Transnationalism vs Cultural Appropriation - Michelle Lovric

It’s so lovely to be back here on ABBA. The reason, obviously, is that I have a new children’s book out this week. It’s called The Wishing Bones, and deals with a carnivorous hotel in Venice that recycles its murdered guests as the fake relics of saints. Naturally, sorting out this iniquity is going to take five children on the cusp of not being children anymore. Two of those children are not born Venetians, which is key to the theme of this post.

I don’t think I can teach the writers at ABBA anything, so I decided instead to offer up a rich and unusual treat – a discussion with an academic specializing in children’s literature. Lindsay Myers lectures in in Italian and Children's Studies at NUI Galway. Her research focuses on Italian children's literature, film and culture. We have conducted this interview by email and in person over a number of months and I’ve found it both stimulating and comforting. I hope you will too.

Late last year, Lindsay delivered a lecture entitled Venezia nel fantasy contemporaneo per bambini: l’evoluzione letteraria di un’amicizia transnazionale (Venice in contemporary fantasy books for children: the literary evolution of a transnational friendship).

 It’s a subject close to my own heart. In The Wishing Bones, a strong friendship develops between a Venetian orphan named Sorrowful Lily and a tough young Irish girl called Darling Dearworthy, and another deep relationship is formed between a Venetian boy Ivo and Eliah, a slave. Both Darling and Eliah will eventually find a ‘home from home’ in Venice, based on roots they grow for themselves there. So I was fascinated to hear Lindsay’s views on how such relationships can be viewed through an academic lens.

Thank you for talking to me, Lindsay. Could I ‘nutshell’ the premise of your ‘transnationalism” theory this way – that in the 21st century, identity in children’s books may not be always related to “genetic/ethnic identity” or “birthplace identity” but rather to other factors such as a “sense of belonging and love for a city”?

Yes, that’s the crux of what it means to think of identity in a transnational way. It isn’t traditionally the way that we think about “belonging”. But it seems to me that in today’s world, the affinity that a person feels for a place is often more important in forming their identity than are other factors, such as actual place of birth and ethnic ancestry. People can move a lot more easily now than they did in the past. The places where a person chooses to live are often not randomly chosen but rather reflect, in some way, that person’s values, way of seeing the world and interests.

And some children are forced to move, to become refugees or economic migrants – or in the case of my character Eliah, are transported as slaves or otherwise exploited, finding themselves living in a foreign culture. Such children must mould themselves into a new life, starting as outsiders.

An outsider’s view is of course a useful way of world-building in a novel: a native has no need to explain the ways of their own town but an outsider can teach the reader by learning for themselves about their strange new world. 

We are starting to see transplanted consciousness as a feature not just in adult novels but also in children’s books, so naturally academics are also interested in this idea? And you are particularly interested. That’s partly because you have personal experience of childhood “transnationality”, don’t you?

Yes. My parents are both English and they moved to Cork before I was born so I have English blood in me but I have always felt that I am Irish. My brother who was brought up in the same family, by contrast, has always felt English, and he, in fact, moved to England as soon as he could and now lives there with his family. He wasn’t at all interested in learning the Irish language at school or in finding out about Irish culture, a subject which always fascinated me. Cork, too, while it was the city that I was born in, has never had the same appeal for me as Galway, the city where I now live and work. It's funny, isn't it? But I knew the very first time that I visited Connemara as a child with my parents that I wanted to live in Galway. Somehow through a lucky twist of fate I ended up being offered a lectureship in Italian in the National University of Ireland in Galway many years later. Galway is where I feel most at home – but, like you I also have a great love for Italy – and for Venice in particular. That’s why I guess I enjoy reading your books – they make me feel as if I am there when I read them – and I like the idea that we deepen our sense of ‘belonging’ to places through the texts that we read about them as well as by visiting them in person.

