A writer for young people makes a case for recognizing innovation

Recently, there has been an explosion of innovation in fiction and picture books—from the proliferation of novels in verse or in multiple voices to the triumphant rise of the graphic novel. But what makes for originality in nonfiction for young people? I think about this a lot. While experiments in other brands of writing are easy to recognize, there are particular reasons why equally fresh and creative work in nonfiction can escape notice. And yet, the essence of the best nonfiction is originality.

As the biographer Candace Fleming recently said to me, nonfiction for young people is an art form. That art form is the marriage of original ideas and original forms of presentation. Those of us who write for this audience face a double challenge. First we need to understand our subject, then we have to invent a format, a means, to reach our readers. We need to be original not only in our theories, but also in how we transmit them. That truly is an art. You can think of this essay as Art Appreciation for Nonfiction.

From its title on, the defining characteristic of Phillip Hoose's The Race to Save the Lord God Bird (Farrar, 2004) was originality. And while Hoose himself was not part of that “race,” the book had the feeling of a personal journey of discovery. You could replace the word “originality” in the dictionary with Peter Sís, and it would mean about the same thing. No one but Sís could have created a word or line in The Tree of Life (Farrar, 2003). But personal books such as Race, or a Sís tour de force, merely scratch the surface of originality in nonfiction.

Mark Kurlansky helped to transform nonfiction for adults with his “product” books—Cod, Salt, now the The Big Oyster. Since then everything from tobacco to chocolate to cotton has been covered in a book (my wife, Marina Budhos, and I are working on one for young people about sugar). Following Kurlansky's example, each of these books uses the story of one commodity to lead readers on an engaging path through history, filled with unexpected byways. After the product books came a wave of similar volumes, about mathematical concepts such as zero or infinity, or years–such as 1453, 1759, or 1776. None of the books claims to make a breakthrough discovery. The originality comes in the organization: within the story of one commodity, or idea, or year, the author has found a key to the otherwise overwhelming epic of civilization.

As it happens, Kurlansky turned his Cod into a book for young people: The Cod's Tale (Putnam, 2001). Not a mere abridgment of his adult work, it is a true picture book and a wholly original presentation. There are two morals to this story. One: originality can come as much in organization and presentation as in spadework. Two: a good index of originality in books for young people is attentiveness and creativity. In what ways has the author re-conceptualized information available to adults in order to reach younger readers? The very best example of this is the most famous, Russell Freedman's Lincoln: A Photobiography (Clarion, 1987). Freedman married very sophisticated academic ideas about Lincoln's presentation of himself, his unknowability, with photos, which even a nonreader can examine.

Stop! Right here, even as we talk about Lincoln, the last nonfiction book to win the Newbery medal, we come to what makes originality in nonfiction easy to overlook. Adult, Kurlansky-style, single-theme books announce their fresh perspective in the title–the commodity, idea, or year, is the royal road that will guide readers to fascinating and unexpected places. But it is the rare book for young people that declares its originality that way.

In the main, the titles and subjects of nonfiction books for this audience are straightforward–especially because authors and publishers are eager to show that the book will easily fit into a curriculum slot. If the title and subject do not blare forth “original thinking found here” it takes knowing the sources the author has used to recognize what he or she has done differently. Because only specialists usually know those sources, some of the most exciting work nonfiction authors do remains hidden from sight.

For example, unlike their adult biographers, Jim Giblin thought to pair John Wilkes and Edwin Booth. His dual biography Good Brother, Bad Brother (Clarion, 2005) was highly praised. But how many noticed that the very concept of the book existed in no other source? Why should that matter? Well, that is like saying, why praise a Picasso collage, or a rapper who creates a remixed song, or a documentary filmmaker who uses news footage? They are all using material that already exists. But of course we do admire the creativity in the new juxtaposition.

