Manufacturing Kiddie Lit[e]: The Process and Politics of Abridging History

It's a Saturday night and we're sitting in front of our computer, surrounded by pictures of dinosaurs, books about dinosaurs, articles about dinosaurs, and a partially empty bottle of Jack Daniels. We've nearly finished a book called The Last Dinosaurs, which we've worked on for three days straight, and we're arguing about the last chapter, called "Where Did the Dinosaurs Go?" There are at least fifteen scientific theories explaining their mass extinction, but we only have a space that measures two inches square, so we are forced to choose just one. Since we are writers, not paleontologists, we're not sure which one to go with. We finally agree to go with the comet theory, since it is the most dramatic and, therefore, more appealing to young readers. Out of a guilty conscience, we tag on a few words explaining that "this is only one of several theories."

For the past five years, we have been writing and editing informational books for Gareth Stevens, Inc., an international children's book company.¹ To date we have worked on, either singly or collaboratively, over thirty books, authoring about a dozen; we have a contract to write about twenty more books over the next several years. Essentially, we write "kiddie lite": we are the people who "write down" a text from adult level to sixth grade, or from sixth grade to second or even occasionally to the preschool level. As free-lance writers, we do the "dirty work"—shrinking 300-page texts down to 64 pages of large print, glossy pictures, and boxes filled with "fun facts."

In this essay, we discuss our books from a series entitled My First Reference Library, which is primarily marketed to elementary schools across the country, although it is also available in many bookstores. This series is meant to function much like a set of encyclopedias for second-through fourth-grade students. However, our books differ from traditional encyclopedias in that they are organized thematically rather than alpha-betically; each book covers an area of human knowledge, including history, geography, science, social sciences, and technology. So far, we have written books ranging from The First Dinosaurs to How People Worship to Exploring Space.

We never set out to become children's book authors. In 1989, an editor at Gareth Stevens called the English department of University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, where we were doctoral students, and asked the chair to recommend someone who could write a quick chapter on the history of the Soviet Union. The chair gave him our names—not because we were experts on Soviet history, but rather because the chair thought we had the necessary research and writing skills to do the job. After completing this first project, we had a long discussion with the managing editor of the company. He was pleased with our work: we wrote quickly, easily meeting the deadline he had established for us; we followed the directions he had given us for word count, level of difficulty, and liveliness of prose; we were good editors and proofreaders of our own text; and, as free-lance writers, we were much cheaper than the in-house staff writers they had on the regular payroll. He also thought our educational background made us ideal writers for this project: our area of expertise in graduate school was creative writing—Bob is a poet and Julie writes short stories—but as undergraduates we were both science majors for several years (Bob in math and computer science, Julie in chemical engineering); and we both had teaching certificates and had taught high school for two years—thus we were familiar with concepts such as "readability" and "context clues." Finally, the editor appreciated the fact that we were working as a collaborative team, and thought this gave us an advantage over writers laboring alone. After writing a few more history chapters (on Hungary and Egypt), editing other people's books, and completing one arduous copy-fitting task, he handed us a contract to "write" 30 of our own books for...