ABSTRACT
Stories are one of the types of fiction offered first to children. Books about characters overcoming the things with resourcefulness are well liked by children, which helps explain the popularity of Jacqueline Wilson’s Tracy Beaker series and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. As Margaret Meek argues so convincingly, fictive narrative has much to teach older children too about ‘the different ways that language lets a writer tell, and the many different ways a reader reads’. When someone writes about fiction they are usually thinking about texts which draw on invention and the inner world of the imagination, often using figurative language to get meaning across. The language in a book may be conversational and full of convincing everyday dialogue and the rhythms of everyday speech or lyrical, fresh and original. It is the choice of language used by the writer in a work of fiction that brings alive the adventures, feelings and dilemmas of the characters.
