Being funny isn’t as easy as writers like to think. In this extract from his article in the Children’s Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook 2027, author and poet A.F. Harrold explains how he goes about it and how you can too.
Before I wrote for children, I was a performance poet. I’d read daft and silly and absurd poems about yaks and sea slugs and cats and fish and men who spent years in baths. I’d talk in between and people would laugh. I won poetry slams and performed at festivals and comedy nights and cabaret nights, and occasional serious poetry events where people would look confused and disappointed.
I actually was being funny for money.
But not for much money. And so I started running poetry workshops, for which people pay more, and that led to visiting schools, and that led to writing poems for kids, and that led to becoming a children’s author.
But the root of it is performance.
Nowadays I’m much more likely to be on stage at 9 a.m., in a school hall, than at 9 p.m. in some club somewhere. And I love it. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t the best thing – making kids laugh on a school day is a truly joyful thing.
I read poems and I tell stories, yes, but more importantly I ask questions and the kids share their ideas, and I take their ideas and juggle with them and make them into new things, daft things, unexpected things. And so every performance is unique, like an eel in a sausage roll..
My set is always improvised, spontaneous, but built around composed chunks – poems or anecdotes – arranged in a random order, steered by the conversations with kids and the random events that happen in the room at the moment. It’s like jazz, daddio!
And when I decided to write my first novel for kids, it was something of that performing voice that shaped the book. The attempt to make the spontaneous static without killing it dead.
So, Fizzlebert Stump: The Boy Who Ran Away from the Circus (And Joined the Library) has a very present narrative voice. It’s a book that talks to the reader, that interacts with them and walks them along the story, in the same way I might walk the ideas in an assembly.
Get your copy of the Children's Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2027 at Bloomsbury.com.
A.F. Harrold is a Reading-based poet, performer and children’s author. His books include the Fizzlebert Stump and Greta Zargo series, as well as standalone novels such as The Imaginary. To find out more, visit www.afharroldkids.com or follow him on Instagram @a.f.harrold
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