The biggest challenge for writers of nonfiction for young people? Creating context

Lately, I’ve been reading Francine Prose’s wonderful book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them (HarperCollins, 2006). It’s a real treasure trove of examples of well-crafted sentences and paragraphs by some of the world’s greatest writers, including Dostoyevsky, Austen, Chekhov, and Woolf. Prose, an accomplished novelist, turns each sentence or passage over—examining it, thinking about it, helping us appreciate its gemlike facets. In other words, exactly as her book’s title suggests, she helps us see text as a writer would—appreciating the craft and recognizing the decisions behind each word, phrase, and punctuation mark. I’m reading it, of course, because I want to be a better writer. And that led me to think, what makes for a wonderful sentence or paragraph in nonfiction works for younger readers?

That’s a complex question, since it involves identifying writing that’s engaging and informative, pitched at just the right level, true to its subject, and part of a larger whole that can include images, maps, time lines, boxes or sidebars, and background material. In fact, rather than beginning with a look at how to paint pictures and stimulate feelings in nonfiction, I’m going to look at the biggest challenge facing those of us who write for younger readers—creating context.

Any book about dinosaurs needs to say something about the various geological ages. Typically, that’s done with a colorful chart that shows the Precambrian, Cambrian, Jurassic, and other ages in their appropriate chronology. When I was a boy, I tried to remember all their names in order. I never succeeded, but it was a fun challenge. And part of that challenge was that I wanted to be—like I assumed the adults around me were—filled with knowledge.

At best, then, context is a form of generosity. As adults who write for young people, we’re putting our readers in the know, giving them a chance to catch up, to join us, to participate in our conversations and world of knowledge. And those dinosaur-book charts do a good job of providing the context that kids need. But it’s also easy to imagine context as the exact opposite, as a lead-weight necessity that slows down a riveting story. Imagine that you’re working on a book about World War I for young readers, and you have to pause to explain the Austro-Hungarian Empire. If I were writing that sort of book, I would instantly feel like I was creating a textbook—the more I tried to get the key information down in a hurry, the less conviction I would have that anyone would pay attention to what I had written.

How can nonfiction writers avoid that trap? Russell Freedman presents an alternative in Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Holiday House, 2006). The book, which revisits a pivotal event in our nation’s Civil Rights Movement, opens with a very short context-setting introduction. In fact, it barely covers three pages, and that’s only because there’s a large photo on the second page. As a reader, you’re invited to enter the story: “This will be painless,” the spacious design seems to say, “not a long, tedious lecture.” The text itself is full of concrete details about segregation, which gracefully convey the message that “people were separated by race from the moment they were born in segregated hospitals until the day they were buried in segregated cemeteries.”

Russell’s book suggests three good principles for establishing context: offer a lot of photos, open with a generous design that tells the reader there will be plenty to look at, and fill the text with interesting, concrete details. But that’s just one approach to creating a great context. If you want to learn the other ways, well, you’ll just have to wait in suspense for my next installment.