I haven’t always been a children’s author. Previously, I was an advertising/marketing copywriter. I did this for about 15 years—even though I didn’t feel passionate about my craft. Don’t get me wrong. I knew I loved to write. I just didn’t love what I was writing.

My professional life shifted 11 years ago when my daughter, a second grader at the time, became the target of some bullying friends. It was one of those experiences that had a profound effect on both of us.

How do you explain to a 7-year-old…

… the complexity of friendships?
… why her best friends one day can become her worst enemies the next?
… how to gravitate to kids who can accept all the goodness she has to offer and give it back in kind?

I went into research mode to find out as much information as I could about relational aggression, a form of emotional bullying hidden within friendships that often goes below the radar of parents and teachers. I learned that relational aggression (i.e., gossiping, spreading rumors, intentional exclusion, the silent treatment, etc.) is evident as early as preschool and appears to peak in middle school. Researchers report that relational aggression is much more pervasive than physical aggression in our nation’s schools. Kids—both boys and girls—also find it more hurtful than physical aggression.

In my search for age-appropriate books to address the very real and rampant problem of social cruelty among peers, I came up empty-handed. Frustrated with this resource gap, I wrote MY SECRET BULLY (Riverwood Press, 2003) to help empower children to make healthier friendship choices. The outpour of positive reviews and heartfelt responses from young readers, parents, educators, and bullying prevention experts and organizations gave me the impetus to continue writing more books to help kids connect with their peers in helpful, rather than hurtful, ways.

Because the social world of today's children is very complex and difficult to navigate, I try to incorporate into my books the wisdom and insights of young readers who preview my stories, so that they resonate with the authenticity of real life experiences and views. I also collaborate with renowned experts in the field to ensure my messages of empowerment are on target with the latest bullying prevention research findings and practices. Equally important, I have the added pleasure of creatively tapping into my own inner child—letting her laugh, cry, and simply breathe. I've finally reached the point where I not only love to write, I truly love what I'm writing.

But writing stories is just one part of my job. I also spend a lot of time traveling throughout the US, presenting at conferences and in schools to provide children, educators, and parents with practical tips, tools, and resources to help them create safer, kinder school communities.

Turning Stories into Teachable Moments

Numerous studies have shown that literature—with proper adult guidance, supervision, and assistance—is an effective supplemental tool at home, in the classroom, and in the counseling practitioner’s office to build social-emotional learning (SEL) skills, teach empathy, and foster perspective in children.

In her book, TREATING CHILD AND ADOLESCENT AGGRESSION THROUGH BIBLIOTHERAPY (Springer, 2009), Dr. Zipora Shechtman states, “Through the imaginative process that reading involves, children have the opportunity to do what they often cannot do in real life—become thoroughly involved in the inner lives of others, better understand them, and eventually become more aware of themselves.” And the more competent children are in SEL skills, the more successful they will be in school and in life.

There is a wonderful Chinese proverb that I take to heart: “I listen and forget. I see and remember. I do and understand.”

When I present to children in elementary and middle schools, I don’t want the students to just listen to me as a guest speaker. I also want them to do activities with me to help them better connect with the characters in my books, with themselves and, most importantly, with each other. Some of my activities include:

• the use of paper dolls for younger audiences to show how our words and actions can break down or build up the human spirit (click here to download a detailed description of this activity);
• a bully web to show how bullying negatively affects the entire school community; and
• a role-playing activity with my “Empower Tools,” as described in my sixth book, CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER BULLY (Tricycle Press, 2010). In this activity, I provide kids with a starter set of communication tools that allow them to respond to hurtful comments in nonviolent ways and to help them get away as quickly and as safely as possible, with their dignity intact.

photo: edenpictures via photopin cc

Adult-guided activities help instill critical thinking skills in children, getting them to understand and engage with the stories they read and with each other in constructive, pro-social ways. Role-playing scenarios, introspective essays, creative drawing/writing projects, and discussion questions are a few ways to accomplish this goal.

I also encourage teachers to visit authors’ or publishers’ websites for ready-made lesson plans. To see an example, take a look at the guide I recently penned to accompany R.J. Palacio’s WONDER (click here to download “Teaching WONDER with Trudy Ludwig”). Another option is to do a Google search on the Internet by entering the title of the book chosen for a class reading, followed by the words “lessons,” “activities,” or even “Teacher’s Guide.”

