British writer, Enid Blyton produced over 700 books, in a career spanning forty five years. What can children’s book writers learn from this much loved author?
Publishing Children’s Books – How Did Enid Blyton Do It?
- Blyton worked extremely hard at writing. She didn’t wait for inspiration to strike, but wrote every day.
- She promoted her books very well, visiting schools, forming clubs and replying personally to thousands of fan letters a year.
- Blyton knew her audience, because she was writing for the little girl she had once been.
- She wrote to escape, and created ideal worlds where children came first and where all conflict and real danger were glossed over. Children love her books because they are so far from reality. They are true escapism, with the adventure set in an extremely safe and rigid domestic world, where everything always turns out alright in the end.
- She wrote according to a formula, which made her books easy for young readers to master.
Enid Blyton’s Life Story
Enid Mary Blyton was born on 11th August 1897 in South London. She had two younger brothers, Hanly and Carey. Her father, whom she loved dearly, left the family when she was twelve. She did not get on with her mother, and found refuge in her imagination, dreaming up stories to escape to an ideal world.
After school she trained as a teacher, and worked as a governess until she was 27, when her writing career became so successful that she could afford to write full time.
She married twice, to publisher Hugh Pollock and to Kenneth Darrell Waters, a surgeon, and had two daughters, Gillian and Imogen.
By her late sixties she had begun to suffer from dementia, and died in 1968, aged 71.
Writing a Children’s Book
Enid Blyton was a prodigiously hard worker. She demanded silence around her, and would sometimes write up to 6000 words in one day. “I have just finished a book for Macmillans – the 8th in a popular series that has been translated into many languages,’ she wrote to psychologist Peter McKellar in 1935. “I began it on Monday, and finished it this afternoon (Friday). It is 60 000 words long and flowed like its title (River of Adventure).”
In addition she answered up to 100 fan letters a week by hand, and also contributed columns and stories to magazines. For over thirty years she wrote the entire contents of three different magazines – 964 editions in all.
How to Write a Children’s Book, the Enid Blyton Way
When she began a totally new story she had no idea of where it would be set, or who the characters would be, or what the story would entail. She would close her eyes, and moments later the characters would appear fully formed in front of her. She would know their first names, and what kind of person they were.
Then behind the characters she would see the setting – a castle, or a village or an island. She would start writing, seated in an arm chair with her typewriter balanced on a board across her knee.
“The story is enacted in my mind’s eye almost as if I had a private cinema screen there,’ she wrote to Peter McKellar. ‘The characters come on and off, talk, laugh, sing – have their adventures – quarrel – and so on. I watch and hear everything, writing it down with my typewriter.’
Books by Enid Blyton
Enid Blyton wrote over 700 books, and numerous articles, columns, stories and poems for magazines.
She wrote for children ranging from ages 2 -14 in a variety of genres. The best known genres are:
- Adventure and mystery stories e.g. The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Find-Outers
- School Stories e.g. Mallory Towers
- Fantasy Tales e.g The Magic Faraway Tree
- Nursery Stories e.g. Noddy
- Retelling traditional stories, e.g. Myths and Legends and Bible Stories.
Blyton made a fortune from her books, which introduced millions of children to reading for pleasure.
Reviews of Books by Enid Blyton: What the Critics Said
Blyton did not win any awards for her books, which were not considered literary enough by the establishment.
Blyton’s work was considered unsuitable by many teachers and librarians, because much of it poorly written, with two dimensional characters, predictable plots and dull language.
In addition, her staunchly upper middle class attitudes, her snobbery, sense of superiority over working class people, foreigners, and society’s flotsam and jetsam infuriated many adults. Her characters display attitudes which today appear narrow minded and politically incorrect.
Why Read Books by Enid Blyton?
Today, thirty years after her death, many of her books are still in print. Apart from the pleasure of reading to escape, her formulaic structures and unimaginative vocabulary makes her books ideal reading material for children acquiring reading stamina.
Enid Blyton wrote plot driven stories, with little character development. Read more about the different kinds of plots in Plotting your Book for Children.
Reference: Stoney, Barbara. Enid Blyton a Biography. Hodder and Stoughton 1974
Helen Brain - I am a writer and writing teacher, living in Cape Town, South Africa. I published my first book in 1997, and now have over thirty books ...