 And I was born in Australia, yet always knew that I belonged to the old world – specifically Venice. I ended up here in London, writing of children transplanted to Italian ‘heartlands’ they didn’t know they had a right to but with which they feel a warm, compelling affinity. This is a dynamic I’ve felt the need to address several times. But lately I’ve joined other children’s writers in a ferment about ‘cultural appropriation’. We are terrified of being accused of it. That fear has personally led me to close down promising storylines and write, I fear, more boringly. Or, I will write about it, nursing a secret fear of some kind of attack later. Is the academic world as accusatory as the book trade’s gatekeepers at the moment? And as frothed up about it? 

No, not as frothed up. Children’s lit academics have always been interested in discussing ‘sameness and difference’ and how cultures are represented to children by both insiders and outsiders to that culture. Anyone who wants to find out more about this whole area would find much of interest in Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children's Literature: From the Enlightenment to the Present Day, edited by Emer O Sullivan and Andrea Immel (Critical Approaches to Children's Literature, 2017).

The presence of such perspectives in children’s literature is not, of course, by any means, a new phenomenon. As Imagining Sameness and Difference demonstrates, children’s books have always been about identity (both on a personal and a collective level), and the construction of that identity has almost always by necessity been formed through discourses of “othering”. It is only by knowing “what we are not” that we come to know “who we are”, and as O’Sullivan has astutely observed, “a nuanced understanding of the what and how and why of portraying sameness and difference is critical to an appreciation of the role of children’s books in promoting social change”. Exactly what transnational perspectives are in children’s books and how exactly these operate has, however, received relatively little attention to date.

It would be a shame if writers became too afraid to write about other cultures. To do so respectfully, the most important pre-requisite, to me, is that the author has a lived experience of that culture rather than an uninformed, tourist gaze. In order to fully understand another culture, you have to know at least some of the language (or dialect) because when you learn a language you inevitably also learn a whole lot more about the people who formed it – it’s a bit like finding a key to a locked door. That’s why I learned Irish and Italian and why I feel confident now in the sense of belonging that I have in both Ireland and Italy.

 It can be daunting to write with authority about a culture that you weren’t connected to through birth but I think it is important that authors rise to this challenge rather than allow themselves to be discouraged from doing so for fear of “cultural appropriation”. I used to feel nervous writing academic papers about Italian children’s books. But then I realised that many Italians do not have the expertise that I’ve built up over many years of research and that those who do are really interested in the perspective I bring – because a person who is fully versed in more than one culture sees things differently from a person who has a more focussed perspective. The most important thing is to always see things from both sides, to listen and to observe with real attention to detail, and to refrain from making value judgements. I think that, if we can teach children to be both humble and curious in their approach to new cultures, then we are doing a really good thing.

I know that you became interested in my earlier book, The Undrowned Child, because the eponymous heroine has been told all her life that she’s from Naples. But when she arrives in Venice, my Teodora feels suddenly at home. Of course it turns out she has indeed come home, having been rushed out of the city as a baby to avoid a scandal. With her Neapolitan accent, Teo meets arrant snobbery from a Venetian boy, Renzo. However, through her bravery and gifts, she eventually transforms his attitude into admiration and affection, strengthened by the discovery that she has a birth-right to the city the two of them work bravely to save from a supernatural enemy. There are also language issues between Teo and the mermaids who have learned to speak Italian by eavesdropping on pirates.

You work in an authentic way with both Italian and Anglophone cultures and avoid the pitfalls that so many other books that attempt to cross cultural barriers fall into. I love the way that you pay attention to language – even to the extent of explaining to the reader how the characters are able to communicate to each other in different languages (or via translators) as this is an aspect that is often ignored in children's books where characters travel to other countries.

 I find it fitting that you write about these transactions in Venice, a city that lies at the crossroads between Western Classical Heritage and the Oriental Dream. Venice has been functioning as a symbolic landscape within the cultural imagination ever since the sixteenth-century so it makes sense to think of it as a transnational space in every sense of the word.

