"It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it"
About this Quote
What reads like a casual shrug is actually a quiet manifesto about how literary careers really happen: through curiosity, not clairvoyance. Penelope Lively frames her move into children's literature as a "combination" of long-held appetite and a simple decision to test herself. That pairing matters. "Intense interest" gives the move legitimacy, but "I'd just have a go" strips away the myth of the preordained artist. She’s not performing the tortured-genius script; she’s modeling craft as something you enter by trying.
The subtext is a rebuke to gatekeeping. Children's literature is often treated as a lesser annex of "serious" writing, something you graduate from or condescend to. Lively flips that hierarchy. The interest comes first, almost like a private loyalty, and the attempt follows as an act of permission: you don't need institutional blessing to write for children; you need attention, discipline, and the willingness to risk being bad at the first draft.
Contextually, Lively belongs to a generation of British writers for whom children's books were not a branding strategy but a working arena - a place to explore voice, compression, and moral complexity without the bulky pretensions of adult literary fiction. The understated phrasing ("just", "have a go") is doing cultural work: it normalizes ambition by disguising it as experiment. In a creative economy obsessed with credentials and "finding your niche", she offers a more bracing recipe: follow the fascination, then see if you can make something true.
The subtext is a rebuke to gatekeeping. Children's literature is often treated as a lesser annex of "serious" writing, something you graduate from or condescend to. Lively flips that hierarchy. The interest comes first, almost like a private loyalty, and the attempt follows as an act of permission: you don't need institutional blessing to write for children; you need attention, discipline, and the willingness to risk being bad at the first draft.
Contextually, Lively belongs to a generation of British writers for whom children's books were not a branding strategy but a working arena - a place to explore voice, compression, and moral complexity without the bulky pretensions of adult literary fiction. The understated phrasing ("just", "have a go") is doing cultural work: it normalizes ambition by disguising it as experiment. In a creative economy obsessed with credentials and "finding your niche", she offers a more bracing recipe: follow the fascination, then see if you can make something true.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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