What I’ve Learned from School Visits & My Hopes for the Future

I’ve presented to tens of thousands of school children over the years and I continue to walk away from every author visit feeling reassured that most kids are decent and caring people. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Numerous experts including technology journalist and Internet Safety advocate Larry Magid and researchers Dr. Justin Patchin and Dr. Sameer Hinduja report that most kids think it’s uncool to be cruel—online or offline.

The reality is that kids make mistakes. Our job as caring adults is to help ensure they don’t keep repeating those mistakes and move forward in their lives in more positive, healthy ways. We need to be better role models, not only “talking the talk,” but “walking the walk” in modeling how to deal with those we encounter in life.

Last and equally important, we also need to drive the vital message home that every person—regardless of age, gender, physical appearance, sexual orientation, political or religious beliefs, race or ethnicity—has value. While we all may not agree with one anothers’ opinions, while we all may not end up being friends, we all deserve to have our presence acknowledged and to be treated in a civil and respectful manner.

References:

Committee for Children (2012). Why Social-Emotional Learning? Retrieved from: http://www.cfchildren.org/advocacy/social-emotional-learning.aspx

Hinduja, S.and Patchin, J. (2012). School climate 2.0: Preventing cyberbullying and sexting one classroom at a time. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Shechtman, Z. (2009). Treating child and adolescent aggression through bibliotherapy. New York: Springer: 26-37.

Trudy Ludwig is a member of Random House Speakers Bureau, a children’s advocate, and the bestselling author of seven books: MY SECRET BULLY, JUST KIDDING, SORRY!, TROUBLE TALK, TOO PERFECT, CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER BULLY, and BETTER THAN YOU. She is nationally recognized by educators, experts, organizations, and parents for her passion and compassion in addressing friendship, bullying, and cyberbullying issues. An active member of the International Bullying Prevention Association, Trudy collaborates with leading U.S. experts and organizations and has been profiled on national/regional television and radio and in newsprint. For more information, visit http://www.trudyludwig.com.

I have problems with authority. Which is a pretty funny thing for an author to admit.

I learned this about myself while I was writing IVY AND BEAN MAKE THE RULES, the latest installment in the Ivy and Bean series. It was a very difficult book for me to write, not because of the subject, which is childhood camp, or the storyline, which is about my girls, Ivy and Bean, setting up their own camp, but because—as I discovered—I am not mature enough to write a book about camp that doesn’t advocate total mayhem.

It’s not rules that bother me. I adore rules. Rules of punctuation—love those! Rules of etiquette? Great! I am a big fan of rules of the road (How many miles per hour when crossing a railroad track? Fifteen!) and safety rules (Mostly). As a parent, I have rules galore, and as a child, I followed my parents’ rules on many, many occasions.

What put me in a snit are rules dressed up as fun. Rules that organize, militate, and regiment fun, particularly kids’ fun, cause me to behave very badly. They always have. This is an enormous character flaw, because everyone knows that you can’t have a good game without rules. Where would baseball be without the Infield Fly Rule? Okay, that’s a bad example because I have no idea where baseball would be without the Infield Fly Rule.

Let’s take card games, let’s take Scrabble, let’s take Monopoly. I can’t stand any of them. I was one of those kids who knocked over the board in the middle of the game because I couldn’t bear it any more. I used to rob the bank in Monopoly so the game would just END already. Nowhere do rules and fun coincide more oxymoronically than at camp. Every camp, from the three-weeks-of-fresh-air-and-dirt camps of my youth to the five-day, four-hundred-dollar Gourmet Groupies camps of today bill themselves as big fun. Maybe educational, but also fun. Fun, fun, fun! More fun than a barrel of monkeys! Just look at all the smiling kids in the brochure! You never saw so much fun in your life!

And yet, once the kids actually get to the camp, there are lots and lots of rules. There are safety rules and instructions about how to do things. Usually, there are lots of group activities and everyone has to do them, plus tasks and clean-up, not to mention rousing songs that you’d better learn or you won’t get to participate.

And I am inside my tent, plotting a revolution.

Actually, I am not, because I never went to camp. (Also, I would hate a revolution. So noisy.)

I never went to camp because, no matter what the grownups said, I knew that if I went, they’d make me follow rules. They’d make me join. They’d make me sing. They might even make me play games. I’d be part of the gang, part of the team, part of the big, happy family. Yuck.

I refused. And what kind of wild, ungoverned behavior did I engage in while everyone else was in camp? I read. I read and read and read. Every once in a while, my mom would take the book out of my hand and tell me I had to run around the block, but that, thankfully, was rare.