 

 

For me, imagining the logistics of communication is very important. It is a bit like using form in poetry – sometimes working with the discipline yields up new creative ideas. In The Wishing Bones, I decided to make Darling a bit of a show-off polyglot. Though Irish through-and-through, she speaks not just Italian but Venetian. Her character in this way becomes storyline. And it is a way of emphasising that otherness is not to be treated negatively. Darling is a vulnerable orphan. Language is a shield she carries proudly. Foreigners often speak our own language more grammatically that we do. I recently read that scientists are teaching seal to sing Star Wars themes, as a way of studying vocal learning in humans.

Surely these are clues to universal truths. We have much to learn about ourselves precisely from those who come anew into our way of life. There is also much to appreciate in those who have an overview, who have another language, another lived experience, know how to be careful, how to treasure – because outsiders have to be observant and vigilant in order to survive. I think they raise the stakes on our ‘innerness’: they show us things about our own culture. I think outsiders teach us that our outrageously good luck is fragile; in the shock of that lesson, we can choose to become more empathetic towards them. I guess I always want to say something like this, ‘Let’s not close our minds. Let’s not be smug. Let’s not pull up our coat collars against them. Let’s listen.’

 Populists from Hitler to Trump have found it useful to peddle the concept of malevolent otherness, singling out otherness for accusation. At worst, the populist preach dehumanisation that can eventually lead to a sense that oppression and even extermination are acceptable solutions to the self-created ‘problem’ of others. I want to do the very polar opposite to that.

And of course I write a great deal about young girls. You might say that women have been outsiders in Western society throughout thousands of years of history: excluded from politics, finance and intellectual life. We count it as one of the major steps of our civilization that women now have almost as many rights, and some of the sense of entitlements, as men. We have come a long way from the time when the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut had to wear a wooden beard to assert her power, but we haven’t come far enough. I’ve written ten historical novels, five for children. The girls I’ve written have lived in Venice between 1725 and 1902. There has been much discussions about how girls in historical fiction have to cross-dress in order to live lives interesting enough to have a story. And I too have followed that trope for brief periods when there was credible alternative for making a story work. But I also think that there are other ways of making outsider-girls insiders in the action – by use of their intelligence, ingenuity, daring and sheer contrariness. I have also conferred traditionally female qualities on boys: for, example, the way Ivo looks after Eliah in The Wishing Bones is as much like a mother as a father. If there must be separate nations of men and women, I want to write transnational girls and boys.

 Meanwhile, Lily and Darling have a choice of ways in which to communicate their way towards an unbreakable friendship. They have secrets and guilt to negotiate: far more important than being Irish or Venetian. And another far more substantial difference between the two girls than their nationalities is the fact that Darling has known both wealth and love, while Lily comes into the story from a background of deprivation and emotional cruelty. Lily initially underestimates Darling’s ability to love and forgive terrible actions performed under a bullying regime. But Darling has ‘sampled’ the behaviour of an oppressor in the form of a school bully, which has equipped her to understand Lily’s trials when she eventually finds out about them. Mutual enemies bring them closer together; then saving Venice becomes a joint aim as Darling falls more and more under the city’s spell. Each brings unique gifts, some born out of sadness, to their roles as young saviours of the city. I think this is the kind of thing that interests you as an academic?

Yes, I am interested in how friendships are formed not just between children of the same culture but also between children of different cultures.

The work of children’s literature was not always to promote intercultural friendship. The birth of this literature coincided in almost all of the countries of the world with the birth of nation states. Children’s books while they have always circulated to an extent between cultures, have often been powerfully influenced by nationalist discourses.

 It was really only after the end of the Second World War, that children’s books began to be seen as vehicles for peace building between cultures, and that the discourses of “sameness” and “difference” that had characterised European children’s books for so long began to break down. 1949 saw the founding of the International Children’s Library in Munich in Germany, and IBBY (the International Board on Books for Young People), a world-wide network of children’s book “people”. Both of these organisations have done much over the years to bring together books and children.

The importance of the formation of international friendships is nowhere more evident than in Venice. This city, which was once founded on international trade, is now living through a real crisis, in the sense that her fragile structure is no longer able to sustain, without grave damage, the millions of tourists who visit every year, exhausting her infrastructure and driving native Venetians away.

