I’ve been fighting a censorship battle all week. No, a parent did not challenge one of my books in a library. I should be so lucky. That kind of challenge is news- and publicity-worthy.

Instead, I was battling the censors from Texas right in my own head. Worse, I was losing.

Yesterday I submitted my second nonfiction manuscript on dinosaurs, a book for much younger children. The blood of battle did not show on it – but the screams still echo in my mind.

I write science for kids. But it has to be bought by adults before kids ever see it. This book is for the educational market, so I am facing school boards, teachers, and parents. And, mid-writing, I read that three out of five Texans believe dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time.

This is not true. It is a belief based on the so-called ‘date of creation’ somehow calculated from ancient oral traditions in the Bible. I had been going to start the book by saying that “Dinosaurs lived long long ago before there were any people to see them.”

And I froze. What if that meant no school in Texas would buy the book? That same belief holds throughout the Bible Belt. That is a huge proportion of shoppers who would slam the book shut on the first page. “Blasphemy!” I hear them shout.

I could write the book without that fact. I could leave it in and let the publisher decide. I was chickening out, and I knew it. The censors – ignorance – was winning out over scientific truth, and I was letting them.

This is internal censorship. This is what ‘they’ want. In the same way as a terrorist’s aim is not to set off a bomb, but to create terror in a population, book censors make a big stink in one locality to scare everyone in the book industry. They want publishers to quake before them. They want authors to pre-censor what they write. And I was letting them do it.

My mind thrashed. The science is clear, I thought. Fossils do not lie. But this is my first book for a new publisher. I want to do others with them. I want the book to sell well. I could reach more kids using other dinosaur facts. I could leave open an inference.

Instead I ended the book this way:
“Pretend you are a dinosaur again. When do you live? If you lived long, long ago, you could be Compsognathus. He looks everywhere. He does not see people.

“Or you could live now. You see people everywhere. You could be a Robin who sees a child reading this book about dinosaurs!”

I went for broke, contradicting ancient legend and including evolution.

Now I wait to see how the publisher responds to the threat of censorship.

My first book about Dinosaurs

Tags: censorship marketing nonfiction picturebooks Writing

Posted by kay on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 12:43 pm under Miscellaneous and tagged: censorship, marketing, nonfiction, picturebooks, Writing. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment, or trackback.