Scientist Authors Lend Expertise To Kids' Books

One way to combat future science phobia and illiteracy is to bring children closer to scientists, educators say. And because scientists often have many stories to tell, publishers have found that using them as authors of children's science books can help bring the excitement of research to youngsters with an authenticity and perspective that nonscientist-authors cannot easily convey. The secret of good writing is for the final product to look effortless. But writing a successful book requires a great deal of planning, even if the final product will be only a few dozen, liberally illustrated pages. Here are some tips on how to write a children's science book from those who have done it. 1. Identify a topic. Start in the children's section of a library. If you hope to write yet another book on the weather, planets, dinosaurs, or warm, fuzzy creatures, decide how yours will differ. If your topic is hot in scientific circles but hasn't quite made it to the Berenstain Bears set yet--such as anything pertaining to molecular biology--think about how you will make the material exciting and understandable. 2. Know your audience. Mark Chartrand, astronomer and author of numerous star and planet guides, says that writing at an appropriate level is difficult, because one must deal with science illiteracy without talking down to the reader. 3. Choose an approach. If you plan to write a how-to project book, be sure to test the projects on real kids. Fact-based books tend to deal with the familiar (recent books describe the seashore, a telephone, and the digestive system) or the unfamiliar (moon rocks or superconductivity). A popular type of children's science book follows a scientist at work, such as The Triumph of Discovery: Women Scientists Who Won the Nobel Prize by Joan Dash (New York, Simon & Schuster Inc., 1991). Says Rachel Cassidy, a senior at Watervliet High School in Watervliet, N.Y. "The peek at the personal lives of these women made the reading more interesting because the reader could see the scientist as a real person, rather than just some name from a textbook." 4. Organize. "Knowing the way you will organize and select topics is three-quarters of the way there. Like in science, a well-posed question is three-quarters of the way to the answer," says Chartrand. Like a scientific paper, a children's science story needs a planned unfolding of events. 5. Sell yourself. Why would you, a scientist, be better able to handle the topic than an educator or writer? Consider what Alan Harris, supervisor of the earth and planetary physics group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Paul Weissman, a research scientist with JPL's earth and space sciences division, had to `offer Simon & Schuster, which published their book The Great Voyager Adventure in 1990. "Working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory," they write, "we were privileged to be able to watch it grow from the drawing board to reality, and then to be there as the spacecraft sent back their incredible photographs and scientific data." Children's publishing is highly visual, which may explain why pachyderms, volcanoes, and asteroids far outnumber viruses, biochemicals, and quarks in books. If you are an artist or photographer, or know someone who will work with you, so much the better. 6. Find your voice. Style is hard to define, but Katharine Payne, author of Elephants Calling (New York, Crown Publishers Inc., 1992), captures it well: "Think back to your childhood, and be that child again." 7. Send it off! You don't necessarily have to send a completed manuscript, but at least dispatch an introductory letter, a prospectus (a detailed outline), and some sample of your writing style to a publisher of children's books. If you've never written anything other than a scientific paper or a grant proposal, say so. If you have talent and expertise, an interested publisher will guide you along. Compile a list of publishers from books in the library, and make some phone calls to get the names of appropriate editors. Consult Writer's Market, an annual compendium of publishers by Writer's Digest Books of Cincinnati, which lists requirements of specific publishers. Tailor your idea to a publisher's needs, and you may be in business.--R.L. Because scientists with riveting children's stories to tell and the talent for writing them are rare birds, publishers track them down, in contrast to typical fledgling writers, who generally need to seek out publishers for their work. But why would a busy scientist invest the time to write and nurture a book for kids? The benefits, though rarely significant from a monetary standpoint, can be substantial, say those who have done it. If a new book series called Face to Face with Science (New York, Crown Books for Young Readers) is as big a hit as its publisher expects, demand for scientist-authors may grow. This series showcases scientists at work, in their own words. The first three volumes were published late last year. The series debuted with two favorite children's topics--space and dinosaurs. Voyager was written by Sally Ride and Tam O'Shaughnessy, and Digging up Tyrannosaurus Rex by John Horner and Don Lessem. Ride, the first female astronaut, and Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University in Bozeman, are well-known scientists. O'Shaughnessy knows Ride from their national junior tennis `tournament days, and is an adjunct professor of biology at San Diego Community College. Lessem is the founder of the Boston- based Dinosaur Society, a nonprofit organization to promote dinosaur science. The third volume, Elephants Calling, was written by Katharine Payne, a research associate at Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., and best-known for discovering the poetic quality of humpback whales' songs. But it was her discovery of elephants' use of infrasound to communicate that led to Elephants Calling. It is uniquely told from the point of view of an elephant. The simple and true story, captured by Payne's camera, follows the lives of a family of elephants on the Amboseli plain in Kenya. While the elephant elders are distracted by two battling males, four-year-old Raoul wanders off, finding a hole into which he pokes his inquisitive trunk. Out jumps a startled warthog, and Raoul yelps. The response of his clan is a fascinating study in animal communication. The Face to Face with Science series was a response to complaints about children's books from scientists, who cited inaccuracies and datedness. "We thought it was a good idea to go to some people and give them the opportunity to write for children, to give kids the sense of what doing science is like, as opposed to just giving them information," says Simon Boughton, the editor at Crown who created the