National Storytelling Week: why children and young adult non-fiction stories can be just as fun as comic books!

January 25th 2023

About Marcia Williams Marcia is an award-winning author and illustrator who has published over 30 books in her entertaining and accessible comic-strip style. Read by people of all ages, her titles have explored everything from William Shakespeare to the Stone Age and Woolly Mammoths. She is a much sought-after panellist at literary festivals and educational conferences, and has won many prizes, including the UKLA Children's Book Award and the English 4-11 Picture Book Award.  DISCOVER BOOKS BY MARCIA WILLIAMS

Each year, National Storytelling Week celebrates the power of sharing stories. If you enjoy storytime or guided reading with your class, it can be a great opportunity to share rich and diverse stories from around the world. Folktales, legends, fables and myths can have all the excitement of fictional worlds, as our guest blogger, the much-loved author Marcia Williams, explains. Plus our children's librarian and comics expert Lucy Forrester gives her take on the importance of young adult non-fiction and KS1 non fiction books. 

Humour and excitement

It is many years since I first visited the world of the ancient Greeks. I loved sharing the stories then, and felt the same excitement when working on Greek Heroes: Top Ten Myths and Legends. There are so many reasons why they appeal to me and why I find such pleasure in reinventing them for a new generation: their humour, their excitement, their improbability and their universal values are all a part of the draw.

Passing on stories

I suspect that one of the main reasons I enjoy spending time with these ancient gods and heroes is because their world is so obviously multi-layered, rather like my medium of comic-strips. There are the gods up on Mount Olympus behaving disgracefully, arguing, plotting, planning, shape-shifting and shooting the odd thunderbolt around. Then you have your demigods and heroes, all vying for immortality and a place on Mount Olympus, not to mention a place in history and success for their quests - which often feature a hapless princess who needs rescuing from some monster or other, or an evil monarch who requires removing from his throne.

Then there are the nymphs, who enrich the tales with magic, off-stage whisperings and strange and remarkable talents – often for making mischief!  We may sometimes forget that there is also the common man who is both the bystander and the reader, or in the case of ancient Greece, the listener to these oral tales. These same stories must have been passed from family to family, generation to generation. Always bending slightly to the will of the new storyteller, but holding on to their traditional core.

Marcia's new book, Greek Heroes: Top Ten Myths and Legends, explores some of Ancient Greece's most exciting stories 

Storytelling is like a comic strip

This oral tradition of storytelling is like comic-stripping in many ways. I try to take up the ancient thread of the story and bend it and stretch it to animate the story so that it appeals to a new young audience, just as a bard would have done. But I also attempt not to break the thread to the original. Like an ancient bard, I add my own jokes and comments, while trying to keep a flavour of what can really only be my sense of the original.

I also have the pleasure of balancing the many layers of the ancient myth with the layers that are present in a comic strip: the body text, the bubble text, the pictures, the marginal characters and the often forgotten space for the reader. It is always tempting to overcrowd a comic strip so that there is no room for the reader’s own imagination, just as it must have been tempting as a bard to give too much information, to be too animated, or too didactic, leaving no room for the audience’s own input. It is a constant juggling act between the multiple layers, all of which are so tempting, but that is part of the fun of visiting this ancient world.

Spellbinding myths

In the end, just like the bards, I can only hope that my audience is as spellbound by these myths as I am. That they might be inspired by these ancient adventurers to go out into the world and fight their own dragons - become a new generation of honourable and brave heroes and heroines, standing up for their beliefs. If those Olympian gods are still out there somewhere, I am sure this new cohort of heroes and heroines would have their support!

More guided reading books by Marcia Williams

Our expert's take: information books needn't be boring!

Lucy Forrester, Children's Librarian  Lucy worked as a children’s librarian in Warwickshire public libraries before joining Peters over ten years ago. She is the company’s comics and manga specialist, and was an assistant organiser for the Birmingham Comic Con for several years. Now she often gives talks to librarians and teachers on how to use this format most effectively. As well as being on the judging panels for the Information Book Award and Excelsior Award, she has spoken at YLG conferences and SLA events.  MEET OUR TEAM

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