It strikes me that The Wishing Bones is allegorical in so many ways – and yet it is also a shockingly literal response to the trope of “death in Venice”.

 You were very brave to tackle such things – especially because institutional abuse such as is described in this book is not normally a topic that can be dealt with so frankly in a children’s novel. Your approach works because it shocks the reader while at the same time showing immense understanding for the suffering of those involved. There was no doubt in my mind after reading the book that the physical abuse that the characters in this story endure has much in common with the abuses that were “enabled” by the Catholic Church in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (even though you never actually go down this line). Sexual abuse is, of course, one of the darkest of crimes, and even though the abuse that the children in The Wishing Bones suffer is not sexual in nature - you convey really well how the child becomes “complicit” in abuses of all kinds, how he or she becomes ashamed and how this fear of being guilty/ punished for crimes that he or she has done perpetuates cycles of abuse and violence.

The adults who let the violence happen by feeding their fantasies are well written in your novel and it strikes me that the evil sisters from Sicily are a wonderfully matriarchal version of organized crime syndicates!

 As always, though, the morals in this book are pure. For you show how the villains’ bids for revenge were fuelled initially by the way in which they and their people were once treated by the Venetians. The last pages of the novel really made me reflect on the anti-migrant discourses that are gaining momentum every day in Italy. Once again “saving Venice” in this book does not mean keeping it Venetian at all costs. Instead, it means keeping out greed, revenge and prejudices. and seeing what is really happening and speaking out about it.

 Keep saving Venice, Michelle, you are very good at it……

 Thank you! But it’s not just the buildings and canals that need saving. The Venetians need help too. What would Venice be without Venetians? A museum of sadness, I think. I think it’s really important not to reduce Venetians to clichés, passive victims of mass tourism.

 Finding ways to safeguard the city’s cultural heritage while avoiding the pitfall of reiteration of national prejudices and cultural stereotypes is no easy task, of course, especially when the very act of writing about in Venice in a children’s book is, itself, potentially a threat to the city’s livelihood in that it will inevitably, if it becomes successful, entice more visitors to its already-crowded streets.

By showing the reader how the views of the protagonists change as a result of their encounters with each other, you effectively break down the “local” versus “foreigner” binary.

 Perhaps the balanced view you have of the city is the result of your personal experience and your own education ? Being born in Australia but having moved to Europe, where you now live in both London and Venice? There is no doubt but that children’s literature is enriched by multiple points of view. This kind of writing is important because it helps children to become citizens of a world that takes responsibility for itself – so long as attention is paid to the way that different nationalities are presented, and old stereotypes are not reinforced inadvertently. It’s important to give a role to outsiders when it comes to protecting the one world we have.

 Your books, while historical, deal extremely effectively with the current issues facing the Venetians. You don’t say so overtly, but it seems to me that The Undrowned Child illustrates particularly well the grave consequences, that can transpire if greed is left unchecked, and democracy is impeded by lies and self-serving policies.

The creature who hides under the waters in this your first children’s book seem to me to resemble the huge cruise ships – almost monsters – that have begun in the last years to enter into the Venetian lagoon and threaten its fragile ecosystem.

Indeed, I campaign with NoGrandiNavi against those cruise ships, using the only weapon I have, which is writing. Things are dire there now, with two dreadful incidents of megaships out of control in the last month alone. This article by my friend Francesco Bandarin shows how Venice is drawing ever closer towards disaster.

And London is facing its own monster ship now too, in the shape of a party boat the size of a football pitch that private enterprise wants to squeeze into the Thames, with the apparent collusion of those who are supposed to protect the river. So here I am again, a London outsider, trying to protect the city with words … from a mega-party boat called the Ocean Diva.

Thank you so much for talking to me, Lindsay. I hope to see you again in Venice soon!

Michelle Lovric's website

The Wishing Bones was published on July 25th.

