ABSTRACT
Despite often being considered a solitary occupation, writing for children involves social interactions within a variety of spaces. In this chapter, we frame these interactions as affective encounters that shape children's authors’ experiences of creative work. Through interviews with authors of children's books in the UK and Finland, we draw out four types of spaces-in-becoming: Writing spaces, Talking spaces, Fictional spaces and Publishing spaces. From these spaces, we theorise three different ways that encounters are shaped by affect as inhabiting, educating and entertaining. Our findings suggest that being an author is strongly influenced by these encounters, with affects that are complex and vary amongst the authors. At times the encounters centred on gendered expectations or assumptions around childhood and writing for children. As such, we found an important part of their work was managing affect and negotiating control in these encounters.
