WISENET Journal No. 22, April 1990, p. 27
Science and literature are often seen as being opposed but writing is a logical process. Even fantasy must have an inherent logic to be effective, even though this logic may be unusual. The writer sorting facts into paragraphs and chapters is rather like the taxonomist sorting organisms into genera and families: there are several ways of doing it, but one makes a better pattern than others.
The first scientific problem that I remember puzzling over was whether things became soft or hard when heated, for butter goes soft and eggs go hard. I remember that my excitement at discovering why waves break on a shore was not shared by my friend when we were surfing. By high school my life's ambition was to be a student, but somehow I saw myself doing Arts. It was not long, however, before I knew that Science was my metier. I was lucky in knowing just what I wanted to study well before I left school. I had an excellent grounding in biology but no physics or chemistry, and Maths 1 and 11 was squeezed into the same timespan as General Maths, plus just two unsupervised periods to work on problems.
After graduating and working in CSIRO Division of Wildlife Research for a few years I left to become a full time mother and soon saw a need for nature study books for children. My first series (of which Snails was the first) had modest success, but I discovered that as far as the "Kid Lit" establishment was concerned non-fiction did not count. I have since tried to increase understanding of what skills are required in writing non-fiction - and that any skill in writing is desirable at all! - and have now reached the stage when people take a little notice of what I do. Children's science books still need more attention from both the scientific and children's literature communities.