This gets to the heart of the invisible originality in nonfiction for young people. Jim Murphy, for example, is just now working on a biography of Benedict Arnold. His first challenge is to think through, to make sense of, this man whose name is synonymous with treachery. Unlike some adult authors, he is not going to write a thousand-page tome proving he's read every scrap of paper Arnold ever touched. Instead he needs to come to his own understanding of the man. That thinking is his original contribution. I hope that it is not too egocentric for me to say that this is exactly what I aim for in The Real Revolution (Clarion, 2005) and in all my books: to read all of the best existing sources, but then to think them through for myself, and come to my own conclusions. Don't young people with their lively intelligence and wide-ranging curiosity deserve our own most original thinking?

Of course they do. But how can reviewers, librarians, teachers train their eyes to recognize this intellectual form of originality? One good starting place is to separate out nonfiction that aims for fresh thinking from nonfiction that aims for dutiful coverage.

A great deal of nonfiction for young people makes no claim whatsoever to originality of thought. The author finds some reliable adult sources and tries to simplify them. That is challenging, true. But the work of making sense of the subject is entirely done by the source book. There is also a tendency to think that all nonfiction is really fact gathering: the facts are out there, all that an author has to do is seek them out. The Robert F. Sibert medal, awarded by the Association for Library Service to Children, after all, is given for “informational” books. Information exists, authors transmit it, they do not invent it.

Readers accustomed to nonfiction that is a rehash of adult work, or who expect nonfiction to be a kind of searchable database, just need to remind themselves that there is another quality to watch out for: has an author thought something through for him or herself and turned that into a new, an original, creative synthesis?

So far, then, we have identified two kinds of originality: conception (how the author has thought about his or her subject) and organization (how the author has juxtaposed the material he has found, to be both true to the subject and in tune with his or her readers). That leaves us with three other kinds of originality that I have left for last, not because they are any less important, but just because they are easier to see. Voice: finding a voice that is appropriate to a nonfiction topic but in tune with young people is extremely hard. But you all know that. I mention it only in passing because this is the one aspect of creativity in nonfiction that is always mentioned. Books are so often praised for reading “like a novel” that a nonfiction writer could start to feel insulted: he is only good when he isn't writing something that reads “like nonfiction.”

Research strategies: Susan Campbell Bartoletti's brilliant insight was that to make Hitler Youth (Scholastic, 2005) comprehensible to her readers she had to build her book around interviews. As former members of the organization talk about the appeal of the Führer, Nazism changes from an inexplicable pact with evil to a movement as seductive as an Xbox game. Like Melvin Burgess in his novel Smack (Holt, 1998), Bartoletti does more to combat a scourge by revealing its power then by merely condemning it. Any reader can see the power of the interviews. But if you pause for a moment, you also recognize that her approach to the topic was original, creative, in itself.

This brings us to design. The advent of the computer with its design capacities led directly to the most obvious, and striking, innovation in nonfiction: the Dorling Kindersley “Eyewitness” look. DK set a standard for the fluid and lavish use of images and for the appealing presentation of vast amounts of information that was a decade ahead of the competition.

Many publishers have tried similar experiments—ranging from truly innovative design to sprinkling in textbooklike sidebars with colored backgrounds. The DK look is no longer the forefront of innovation in nonfiction. But it did have one effect that is still important: it upped the ante for the look of nonfiction. Whether it is Elizabeth Partridge's John Lennon (Viking, 2005) or Laban Carrick Hill's Harlem Stomp! (Little, Brown, 2004), Candace Fleming's Our Eleanor (S & S, 2005) or Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart's Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs (Candlewick, 2005), the idea that nonfiction can be extravagant, lavish in its imagery, and a beautiful object in the way a picture book often is has taken hold in children's books.

If you think about the fresh thinking and creative research that the best nonfiction authors for young people are doing, marry that with the innovations in design that began with DK, you realize that the defining characteristic of the new nonfiction is originality. It just takes a bit of looking to see it.