Tolkien's The Return of the King scoops eleven Oscars, Philip Pullman gets an CBE, JK Rowling wins the adult WHSmith Award for Fiction, Jacky Wilson tops the list of borrowed books for PLR and they both have lunch with the Queen - children's books are hardly ever out of the headlines.
The biggest stories still seem to be about large sums of money, especially if this can be linked to ever-younger authors. Bloomsbury have paid £400,000 to an eighteen-year-old first-timer, Helen Oyeyemi, for a two-book deal (Times 12.1.04), Christopher Paolini is writing sequels to his best-selling Eragon fantasy, written when he was only fifteen and respectfully reviewed by Diana Wynne Jones in the Guardian and a Hertfordshire single dad gets a million dollars (just over half in pounds) from Walt Disney to film his bedtime story about how a robin saves Birddom (sic).
This makes it much harder to tell early teen readers, who write shyly about their attempts at novels, that they are not likely to get them published. But we must tell them that. Although there is a lot of raw talent out there, which must be fostered and encouraged, we must distinguish between first forays and something which really comes together as an achieved book. The notion of apprenticeship is still valid, even if the masters are at a distance.
The Internet is a useful forum in which to try out ideas, with many generous authors encouraging fan fiction on their sites and I usually direct keen would-be writers to them. Sure, there will be a lot of uncritical ego-massaging by fellow-tyros but there will also be the discipline of seeing what they've written in print but not cast in stone; the very ephemerality of the medium is in this case helpful.
I haven't read Eragon, which may be excellent, and Helen Oyeyemi has yet to write her novels, but I am sceptical that early exposure of such young writers is always a good idea. I remember my first attempt at fiction was a horsey novel, written in alternating chapters with my best friend at school. øFrom Herd to HarringayÓ was sensibly abandoned after two chapters each. In the present climate we'd probably have tried for a six-figure deal on a trilogy.
~ Mary Hoffman