There are some pages about it on the website here

Apologies to anyone who was planning to attend my Wishing Bones event at the Finchley Road O2 Waterstones on this coming Sunday August 4th. Almost appropriately, for a book set in Venice, this event has been delayed by a flood.
It will be reconvened as soon as possible.

Making a Mark

In Jacob’s Room Is Full of Books (her follow-up to Howards End is on the Landing), Susan Hill describes the author so furious he wasn’t included in a Man Booker shortlist that he screamed and pounded the dashboard of the car he was being driven in with his fists. Another author she knew refused to talk to anyone for 24 hours after hearing his new book wasn’t a Book of the Month Club Choice. Yet another Man Booker loser, on hearing the name of that year’s winner, roared out: ‘I have been cheated of this prize!’

I can understand the disappointment. Maybe even the envy. But such behaviour seems so over-the-top I had to read that passage in her book twice to take it in. In my life, I’ve had four books published. None of them have made me rich. Or famous. But they made it out there. One of them even won me a prize in a competition decided by the children who’d read the books on the short list. That was more than gratifying.

As much as I’d like more recognition – and more money! – I can’t help coming back to an observation by Clive James. Talking about literary success, he noted that just being published was a notable achievement and bumped you high up the writers’ mountain.

That may be a touch disingenuous coming from the man who wrote the bajillion-selling Unreliable Memoirs, but I still think it’s a fair point. Because every time my mood slumps and I end up staring at a chapter that won’t work, or an idea that won’t develop, or at a page that stays resolutely empty, I tell myself that at least I’ve had some work published. I’ve made a mark (however small) on the world.

And that’s not so bad, is it?

Children's literature that refers to children's literature - Clémentine Beauvais

I want to talk today about a phenomenon I've noticed in children's and YA literature, and which seems to me to be on the rise: what I'd call 'lateral' intertextual and intervisual references in children's literature. Namely, children's texts that refer 'sideways' to other children's books, rather than 'up' to 'adult', clasical, 'real' literature, as used to be more common.

Children's literature has always tried to establish and consolidate its own status as worthy of existence and respect, and since hardly anybody helps it in that endeavour, it's had to help itself. One of the ways a text can inscribe itself into a prestigious literary family tree is to refer to (more) prestigious literary relatives. And so, since its early days, children's books have generously referred to 'adult' literature, especially to classics.


Those referential networks have been quite varied. Adaptations, rewritings, abridged versions - children's books have been, historically, often 'indebted' to adult classics. Among the first novels considered to be 'for children' is Fénelon's Télémaque, which was, of course, a rewriting of the Odyssey. Today, there are still many children's and YA books that align themselves with classic texts generally seen as being for adults. 

Not all do so for educational reasons (and there's nothing wrong with those that do, of course, I hasten to say). Plenty of children's books use 'adult' literature as a playing field, referring to canonical texts and authors discreetly, in intertextual games of varied levels of irreverence. Daniel Pennac's Kamo series, for instance, play with Wuthering Heights in an extremely erudite way, but there is no pressure whatsoever to go read the 'source' text - that said, when you do read it later in life, you arguably enjoy the experience even more for all the moments of retrospective understanding. The same could be said, on this side of the Channel, for Philip Pullman's rewriting of Paradise Lost, His Dark Materials.

Frequently, too, children's literature has established relations of a more parodic, pastichey or satirical nature with the 'prestigious' texts it references. In that tradition of children's literature, the intertextual or intervisual references to more canonical fields are sweet-and-sour: respectful sometimes, mocking often. From Lewis Carroll's 'How doth the little crocodile' to the whole works of Anthony Browne, those references have come in to question what one, as a child (or indeed adult) is supposed to like. Children's literature, of course, sets tastes - reading tastes, aesthetic judgments - and for a long time it took seriously its guiding role as an introduction to 'real', grown-up art. But then it decided it could do more than that, and critique from the inside the very concept of 'real', grown-up art. References here range from well-meaning and humorous to brutally acerbic.