Reading, to me, was—and is—perfect freedom. Sure, there are a few rules: left to right, and you’ll probably get more out of it if you hold the book right side up. I can’t think of anything else. Once you know how to read, you don’t need an adult’s help to do it. You don’t have to negotiate with anyone. You get to find out stuff on your own. You get to have your own experience. You decide when to do it and when to stop doing it. It’s not competitive. There’s no show at the end. It is absolutely unlike camp.

This is why I am an advocate of Free Reading, Drop Everything and Read, Sustained, Silent Reading, whatever you want to call it. I call it reading. More than anything else, I want reading to be a rule-free zone for kids. In my perfect world, kids would be able to read and run. They’d be able to read any book, at any lexile level, on any subject (okay, almost any subject) they desired. There would be no tests, no notes, no questions, no reading logs, and no response journals, nothing at all that regulated, militated, or organized the experience for them. Without all these mediations and interruptions, maybe reading would regain its status as a freedom, rather than a task, for kids.

I bet you’re asking yourself why, if I am a reading liberationist, did I write a book about camp? Why, you ask, didn’t I write a book about reading? Well, I did. Of course, a book in which nobody does anything but read is going to be a tad dull, so I transplanted the act of interpretation, which is the essence of reading, to the subject of camp. Bean and Ivy, bless them, are giving their free-verse rendition of the idea of camp, with accompanying good times. Their version, Camp Flaming Arrow, is their reading of “camp,” and their reading of “camp rules” is the most glorious possible: none at all.

Obviously, there are lots and lots of kids who have a great time at camp. They like being part of the gang, on the team, one big happy family. Ivy and Bean, being reasonable human beings, don’t want to change those kids. They don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade. They want to live and let live. That is the one rule they follow at their camp, and it’s the one that’s the hardest for all of us grownups to learn.

Maybe there should be a camp for that.

Annie Barrows is the author of the Ivy and Bean children’s series, which has sold over 2 million copies, as well as of THE MAGIC HALF. She is also the co-author, with her aunt, Mary Ann Shaffer, of THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY.

© 2012 Annie Barrows. Photo: Annie Frantzeskos. Please do not reproduce in any form, electronic or otherwise.

Originally from a world beyond our own, DIRK LLOYD lives in the town of Whiteshields, England, where he spends most of his time trying to get back home to his Iron Tower in the Darklands. Some of his achievements include: building the Iron Tower of Despair, raising vast armies of Orcs and Goblins, the casting of mighty spells and enchantments (including the spell that forced JAMIE THOMSON to submit to his will and record his life story), and excelling in English, science, and math classes in school.

Hi, I'm Jamie Thomson, creator of Dirk Lloyd and author of DARK LORD: THE EARLY YEARS. I've written a lot of choose your own adventure books and novels as well as various computer games for a good 30 years or more, all involving goblins, dragons, aliens, spaceships, creatures of the night and the like, so I've been thoroughly immersed in fantasy/SF/games pretty much all my life.

A lot of this work was with my writing and business partner, and life-long friend, Dave Morris. One of the things we've noticed over the years is how the idea of a “Dark Lord” or “Supreme Villain” has always been such a staple of our genres, but they're hardly ever explained. Why does Sauron do what he does in Lord of the Rings? Why is Voldemort like he is?

Of course, they do have back stories, but they're really not that important to the plot and therefore not explored in too much detail. It's all about the good guys. Which is fair enough of course, but why do Dark Lords become Dark Lords? What motivates them? What would it be like to tell their story, from their point of view? Or, as Dirk puts it “Why is the Dark Lord always the bad guy? It’s just not fair!”

Well, if you did it straight, it'd be interesting, but ultimately not much fun. It'd be like reading a novelized biography of someone like Hitler or something. People would end up hating your main character, and no one would read it!

So, how can you make your Dark Lord sympathetic to the reader? Well, one obvious way is to make his story redemptive. And funny. Very funny. We started with the idea of a Dark Lord exiled to modern day earth and trapped in the body of a twelve year old kid. Then the “Dark Lord sounds like Dirk Lloyd” joke, and then the idea of having him go to school. (School? NOOOOOoooooooooo!) Everything just took off from there.

Out of that, I discovered new themes and tropes. For instance, as Dirk is a powerful being in his own world, what would it be like to suddenly find yourself powerless in a new and confusing world? That got me thinking: rightly or wrongly, our school children are actually pretty powerless and highly controlled themselves, especially these days. There are all sorts of rules and lines they can't cross and places they can't go.

