BOOK SPECIAL...THE CUB BOOK CLUB

THE CUB BOOK CLUB  Social media and MS Word are pushing curious little minds to pen novels that are being lapped up by publishing houses     As if it wasn’t dispiriting enough for adult little-weights to watch kids ace grad-level Physics tests, whip up prize-winning chocolate lava cakes on TV, and clinch spelling bees with words like ‘pococurante’ (which we will now resentfully look up) — all before peaking puberty, now we also have to contend with them signing book deals even before their handwriting matures.     One such is 12-year-old Anusha Subramanian, who has signed a contract to pen a four-book series for Rupa’s new children’s imprint, Red Turtle. The first of the quartet, a fantasy/mytho/adventure piece called Heirs of Catriona, hit the stands last week. At the book launch in Mumbai, instead of author reading excerpts, Anusha’s friends read out passages from the book, turning the affair into a bit of a school skit.     “I usually write at night, when my creative juices flow. And I try to achieve between 500 and 1,000 words a day,” says Anusha, who, kitted out in sweats and a pair of spectacles, makes for a home-grown Hermione. Unsurprisingly, J K Rowling figures among her literary idols alongside Rick Riordan, and they appear to have shaped her writing. Anusha, whose father Ravi is the author of such pulp hits as If God Was a Banker and Bankster, says she took a pointer from her father on writing discipline. Just like Ravi makes time to write on the sidelines of his corporate job, so too does Anusha knuckle down to ordering her parallel realm after her school assignments are in the bag.     Leaving vanity publishing squarely off the table, it has been observed by some leading English language publishing outfits that more children are writing, or attempting to write books now than before Microsoft Word. Sudeshna Shome Ghosh, who moved house from Puffin to Rupa to lead Red Turtle, imputes this to the fact that children are more ambitious today. “They also have more avenues to exhibit their work, like a blog, or social media, so writing a book is not such a huge leap for them,” she says. Could some of these be ghost-written by an adult? They could, but Ghosh says editorial instinct helps them catch out the proxies. “For example, we watch out for jumps in voice, abrupt changes in tone, language, and so on.” We’ll now proceed on the assumption that books by children are indeed written by them.     As most adults know, it takes more than will to hard-bind a book; in the case of child writers too, few manage to get past editorial turnstiles. “Most manuscripts are not up to the mark,” admits Sohini Mitra, who now heads Puffin. “We look for original writing, but we get lots of rip-offs of what’s already in the market. We’re not nitpicky about the style or the flow, because writing can always be spruced up and edited, but we do look for novelty in idea. What’s usually missing is the balance between decent writing, a good plot and great narrative style.”     It’s not shocking that child writers mimic the content and style they admire in the literature they read, but if originality is to be expected, it must first find patronage. Mitra believes that national junior writing bugs and school-led writing programmes could raise the benchmark by bringing more hands to the desk. Publishers too could get in on the act, by collaborating with schools and kids clubs, or having scouts pick out talent, but it’s a mammoth task, and publishers don’t have the constitution for it.     One publishing house that gallantly took up the gauntlet was Scholastic India. They instituted a writing award in 2007 to seek out and publish young writers between the age of ten and 16 from schools that were associated with the Scholastic through its Book Clubs and Book Fairs. Selected short stories from close to 2,000 submissions are anthologised in their For Kids By Kids series.     “The themes for the competition are announced in the entry form and a different story prompt is given every year for each category,” says Aditya Puar, Scholastic India’s marketing head, referring to the age-wise division of contestants. This usually guarantees plurality in genre and style — indeed while one story may concern itself with the anxiety of a child who fears he may be adopted, another is an action adventure set in battleground Afghanistan. While the writing is not quite Sebastian Junger or L M Montgomery, the commitment to research and the agility of imagination augur great possibilities. “The number of talented but unpublished authors writing in India is growing every day, and we seek them out with a greater sense of adventure than we perhaps did before. Publishing an anthology of writing by young children is our way of acknowledging and encouraging talent,” says Puar, adding that the 2012 edition of For Kids by Kids sold 1,000 copies.     Talent can also be prodded out of complacency by a peer’s own success. At the annual children’s book festival in Delhi, Bookaroo, closet writers are spurred to step out by published authors their own age who willingly field questions and gratuitously offer inspiration. M Venkatesh, co-organiser of the festival and part proprietor of Eureka Bookstore, says meeting their heroes in the flesh, and discuss writing and illustrating during book signing sessions is an exhilarating experience for budding writers.     But he believes we’re still a long way from filling up a bookshelf with works by Indian child writers. “I don’t think there has been a flood of writing from either children or teenagers. I remember Trisha Ray (Harper Collins) and Anshuman Mohan (Puffin) last year. There was Ragini Siruguri who illustrated Autorickshaw Blues (Katha) when she was just 10 back in 2004. Others like Anirudh Vasudev and Asmita Goyanka have written books published by Sterling and Roli respectively. Samhita Arni wrote Mahabharata: A Child’s View (Tara) when she was 12. But very few have had a second book out,” he points out. Venkatesh contends that if there are fewer books by children than ought to be, it’s publishers who should answer for it. “While there is a lot of writing talent out there, it is the publishing of that work that is the challenge,” he says.     For Samhita Arni, publishing was hardly a challenge only because it was never considered. “I did not imagine The Mahabharata: A Child’s View would get published when I was working on it. It was just a way for me to fill time at first — like how most kids keep a diary,” she says. “I would write and illustrate it as a cathartic/ therapeutic activity, on the backs of greeting cards and scraps of paper. A friend of my mother’s dropped by one day and saw me working — and the piles of paper my mother had collected — essentially, my manuscript. She thought it could be a book and suggested we meet her friend Gita Wolf, of Tara Books, who offered to publish my book if I could complete it. That’s how it happened.”     Arjun Vajpai made his way to a book via Everest. His feat — of being the youngest Indian to scale the mountain at 16 — drew Puffin’s attention, and they decided he was a fitting subject to launch their series on real-life heroes for children and youth. “When they approached me with the proposal, my mother was incredulous. Because I rarely ever read a book, so the prospect of writing one was hilarious to her,” Arjun, now 19, says. Puffin assigned him a co-author, and he eventually put it all down and the outcome was On Top of The World: My Everest Adventure. He completed it in six months, and was surprised by the attention it received, particularly from children who saw in Arjun an idol they could relate to. He’s grateful to Puffin for encouraging him to broadcast his adventure via the book because “an achiever is not always a writer”. Although the reverse is often true.

JOEANNA REBELLO FERNANDES TCR121208