Louisa and Isabel Young aka Zizou Corder © Richard H. Smith
It seems that many readers are interested in how writers work. They like to know which pen we prefer, what desk, where we like to face. The answers are almost universal: one which works and doesn't smudge, a comfortable one, and out over a lake. The questions have advanced a little with modern life: what software, which laptop. Answers: whatever was on the laptop when I bought it, and a really light one so I can lug it to the library/lakeside cottage of my dreams. The other question is about clothing; and the answer is that if it is going well we work in our dressing gowns and woolly socks, because we are so stricken with inspiration we have no time to dress – we just add things on top as we get colder and colder from not moving about because we are glued to our own genius. The same reason applies to writing at the kitchen table – no time to make it to the study. My best friend says she can tell when I'm on a roll because I come to the door with a dishcloth on my head and mascara down my face.
The other question which crops up, over and over, is about the difference between writing for adults and children. The answer is, there's just one: you can only use made-up swear-words. It's exactly the same as when an adult talks to children. Don't pretend they're adult. Don't pretend you're a child. As the great US children's writer Edward Eager said (I paraphrase): they're children, you're an adult, there's no reason why you shouldn't get along fine.
I am particularly pursued on this subject of 'how you work' because I write with my daughter, who is a child, and we have given ourselves an invented name. People seem to want to pin us down. Because we don't give out that much information, they then make it up.
For example, I read in one paper that my co-author (she's 12 now, was eight when we started) dictates the books to me and I am a mere stenographer. My response? God, I wish. In another I read that I wrote them all, and she was a marketing device, served up on a silver platter by an evil mother desperate for press attention. My response? Come outside and say that.
Following this lead, we decided to make it up ourselves – making things up being our job, after all. We told people we found ideas in the compost heap, cold and weeping all alone in the snow, or that they grew on the old motorbike at the bottom of the garden, and a little green man brought them in in a basket. We said that we are a cover, a double bluff, and that in fact, Zizou Corder did write the books – Zizou being either our lizard, a vegetarian uromastyx (his ancestors are from the Sinai Desert, but we got him on the internet), or a glamorous but reclusive New Yorker who's great grandmother was painted by Whistler (the picture is in the Frick Collection – beautiful) and whose grandfather was a Hungarian gypsy accordionist. Underwater. No, I made that bit up.
We have also, from time to time, told the truth.
The truth is, when Isabel was little and I was exhausted, she would want stories and I would require her to provide the raw materials. The process went like this:
Isabel (aged three): Tell me a story.
Me: Yawwwwnnnnn…
Isabel: Please!
Me: Oh all right, what about?
Isabel: A little boy.
Me: What's his name?
Isabel: Charlie.
Me: What's he like?
Isabel: Naughty.
Me: What does he do?
Isabel: Goes to Ireland on a whale and sees leprechauns only they're not green.
Me (waking up): Hey, that's nice … ok, once upon a time there was a naughty little boy called Charlie and he lived by the sea, in a little house high on a cliff. One day a whale came by, she was huge like a giant aubergine…
Isabel: What's an aubergine?
Me: A big purple vegetable…
Isabel: Is it as big as a whale?
Me: No. Now, he says to the whale 'Bonjour Madame Baleine' because all whales talk French….
Isabel: Do they really?
Me: No they don't talk at all really, they just sing – I've got a record somewhere…
And so on. As you can imagine it doesn't get very far, but time passes and it soon becomes apparent that there are lots of nice ideas bouncing around, and if I detach myself from my importunate audience and do something with these ideas on my own time, while she is at school, and let her read and comment on them on her return, then perhaps we can come up with something.
So that is how it worked. She was inspiration, provider of ideas, first critic and editor, rewriter; I was organiser, provider of narrative flow and, yes, stenographer. She told me when words were too long and jokes not funny, and that if you have four rowers to an oar then you can't have 42 rowers in your one boat. When our editors said descriptions were too long she told them that description rocks. She also whistled through primary school, fitting in promotional trips to Japan, Thailand, Argentina, New York, Amsterdam, etc., etc. and on to secondary school where she now learns Latin and Physics and so has no time to 'faff' about with a literary career.
I, fearing that I had created a monster, got the words on the page, fought off the journalists lurking in the street and wondered what to write next. An adult book? (I hate that phrase – it sounds like you mean pornography.)
Zizou, we have finally decided, is an anarchist syndicate, belonging to us, and can do anything that we choose. Zizou seems to be choosing to write some more stories for children, set in the world of Lionboy.
Isabel is choosing to finish her homework. I am choosing – perhaps – to be Zizou. Or perhaps to write something with real swear words. I don't know yet.
Writing with her daughter Isabel Adomakoh Young under the pseudonym Zizou Cordor, Louisa Young has written two extremely popular children’s books,and . She has also written a series of fast-paced literary thrillers featuring an ex-bellydancing single mother.
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