Dirk finds himself in the same position. To get things done, and to realize his goals, Dirk has to use subterfuge and subtle persuasion—unusually for him, as normally he'd just use force, or a magic spell or an army of orcs. He can't persuade people with threats, (though he does try of course.). He has to use other methods—kindness and friendship for instance. And that's where his journey to redemption begins. Well, sort of.

Essentially, it's a classic fish out of water/odd couple plot, but it also parodies its genre, albeit in a loving way. It lampoons fantasy, but it is also a cracking fantasy tale in itself, though I do say it myself. It's also interesting that this book probably couldn't have been written thirty years ago. Its time is now because everyone knows what a Dark Lord is, the imagery, the “trope” is everywhere. For instance, the books have come out in Germany and Spain, but they keep the English “Dark Lord” on the title. The publishers know that their readers will be familiar with the term from LORD OF THE RINGS, Harry Potter, STAR WARS and so on. And then... hold on a moment, someone's coming... Uh-oh! It's Dirk himself! Oh my, he's here...

Thomson, you blubbing maggot, what are you doing?

Nothing, my Dark Master, nothing...

Move aside, you absurd walrus. Let me take a look...

Umm... it's just... I didn't mean…

What!!!! You're not still peddling this nonsense that you created me? What drivelacious goblin-snot! Everyone knows I found you penniless in the gutter, deigned to choose you as the writer of my memoir, and raised you up like a phoenix from the sodden ashes of your pitiful misery!

Yes, Master. Sorry, your Magnificence, I...

Silence, wretch! Who is it you are writing for?

Umm... it's the—

I said silence, Thomson, or it's the Iron Maiden for you! Ah, I see... It's for that lot over the water, the ones the weakling human wretches in England call “Yanks.” Teachers, eh? Interesting. Right, I'm taking over.

Now, listen to me, puny humans of America! It is I, the Great Dirk. Heed my words.

It won't be long before all the people of earth will be bending the knee to me, Dirk Lloyd, the Dark Lord, so you'd better do as I say or else it'll be the Rendering Vats for you, and you'll be turned into sausages. My Orcish legions will be requiring a lot of those, oh yes!

What you need to do is to introduce a new curriculum for your pupils. Well, I say curriculum, but really I just mean “brainwashing.” They must be filled with unquestioning obedience to the Dark Lord (i.e., me) so that when the time comes my transition to ultimate and total power will be seamless and unopposed. You can start by forcing every single last one of them to read my memoir—written by me that is, not that ghost writer and lickspittle lackey, Thomson, who is nothing but a worthless slave. Though I suppose I must admit he has been useful from time to time.

Oh, thank you, Supreme Lord, thank you, your kindness is...

Oh, stop your sycophantic mewling, Thomson, and get back to work, there's book three to write! In any case, I may have been over hasty in my praise. After all, as every manager knows, the appreciation of talent and the giving of encouragement only leads to complacency and laziness. No, better to use the lash.

Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, instructing the teachers of America. Your charges will enjoy reading my book where they will learn their true places in the order of things... no wait, I mean... they'll learn new words and laugh whilst doing it, where they'll be uplifted through the power of storytelling, where boys who don't normally read books will find that reading is fun, where.... Oh, who am I kidding? They'll love it, or else. And I'll get some royalties. And boy, do I need royalties. Have you got any idea how much an army of orcs and goblins costs these days? And Dragons? Don't even mention Dragons!

By Order of the Dark Lord The Seal of Dirk

I, the Dark Lord, Master of the Legions of Dread and Sorcerer Supreme, the World Burner, the Dark One, Master of the Nine Netherworlds, the Lord of Darkness and the Lloyd of Dirkness, his Imperial Darkness and his Imperial Dirkness, Dirk the Magnificent, make this missive my own with this seal, on this date the 27th of the month of Misery, Year of the Dark Lord Two, in the Reign of Iron and Shadows.

Jamie Thomson is the minion and slave of the Dark Lord, Dirk Lloyd. Jamie has been writing books, comics and computer games for his Dark Master for many years now. He lives in the dungeons below his Master's Iron Tower, chained to a desk, where he spends every day writing for his overlord. Or else.

Jamie Thomson Dirk Lloyd would like to offer you the chance to read a teaser of his memoir, DARK LORD: THE EARLY YEARS. So click here!



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