All those references, however, whether respectful or irreverent, remain 'upwards' winks, towards that Other, Higher Literature that children's books have always looked up to in spite of themselves, hoping, secretly, to be helping children to reach it some day... They are also, of course, ways for authors to legitimise their own statuses - sure, I write for children, but look, I'm a real writer, I'm well-read, I know the canon.

Just in case it sounds like I'm being critical of my peers, let me plead absolutely (and unashamedly) guilty to that erudite crime, since a very large number of my children's books are extremely referential - and mostly to that Higher Literature, the literature that grown-ups consume and approve of.

More recently, children's literature has started playing with other webs of references, closer to itself, but still classical: the canon of children's literature. It is quite common to see references in children's literature to Peter Pan, Jules Verne, Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, and, of course, fairy tales, Aesop's fables, nursery rhymes. For instance, Thomas Taylor's Malamander is full of delightful intertextual references to Peter Pan. Those glances are more 'sideways' than 'upwards', but they still look 'up' to a canon.

But I've also been intrigued to see an increasing number of authors and children's books that make explicit, joyful and unashamed references to other contemporary, non-canonical authors and books. In other words, we now see children's literature establishing itself as a worthwhile field of references, weaving itself its own web of self-referentiality, finding itself worthy of winks. No inferiority complex anymore: it's about celebrating children's literature in children's literature, severing the links to that Other literature, that Great literature, and finding oneself quite satisfied with what's left.



I started to notice this first in picturebooks - with French author-illustrators such as Gilles Bachelet and Claude Ponti, whose explicitly referential work started to feature other contemporary characters: Bachelet, for instance, references Pomelo, the pink elephant of Ramona Badescu and Benjamin Chaud's contemporary series.

Gilles Bachelet, referencing two pieces of children's culture at the same time, one canonical, one less so

I then started to notice it everywhere. In L’écrivain abominable, a French MG novel by Anne-Gaelle Balpe, the eponymous 'abominable writer' of the title (an evil children's writer) is called Roland Dale (pronounced, in French, 'Dahl'). In a recent MG novel by Paul Martin, Violette Hurlevent et le Jardin Sauvage, the wild wolves' names are of famous picturebook illustrators, including 'Sendak' and 'Nadja'. I've caught myself doing that in my own books, too, with references to other children's authors and their works, and in turn I've found my works, to (I'm not going to lie) my great delight, here and there referred to in the works of other children's authors in France.

I think that those 'lateral' winks are in part due to the fact that children's literature has become a field of its own, where authors read each other abundantly, know each other, keep a close eye on what's being published, and genuinely enjoy that vast and varied production. I'm not sure the same happens as much in 'adult' fiction, in part because the emotional investment and intellectual interest in one's contemporaries' books seems to me - admittedly from the outside - to be on the whole lower.

Through this recent-ish move, children's and YA literature is establishing its own field of knowledge and references and, to some extent, theorising itself as well as its reading and writing practices. Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, which I actually recommend to my undergraduates as one of the best 'theoretical' works on fanfiction, refers to many teenage series, as well as to the whole extended universe, reading habits and creative offshoots of YA fiction-reading.

Those references are arguably anecdotal in comparison to the ocean of 1) non-referential works and 2) works that reference classic, adult literature or canonical children's literature, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them intensifying and normalising, as children's and YA literature increasingly asserts its own status as an artistic field of its own, full of contemporary vitality, and worth referring to. And adult literature, which already refers to canonical children's literature and to works such as Harry Potter, will look no longer downwards, but sideways, at us.

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Clémentine Beauvais is a writer and literary translator. Her YA novels in English are Piglettes (Pushkin, 2017) and In Paris with You (trans. Sam Taylor, Faber, 2018).

Duende

So I'm sitting in a Costa at a table in the corner - furthest table away from the door - thinking about writing this blog post about art and performance and magic - and a tortoiseshell butterfly suddenly lands on the table beside my toffee muffin. It is the day that Boris Johnson has been made Actual Prime Minister and I could give in to a different kind of amazement, but I'm choosing to be happy about this lovely visitation. I want to write about this kind of thing - beauty that makes life worth living and which is free, so that everyone can have it, and which reminds us that we came from the earth and we will return to it. This is a mystery which belongs to itself. No politicians can get a hold of it and monetise it, and that makes it very valuable, even though it's a widely available thing. I have never subscribed to the idea that our impermanence or smallness or lack of individual power makes us insignificant. To me it is the opposite, and it's there for everyone. 

