Ken Spillman: 'Teaching children creativity today is simply about giving them voice, the confidence to express themselves and the tools they need.'
Ken Spillman knows all about kids. He frequently gets in their heads and comes up with the most imaginative and creative results.
His name may not ring a bell. However, your children may be familiar with his work. He is the author of the Jake series (Jake's Concert Horror, Jake's Great Game, Jake's Balloon Blast, Jake's Monster Mess and Jake's Gigantic List), The Absolutely True Fantasies Of Daydreamer Dev, Radhika Takes The Plunge, Avaita The Writer and Love Is A UFO, among others.
Spillman has written about 30 books including acclaimed children’s fiction and young adult novels.
Fun is the ingredient to success for Spillman. He believes that children should have fun reading his books. “When a teenager reads a book about a young person dealing with a crisis of some kind, they don’t want to be taught a lesson – they just want to engage with the story and draw their own conclusions about the consequences of certain actions and attitudes. It’s the same with younger children, and that’s why fun comes first for me. Let the story be told – every child will take from it something slightly different,” he adds.
Children's books
Writing children's books allows him to use his imagination, do anything and go anywhere. What could be cooler than that, he asks.
“There’s another aspect to it, too. I am privileged to be able to visit schools and speak to kids about things that matter – the importance of reading, its relationship to life competency and quality of life, the power of imagination and the role it plays in building resilience, solving problems, and so on,” says Spillman.
In the past three years, he has spoken to around 70,000 kids in many different countries – an opportunity which he would not have had had he not been a children's author.
He also interacts with children online through his website, email and Facebook.
Claiming not to base the characters in his books on any single person, Spillman admits that some aspects of Jake's character is a lot like him. In fact, Jake's dad is also like him, or rather, the father he tries to be.
Jake is a boy with a wild imagination who often gets into trouble. This seems to be a tried and tested character in successful children's books.
Spillman says characters like Jake, Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson are interesting because they are do-ers – they have ideas and take action based on those ideas.
“Consequently, they have adventures or get into trouble. People love such characters because they are acting out what many people don’t dare do – or are too sensible to! Take flying, for example – we’ve all dreamed of flying, but Jake takes that a couple of steps further in Jake’s Balloon Blast and that’s where the fun begins.”
Children vs young adults
According to Spillman writing for children and young adults is quite different in terms of how the main character relates to the world at large. Nonetheless, a good story is still a good story.
He says that in young adult fiction, that relationship is typically problematic, if not oppositional. In children’s stories, there’s often more innocence.
He finds them both equally difficult to write.
“The author’s task is to create a character that’s as real to him as any actual person, even more so, and to convey that world. Becoming a child or a teenager again – and maybe having another gender too, or living in another country – takes real imagination, no matter what genre you’re working in.
“In creating characters and situations, authors need to take account of society. In writing about teenage life today, it wouldn’t be possible to ignore the importance of phones and Facebook – so that’s an example of keeping stories current. With stories for younger readers, it’s equally important to ‘connect with their world’. In Jake’s Cooking Craze, for example, the kids have gone mad about a cooking show on TV – and that’s something today’s kids can easily relate to.”
Teaching children to be creative
Spillman believes that children have a right to know that, as human beings, they are natural storytellers. All human civilisations have told stories as ways of making sense of things, recounting events and communicating hopes and imaginings through spoken words, pictures, dance and so on.
“Ask a little kid about their day at the zoo and they will ramble on the best way they know how, and their recount will take on a certain structure and probably also have elements that come from their imagination or individual understanding of the world.
“Teaching children creativity today is simply about giving them voice, the confidence to express themselves and the tools they need – whether those tools are paint brushes or words. They should not be thinking about it too much, because thinking becomes overthinking and stifles their natural creative ability.”
Let kids read naturally
Spillman believes kids should also be encouraged to read. According to him, this should be done by example and not by telling children what to read and what not to read.
Parents should also not get caught up trying to get kids to read the books that they read as children.
“While there’s value in exposing young people to classics at school, reading a particular book shouldn’t be considered a criterion for being educated. I respect the classics and absolutely loved Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but that didn’t stop me reading Scrooge McDuck comics and trashy adult paperbacks. Today, exposure to the classics can come in many forms – Hugh Jackman in Les Miserables, or Shakespeare plays as graphic novels. It’s all valid.
“To me, it is a question of providing the environment and allowing kids to find the right book at the right time, with a little help along the way. And if they read it on a gadget, fine!”
Crossing boundaries
Writing many different kinds of book, Spillman works with various publishers in several countries.
As his novel Advaita is about an Indian girl in an Indian setting with Indian cultural references, it is published by an Indian publisher.
“Jake crosses all those boundaries and is loved everywhere, which makes the world’s largest publisher of children’s books, Scholastic, a perfect fit. Another reason (why I have several publishers) is that I’m currently writing too many books for one publisher to handle!”
Each new book is exciting and and fresh to him and it's only when he returns to a book that he's written that he realises he's forgotten certain aspects of the book, almost as if it was written by someone else.
“Each new book, though, is exciting and full of life – I feel real passion and love throughout the writing process. I need to be completely present in the work and if I achieve that it will be fresh for the reader, too.”
Originally from Australia, Spillman now spends much of his time travelling internationally and making presentations to schoolchildren on the subjects of imagination, creativity, reading and writing. Recent tours include China, India, Malaysia, Oman and Singapore.
The dad of “young and not so young” kids says being a parent is the greatest of privileges and also the greatest of all life’s challenges.
He says “I’m quite a lot older than Jake – and older than his dad, too! I tell kids at the schools I visit that I’m a very old child and they really get that”.
He has been a keynote speaker at several international conferences, and has appeared at the Asian Festival of Children’s Content in Singapore, the Beijing Bookworm Literature Festival and Bookaroo, the Delhi Children’s Literature Festival.
In 2010, Spillman was appointed chair of Singapore’s inaugural competition for children’s books.
For more information, go to www.kenspillman.com.
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