series. The intimate perspective of Elephants Calling is due to Payne's ability to think like a child. "There are a lot of things one can't say through the voice of the scientist," she says. "What I love to do is to just notice--and children are the best observers. The big thing is being undistracted. You can see this in a one- or two-year old, those moments of intense attention in simply examining something. We lose that ability later on." Payne was steered off the Ph.D. track by the arrival of four children. Before that, she had trained with noted ethologists Thomas Eisner of Cornell and Edward O. Wilson at Harvard University. But lack of a Ph.D. didn't stop her from doing extensive fieldwork. Chris Myers, like Payne, considers himself a bit out of the mainstream because he enjoys the humanistic side of science. He relishes writing children's books "mostly because there were some things I wanted to express that I couldn't in the scientific literature," he says. Myers is an assistant professor at Western College, an interdisciplinary arm of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he teaches courses on ecology, evolution, the imagination, and technology. Myers and his wife, Lynne Born Myers, penned McCrephy's Field (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1991), a tale of ecological succession. The Myerses weren't well known enough to be asked to write a children's book, as the Face to Face authors were. After they wrote their book in 1989, they sent it to three companies. Houghton Mifflin signed them immediately, and they've been writing ever since. Mark Chartrand, another eclectic scientist who has attracted publishers, puts his finger on just how and why a scientist brings a special ring of authenticity to a children's book. "I consider writing a science book a little like [working in] a museum, and, having done both, I can see parallels," he says. "In a typical major museum, only 2 to 5 percent of the collection is on display. So it is with an author. The museum director must know the other 96 percent so that he or she can know the proper 4 percent to choose to display." Today, Chartrand spends about half his time writing and half as a private consultant, giving seminars on satellite technology and telecommunications. Chartrand became interested in writing from a man who influenced many science writers--the late Isaac Asimov. While working on a Ph.D. in astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, Chartrand heard Asimov speak. "I thought, well, if he can do it, so can I," he recalls. Realizing that he preferred explaining to researching, after grad school Chartrand took a position as director of education at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Three years later he was promoted to chairman of the planetarium, and also taught astronomy at nearby Fordham University. Chartrand's first book was an astronomy textbook written with Franklyn M. Branley, also a Hayden planetarium astronomer. Their text fell into a black hole when the publisher was sold, but Chartrand's prolific work soon attracted attention at Western `Publishing Inc.'s Golden Press, based in New York, which asked him to revise its Skyguide and other how-to astronomy books. Chartrand "cut his teeth" on these projects, viewing the requests to update them as "being asked to revise the Bible." But revise he did, so well that he was soon asked to revamp guides to the planets and space exploration. Research is the scientist's niche; designing easy-to-do projects demonstrating scientific principles taps a teacher's expertise. A pro at this type of book is Janice VanCleave of Otto, Texas. Since 1989, she has written three series of hands-on science books for John Wiley & Sons Inc. of New York--six volumes of Science for Every Kid, six of Janice VanCleave's Spectacular Projects, and her current effort, for high school students, A+ Projects. VanCleave accumulated her material from 26 years of teaching science in the sixth through 12th grades, having to make do with very little. "When I was teaching, most of the time I was designing something for the kids to do," she recalls. "It was a real rarity to be in a school that had money to buy science equipment. Indirectly, all that training of not having anything to work with, well, that's what I do in the books now." Recognizing that her readers probably have limited resources, too, she designs her projects to involve commonly found, cheap, or free materials. VanCleave calls her entry into book publishing "a Cinderella story." When she was teaching at a grade school in Fort Smith, Ark., she shared her classroom approaches to teaching science with other instructors in workshops called "Teacher to Teacher." Someone from a local junior college heard of her workshop and asked her to teach an enrichment class. This program, "The Magic of Science," was described in the college's catalog, which caught the attention of an editor at Prentice-Hall Publishing Co. Inc. of Englewood Cliffs, N.J. But when the publisher asked her to send a prospectus, VanCleave recalls, "I didn't have the foggiest idea what that was." So the editor sent her an outline on how to write a prospectus. Later, after she had signed a contract, she confessed that she didn't know how to write a book. "So they sent me a book on how to write a book," she says. That original editor moved to John Wiley, which continued publishing VanCleave's books. "For most scientists who write children's books, it's not the only thing they do," says Chris Myers. An exception is VanCleave, who supports herself by writing many children's science books as her sole occupation. But a children's book best-seller is not as lucrative as a top-flight novel. "If a book is very successful, it could make $5,000 over its lifetime. And it takes at least a year to write it," says Chris Myers. A writer usually receives a small advance against royalties, and the royalty is generally 10 percent of the cover price. But Boughton of the Face to Face series points out that for scientists writing about their own work, not much effort is required to translate it for children: "We don't ask anyone to do research, we ask them to write about what they have already done and probably already written about." Despite the lack of financial reward, writing a children's science book can be very satisfying. Says Boughton of his best- known Face to Face author: "Sally Ride did not need to do this book; she has plenty to do. She just really enjoys it. She feels she has something to say." Adds Chartrand, "Like teaching, writing science books for children is very rewarding, when you see the light go on in somebody's eyes." Ricki Lewis, of Scotia, N.Y., writes college biology texts.

Scientist Authors Lend Expertise To Kids' Books

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of