Holiday Work: On Writing for Children and for the Academy

There are numerous academics who have also been novelists, including several prominent writers of children’s literature. Yet the relationship between academic writing and the writing of fiction has not been systematically explored, nor have the kinds of knowledge gained from the experience of writing fiction always been easy to incorporate into the scholarly and institutional contexts of academic criticism. The author discusses some of the ways in which academic and fiction writing can complement and inform each other, drawing on his own experience in both fields. He also argues that ‘the act of writing’ needs to be far more thoroughly integrated into English studies at both a practical and a theoretical level. Charles Butler was a fiction writer before he was an academic, writing his first novel before he went to London University to study English Literature. He readily admits that his first and second novels remain deservedly unpublished, the influence of other authors hanging too heavily over them. The Darkling (1997) was the first of his six fantasy novels published to date and, as he relates in this article, he has also written a number of critical works. As Charles is one of that rare breed of writers who have managed to combine these two careers (though he has some illustrious precursors, in Tolkien, of course, C.S. Lewis and Ursula Le Guin), we invited him to share his views on both the rewards and possible pitfalls of trying to keep both activities buoyant. Charles Butler is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he specializes in children’s literature. He is author of Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (Scarecrow/ChLA, 2006), and editor of Teaching Children’s Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He is also the author of six children’s fantasy novels, of which the most recent are Death of a Ghost (HarperCollins, 2006) and The Lurkers (Usborne, 2006). His web site is http://www.charlesbutler.co.uk