So I thought about trying to explain 'Duende' but I won't say much, because it's Googleable, and Lorca explained it properly. You can read his thoughts about it here.  

Lorca in a cave with a gypsy flamenco family.

Instead I'm going to share a video that represents what I'm trying to say. My son is a young musician and he works so hard at his music and he gets so annoyed when it makes a mistake. I tell him about Patti Smith performing at Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize ceremony. She messes the song and stops, apologises, and starts again. When it happened some fans of Bob were really annoyed with her for causing an awkward moment on Bob's big day. Leonard Cohen famously sang 'There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.' I don't know if Patti's mistake was some part of the wonderfulness of this performance. I can only say that to me she embodied the spirit of Hard Rain completely. Something a bit magical happens in the struggle- and in the reaching out and in our receiving. 

What does 'done' look like?

 What does ‘done’ look like?

This blog is one of those practical ones. We love to see what other writers do, don’t we? We love to see how they deal with the same conundrums and challenges we face.

 So this is one of those, the thorny issue, not of starting, or of the process itself,  but of the end of the manuscript.

 It’s a sort of paradox; we only find out by really doing, and it’s a lonely business, learning the hard way. Yet there’s also benefit to be had in seeing what others do, from ‘where do ideas come from,’  (actually I might actually try and answer that question next month), to this subject:  how do we know when it’s finished?  Indeed, is it ever ‘finished?’  Is it more a case of choosing the right time to leave a work in progress? 

So here’s some insight, but of course, I’m only really talking about my own experience. I hope it’s of some use.

So, what does the phrase 'final draft' (FD) mean?

It means no more changes are possible. In an ideal world that would mean no more changes are necessary, but for an author it can mean when you’ve hit deadline and have to deliver, which is at least  useful in forcing you to make timely decisions, and not dither. Or, perhaps it’s FD when you can’t see the wood for the trees, or when you get the feeling that further tinkering might improve the draft, but you’re not really sure. And if in doubt about changes, perhaps it’s better not to make them? I don’t think there are hard and fast rules. I think, like so much in writing it comes down to leaving it alone when it feels right to do so.  Even so, I still find it hard to read long ago written text without thinking about how I’d like to improve it in some way. As I already noted, maybe there’s no such thing as a finished story?  They just evolve.

What is the process when writing a final draft?

Assuming I’ve done the structural changes, and line edits, FD means going through it and making sure – again – that it feels right, and that it flows and that nothing jars; is out of place, or is too long, or too short or too much this, or not enough that. The process has been likened to sculpting a horse from a block of stone, (I wrote about that in last month’s blog). In editing, you know the shape of the horse, so you go in and take out anything that isn’t the horse. Once I’ve done that, I go over it and think: is this the horse as I imagined it? It might be a different shape but hopefully it might still be a pretty good horse. As soon as it feels like I’m chipping at the horse’s flesh, I stop.  I’m reasonably ruthless about taking stuff out. Getting other writers to look at my work is also critical to my process before it goes to agent and then editor.

Are there any particular challenges in writing a FD?

It’s easy to be too subjective; to hate or love it all.  You can get so close to a text it’s impossible to be clear minded about it, or to see an idea or phrase or character as the reader will see them for the first time because you are so (over) familiar with them. It then gets hard to ‘kill your darlings,’ or to recognize stuff that really works.  But in truth no matter how good you may think one aspect or element is, it may not fit with the whole, so it has to go.  It’s also difficult – but important- to give yourself space to not look at a draft for a while before going in for final edit.

The wonderful Julia Green, course leader on the MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa  Uni, once told me: ‘writing is re-writing.’

I think that’s true. It’s also critical to know when to walk away, and start on a new story.

