilemma, but makes a different moral decision. Like Darth Vader, Lots O' Huggin' Bear goes to the dark side.

Then it all comes down to stirring the pot.

In bad storytelling, it's all about pot stirring. There's no substance to it beyond the superficial danger. The protagonist is an archetype, and the threats have no real emotional resonance.

But there's nothing wrong with stirring the pot when the characters and conflicts are well established and fully realized, with adding a few superficial conflicts to engage us with the dilemma of the character. That's good storytelling. But in the best storytelling, you must respect the reader. Once you have them emotionally engaged, you've put them in a vulnerable position, and its a position that's easy to exploit. You've got them in your thrall. Now, when you stir the pot, every additional conflict pushes the reader further on an emotional level. But you must respect the reader.

If you exploit this too much, you're doing the reader an injustice. When the new conflicts you introduce have nothing to do with the unique dilemmas of the character, it's all about emotional button pushing. You can up the ante and up the ante, but you're simply working the audience. You're not trusting the strength of the characters you've established to carry the story on their own. Filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and James Cameron are very effective at this: they feel this need to seal the deal, to make sure that the audience feels something, but they don't trust the characters ability to do this on their own, so they amp up those emotions through superficial conflict. Sometimes, especially in the case of Cameron, this is because the characters are too poorly developed. Spielberg is capable of better, but he just doesn't trust his own story. He always seems to feel he needs the insurance.

(WARNING: THIS IS THE PART WHERE I GIVE AWAY THE ENDING) So Toy Story 3, as well, was unwilling to trust its audience. In the penultimate scene, the characters are headed for the incinerator at a city dump. Before they are saved at the last moment, Buzz Lightyear takes Jessie the girl cowboy's hand and looks at her with a pitiable expression that denotes a very adult emotion--he's preparing to die. And she gets it. And then the other characters get it. And the film holds on to this moment until they're rescued from this horrible fate, but the moment is milked for all its worth. To young children, this moment is more than terrifying. It's more than Pinocchio getting swallowed by the whale. They're being confronted with the idea of real death. It's an amped up version of The Velveteen Rabbit, a story that is similarly emotionally manipulative in a way that betrays the audience, though the Velveteen Rabbit isn't nearly as visceral. Death is a reasonable subject to broach with children, but it must be done sensitively, and this, simply, wasn't.

But even as an adult, I felt my buttons being pressed in a way that didn't ring true. The characters and their dilemma weren't complex enough to justify this kind of emotional ride. It was lazy storytelling. Pixar can do better. And as writers, we can do better. So the next time you're writing a story, ask yourself: am I stirring the pot for the sake of stirring the pot, or is adding conflict justified by character? Is the conflict meaningful, or is it insurance?