The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Writing for Boys:

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Writing for Boys:

I found this to be true when I was teaching; I would love to read about a study which explains why my husband and I can't agree on a movie...wonder if the findings between the genders would be similar?

From the Teacher/Librarian Journal:

From After years of neglect, there is now a growing body of research to explain the reading and non-reading habits of boys. In the first chapter of Michael Smith's indispensable book Reading don't fix no Chevys is a quick review of a dozen major findings of that research related to boys (not just teens) and reading:

Boys don’t comprehend narrative (fiction) as well as girls
Boys have much less interest in leisure reading than girls
Boys are more inclined to read informational texts
Boys are more inclined to read magazine and newspaper articles
Boys are more inclined to read comic books and graphic novels than girls
Boys like to read about hobbies, sports and things they do or want to do
Boys tend to enjoy escapism and humor
Some groups of boys are passionate about science fiction or fantasy
The appearance of a book and cover is important to boys
Few boys entering school call themselves “non-readers” but by high school, over half do
Boys tend to think they are bad readers
If reading is perceived as feminized, then boys will go to great lengths to avoid it
Thus, the boy at the booktalking session saying he doesn't read might simply be saying that he doesn't read what libraries offer.

Most young adult sections in public libraries are filled with fiction; there is little recreational non-fiction. If there is recreational nonfiction, it is more than likely to be self-help, health-related, about teen issues or pop star biographies. There might be magazines, but the chances are they are aimed more at girls than boys. Comic books are more than likely not to be there, and graphic novels, if collected, are not featured. There probably isn't a newspaper lying around. Boys who venture into the YA area will find shelves so jammed that they won't have a catchy cover catch their interest and it is doubtful if anything but new books (which again, no doubt are all fiction) will be on display. Given these choices, the teen boy, especially a younger one, will opt for something safe like a series (boys like brands) only to get the message from a teacher, parent or maybe even a librarian that the book is okay because "at least they are reading something.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: This explains a lot - I am a new upper elementary teacher and I struggle with getting my boys to read. It could be I am picking too many classics for them and not enough of what they want. -
Shirley Dunner; Friday, 28 March, 2008

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Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

***