So, in the end, it might be a deadline, but I hope, for all of us, it’s more organic than that, like a relationship,  or a job, or like a hobo, with itchy feet, sometimes we just know, in our heart, it’s time to move on.

 Chris Vick’s Girl. Boy. Sea is published by Zephyr (Head of Zeus) 8^th August.

 

GRANNY'S EXPLODING TOILET, by Saviour Pirotta

Funny how things turn out!

When I emigrated to the UK in October 1981, I joined a group of artists working at the now long-defunct Commonwealth Institute in London. Authors, poets, dancers and actors, we visited schools all around the UK, introducing children to cultures from the commonwealth. I used to do an illustrated talk with slides called A Day in the Life of A Maltese child. This featured mostly my youngest brother Michael, who I photographed doing various tasks around the home and the village. It also featured my maternal grandmother, although I had no slides of her to show, because she resolutely refused to be photographed. (Actually, there is a grainy black and white snap of her in existence, and you can tell by her rebellious expression that she had been made to sit for the photographer.)

My grandmother was an irascible character. Married to a Maltese soldier in the British army, she moved house with every pay rise, although she stayed in the same street all her life. She was known to blow an entire week's pension on Sunday treats for her grandchildren. I remember with fondness sharing pan con olio on her roof terrace, eating out of a gigantic chipped enamel dish and watching red admirals sunbathing on her backyard wall.  We would pick mint and rosemary to put on the bread, which we rubbed with her homemade sundried tomatoes. Hers was a cheery smile in a childhood filled with austere faces. Grandma would let me dance around the terrace. She listened to my stories and blew eggs to make heads for my hand puppets.

The anecdotes about her soon started taking over my talks. The slideshow abandoned, I started creating narratives based on my granny and her coterie of female friends. Even when I started getting published, I continued telling her stories, although by now they were more fiction than fact.

Soon I had enough stories for a book. It was bought by Kingfisher, who had published two of my most successful folktale anthologies. But as my gran used to say, 'the devil has no milk but still manages to make cheese', meaning mischief happens when you least expect it.

Before I'd finished my first draft of the granny story, now called Gruesome Gran, Kingfisher was bought out by Macmillan, who dropped the entire fiction list. My agent at the time had just passed away and I never had the chance to sort out the ms for another publisher. I continued telling my granny stories in school, though, until one day -

'Sir, is your gran Gangsta Granny?'

It was the first time I'd heard of a certain celebrity's book but it was by no means the last. I couldn't believe my bad luck. The best idea I'd ever had and I'd let someone pip me to the post. Not that mine would have sold so many copies, of course. But still...

In disgust, I decided not to pursue the Granny project any longer. Gran seemed to have other plans, though. Last year I started doing storymaking workshops in Scarborough schools. They are part of an outreach programme organised by the Stephen Joseph Theatre. Hoping to write a play for the SJT, I asked for a meeting and spent a long weekend thinking up of stories that would make great plays for a family audience.  I needn't have given up that weekend. The children's feedback forms from the afterschool clubs were full of Granny stories. That's what the SJT wanted the play to be about.

So here we are a few months later, with a brand new story for the stage. Granny is taking to the boards in the autumn half term. With nine songs, the show is almost a full-blown musical. The booking opens at the end of July but there have been people asking for tickets at the box office already. Who'd have thought it?

And what's the moral of this rather long-winded rant, I hear you ask?  As Granny would say, 'the devil might make cheese but you don't have to eat if you don't want to.' Which means don't take defeat lying down. If you have a good idea, fight to make it become a reality.

Best words my nan never said, ever.


GRANNY'S EXPLODING TOILET premieres at the SJT on the 29th of October. Tickets will be available here. Saviour Pirotta's historical novel for 9 - 12s, MARK OF THE CYCLOPS, won the North Somerset Teachers' Book Awards 2018 in the Quality Fiction category. His new series from Maverick, The Wolfsong Series, launches with The Stolen Spear in August.  Follow Saviour on Twitter @spirotta.