On “Write The Author” Assignments

Authors, by and large, love fan mail.  Hearing that readers were touched by our stories and love our characters as much as we do, if not more, is a joy. And letters from kids are the best of them! They are honest, heartful, funny, kind, sincere. Good stuff! So I was delighted to see an email in my inbox this morning that started “I am in seventh grade at” and prepared to read it over morning coffee.  But then I opened it and found, effectively, a book report in letter format.

Now, not everything in the email was bad.  It was quite mixed with a generally positive, if ciscentric, bent. It was an honest, genuine, book report. Relatively thoughtful, even.  I LOVE students questioning and critiquing what they read. I even appreciate when kids email to tell me something they didn’t like about the book. The fact that a kid was so much by my writing that they want to talk with me about it? Bring it on.

But this was a book report, complete with a few “some evidence of this is” lines and an unusual preoccupation with inciting incidents. It is a solid assignment. And it should have remained in the classroom. This critique of whether my book has a sufficient inciting event to qualify as realistic fiction should not have been sent to me. A conversation about the balance between characteristic traits and prescriptivist definitions would be a fascinating classroom discussion and could give students a fuller understanding of genre. But it’s not the author’s job to defend their work in this way.

Rather than take my frustration out on a seventh grader completing their assignment, I wrote to the two 7^th  grade ELA teachers at the school in question.  (The internet truly is fabulous.) I heard back from one, who said one of the goals of the project is to provide authors feedback from their demographic and wanted to know how I recommended they change the assignment.  It’s as simple as this:

Don’t actually mail “Letter To The Author” assignments unless you think they will be enjoyable and/or valuable for the author. This goes triple for authors who are marginalized in ways the student is not.

Now I’m not saying that everything I receive needs to be glowing. But to have a seventh grader emailing me because she personally doesn’t think the idea of a trans fourth grader is realistic? I have spoken with plenty of elementary school-age trans kids who would say otherwise. And I have spoken about the importance of trans youth in elementary age settings and the age appropriateness of my characters countless times, including both in this blog and in the FAQ for the paperback edition. It’s cisnormativity being thrown in my face. Again. (Hint: If you are coming from a place of privilege and have something to say to someone from a marginalized community, I 99% guarantee you they have heard it before.)

Further, this is a completed published work of fiction. Your students’ unvetted ideas of how the book should have ended aren’t actually helpful to me.  I mean, it’s sweet if a kid takes it on themselves to tell me their thoughts and I smile through those responses and inwardly grumble as I encourage them to engage in fan fiction. But for a teacher to make it an assignment that includes questions for me to respond to? Why are you throwing that labor at me? You know writers are real people, right? And we read our email. And many of us want to reach out to readers to take the time to reach out to us. But assignments like this make the whole idea of being accessible feel icky.

Also? I, and many children’s book authors, go to schools and talk with kids. We have kids in our lives. You are not doing us a service by letting us know what a “real live kid” thinks.

But what bothers me most about this letter is that it’s a wasted opportunity for communication literacy. What is appropriate to share with whom and when? What is your goal and purpose in communicating? Who is your audience and how will your words be received?

One more thing. Let’s look at the numbers. What if 10% of teachers gave an assignment like yours once a year. Let’s be limited and just look at seventh graders in the US. According to the US Census, there were about 54 million kids ages 5-17 in 2010. Assuming the spread is even, that’s roughly 4 million seventh graders, or 400,000 letters. Pulling a generous number of 10,000 children’s authors out of thin air, that’s still 40 letters per author per year. Multiply that by, say, the rest of 3^rd through 7^th grades, (how Scholastic tends to market middle grade titles), as well as English speakers through the world, and that’s a lot of unsolicited feedback. Could you imagine getting notes on your desk from your students that question your pedagogy, techniques, and efficacy?

The good news is that these numbers remind me that most teachers recognize that this is not an appropriate assignment, as these emails are pretty rare for most writers I’ve talked to. We get them, but maybe a few a year. I’m still convinced that’s a few too many. But then there are the big name authors. I can only imagine how many emails Rick Riordan’s assistant has to trash a day.

So here I am, spending my daily word count on this blog post. “Should” I? “Shouldn’t” I just let it roll off my back? I’m gonna call BS on that. (BS=Beat-it Should!). It’s in writing about it that I get the thoughts out of my head and clear to get back into other projects. And given that I’m not the only one who gets these emails, I may as well share my thoughts, so that folks who wish to can point to this post or adapt any language that works for them.

To sum up, if you are a teacher and your student wants to write an author, encourage it! If you give an assignment for students to “write” an author, don’t actually have them send it. Do what we did back in the 80s. Mount it on a piece of construction paper and staple it to a bulletin board.  And if there’s a really cute one that would give us a smile, send it along! Otherwise, let us be so that we can be focusing on writing the next book.

Author notes:

1) I am specifically referring to “book report” type emails here.  Most authors LOVE receiving “thank you” type messages from kids.  And if you have nondigital media for us, get in touch. Many of us are happy to provide a mailing address to receive handwritten notes.

2) All thoughts here are my own.  Other authors have every right to disagree with me.

3) Author is currently in limbo being having sent off the page proofs for my second book and the beginning of distribution of Advance Reader Copies that sparks the beginning of “pre-book season”.  Author then had a brief email exchange that set their angst alight in a cranky blaze.  Author wished they had a blog post to point to. So, amongst all of the other problems we’ve got in the bizarreness we call 2018, here we are.