Youngsters’ Books Not Child’s Play, Author Says

Sid Fleischman was a successful screenwriter and the author of such decidedly adult titles as “Blood Alley” when he began writing for children.

“I backed into the field,” said the prize-winning writer of more than 30 children’s books during an interview in his Santa Monica home, where he works.

Fleischman’s 1986 book, “The Whipping Boy,” recently won the John Newbery Medal--the Oscar of children’s literature. As a result, Fleischman, 67, has been inundated with requests for interviews and invitations to speak.

“The Newbery is a full-time job,” he said, as he fielded yet another phone call.

Amusing His Children

Inevitably asked how he came to write for young people, Fleischman explains that his first children’s tale was concocted almost three decades ago to amuse his three now-grown children. His son, Paul Fleischman, a writer in Northern California, has also won a Newbery.

As writers will, Fleischman wrote himself, his wife, his offspring, their friends, even the family dog into his first book for children, “Mr. Mysterious and Company,” then sent the manuscript off to his New York agent.

“I seem to have written a children’s book,” he wrote. “If you’re not interested, just drop it in the waste basket.” The book was published by the first firm that read it.

Fleischman was amazed when letters began to arrive from children responding to his work. “Adult readers never write,” he said. “It was the first time I ever felt in touch with my audience.”

“Their letters are wonderful,” he said of his young fans. They make you feel like Shakespeare must have felt when he heard the applause.”

‘Dear Sid’ Letters

The writer relishes the candor of his readers, who write “Dear Sid” letters telling him exactly what they think of such Fleischman books as “The Ghost on Saturday Night” and a series of tall tales featuring farmer Josh McBroom.

“They keep my hat size where it was,” Fleischman explained.

“When did you start writing? When are you going to STOP writing?” one letter asked.

Other favorites: a missive assuring Fleischman his “was the second-best book I’ve ever read” and one that ended “Better luck next time.”

One of the pleasures of writing for young people, Fleischman said, is that fine children’s books endure. “Adult novels are as ephemeral as newspapers,” he said. “Children’s books stay in print for decades.”

More important, children’s books stay forever in the minds of those who love them. Fleischman suggests that few activities are as satisfying as writing a book knowing it might have the impact of Margaret W. Brown’s “Good Night, Moon” or E. B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web.”

‘Doing Something Important’

“For the first time,” he recalled, “I felt I was doing something important.”

People seem to think that writing for children is easier than writing for adults. Not so, Fleischman said. A person writing for children must find a way to express himself simply as well as richly.

And children are ruthless critics. “They won’t indulge you if you bore them,” Fleischman said. “As an adult I’ll give a writer 50 pages. If the book doesn’t interest me in 50 pages I’ll say the heck with it--there are just too many other things to read. A child won’t give you 50 pages.”

Fleischman’s first ambition was to be a magician. Born in Brooklyn, Fleischman grew up in San Diego, where he haunted the public libraries, reading everything he could find on sleight of hand. He was a professional conjurer, working in vaudeville and night clubs while still in his teens.

Today, when he addresses audiences of school children, he likes to warm up the crowd by sawing a young volunteer in half with a ribbon before he starts talking about books.

Fleischman’s passion for magic led him to writing: His first book was a collection of magic tricks he had invented.

Published at 19

“I needed to put my bafflers on paper,” he recalled in his Newbery acceptance speech. “I sat down at the family typewriter, the old Remington with the faded, tenderized blue ribbon and began rattling away. The pages stacked up. I had a short book. In literary style, it was on a par with the instructions you get with a digital clock. But it was published. I was 19.”

Why mess around with rabbits when you can pull characters out of a typewriter?

Fleischman finds he writes more slowly now than he did when he was first teaching himself to craft stories and novels. He finished his first novel, a mystery, in just 2 1/2 weeks. “Now it takes me 2 1/2 weeks to write a note to the milkman,” he said. “The less you know, the easier it is.”

“The Whipping Boy” gestated for almost a decade. Fleischman discovered in the course of researching an earlier book that it was the custom in some royal courts to raise a boy as a companion to a prince who was punished in his highness’s stead (princesses had whipping girls).

“It was the injustice of it, the lunacy of it, that got me,” he said.

But one good idea doesn’t make a novel, according to Fleischman. The story of Prince Brat and his whipping boy, Jemmy, began to come alive only after he came up with a second.

‘Need Two Ideas’

“You need two ideas,” he explained. “They’re like sticks. You have one, you can throw it to the dog. But if you have two, you can rub them together and make a fire.”

The additional idea that sparked the book: that the prince, who refuses to do his lessons, is illiterate and, thus, easily mistaken for a commoner.

Fleischman begins each of his fictions by compiling a research book in which he jots down relevant historical information: flora, fauna, colloquial expressions, even the cost of things. The research book for his “By the Great Horn Spoon!” includes notations that a slice of bread cost $1 during the California Gold Rush, “$2 buttered,” and that prospectors sent their dirty shirts to China for laundering. (The book was filmed by Walt Disney Productions as “Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin.”)

Fleischman does much of his research in the Santa Monica Public Library. He is also a habitue of the second-hand book shops of Los Angeles, including the growing number in the Santa Monica Mall. “It’s sort of becoming a Charing Cross Road down there,” he said of the mall, alluding to London’s famed avenue of booksellers.

Fleischman never outlines his books in advance. He allows the plot to emerge in the writing. Plot is not as important to a book as “characters that cast a shadow and scenes that come to life,” he said.

Emerging Themes

Nor does he write with a particular theme or moral in mind. “After I’m through, I discover what the moral is.” His two most recent books, “The Whipping Boy” and “The Scarebird” (not yet published), both deal with the nature of friendship.

Humor is a constant in his books, however serious the themes. Fleischman said he sometimes laughs out loud when he is writing, and he treasures reports from teachers, librarians and others that his readers do the same. “I want them to know they can have a terrific time within the covers of a book,” he said.

Although Fleischman is acutely aware of the need for clarity in writing for children, he makes no concessions to his young readers in terms of vocabulary. He has no qualms about sending them to the dictionary to look up an occasional word.

“By the Great Horn Spoon!” includes references to a “Jipijapa” hat, a Gold Rush term for a Panama hat. The scarebird of his latest book is an obscure name for a scarecrow.

Fleischman, who wrote five screenplays for director William Wellman, has just completed the script for an animated musical feature for director Taylor Hackford, called “Corduroy and Company.”

Freedom to Choose

One consequence of his success as a writer for children is freedom to pick and choose among film assignments. Of the movies he has scripted, he especially likes one most people have never heard of, a 1956 film about a boy and his dog called “Goodbye My Lady.” His least favorite movie project: the British film version of his pirate book, “The Ghost in the Noonday Sun.”

“Even Peter Sellers was bad in it,” he said.

As both a maker and consumer of books, Fleischman is appalled at the campaign against some children’s books that is being waged in parts of the United States. Fleischman’s work is far less controversial than that of fellow youth writers Judy Blume, whose books are often denounced by fundamentalist religious groups for their sexual explicitness, and Robert Cormier, frequently condemned for his pessimism.

Fleischman has had the discomfiting experience of having his books on magic barred from library shelves in Texas and elsewhere because of pressure from those who lump card tricks with satanism.

Fleischman described the banning of books as a fire that never seems to be quite out. “If it gets worse, we’re in real trouble,” he said.

Perhaps most offensive to him is the thought of children denied the power and consolation of books. Without freedom to read, people suffer from a kind of malnutrition.

Or, as he said, “You are what you haven’t read.”

The next morning Lonesome John hunted up an old pillowcase and stuffed it with straw. He used house paint to dab on a pair of yellow eyes. A hole in the pillowcase would do for a mouth. He sauntered to the corn patch and fixed the head to the neck of the scarecrow.

“Does that face suit you, Scarebird? You look like sunshine on stilts with them yeller-paint eyes! Well, make yourself at home.”

--from “The Scarebird”

(to be published in 1988)