Reading the magic: The Children of Green Knowe - Sue Purkiss

 Have recently been doing a lot of sorting out/chucking out of all kinds of things. (There's something very liberating about it, isn't there? It certainly brings out the ruthless streak in me.)

Part of this was making room on bookshelves. (We buy far too many books, and have historically been far too averse to recycling ones that, in our heart of hearts, we know we'll never read again.) As I was sorting through a shelf full of children's books, I came across this one by Lucy M. Boston, The Children of Green Knowe.

Now I know that many of the people reading this are very knowledgeable about children's books, and will be very familiar with this book. But I wasn't. I first heard of it some years ago on one of the Charney retreats that the Scattered Authors used to run, and I guess that's when I bought the book. If I read it then, I had forgotten it - which would be a very strange thing, because I've just sat down and read it and found it literally enchanting.

I'm quite puzzled by my feelings about fantasy in children's books. Some of my favourite books ever are fantasy: Lord of the Rings, Alan Garner's early works, C S Lewis, His Dark Materials, Harry Potter. But I haven't felt the same about recent fantasies I've read, and I'm really not sure why. I've enjoyed them, but I haven't been totally drawn into and mesmerised by that world, in the same way as I was by those I've mentioned. (Harry Potter not quite so much, perhaps.)

But this book - yes. Lucy Boston's Green Knowe is based on the house she lived in herself - not as a child, interestingly: she didn't come across this ancient, magical building till she was middle-aged. The premise of this first book in the series is that Tolly, a seven year old boy in the thirties, has been virtually abandoned by his father: his mother has died, and his father has remarried to an evidently unsympatheic stepmother and gone to live abroad, leaving Tolly at a boarding school, till he is rescued by his great grandmother, Mrs Oldknow, who invites him to stay with her in the holidays. Tolly instantly bonds with her - and quickly senses that the old house is full of magic - and also of the ghosts of children from the past, who become his playmates.

The actual story is pretty much that - there is no quest, no journey, no powerful narrative arc - though there are lots of extraordinary encounters. And yet it is completely gripping. The house and its inhabitants became as real to us as they do to Tolly: it is, literally, enchanting. This is partly to do with the detailed and luscious descriptions of the house - it's clear that Lucy Boston is describing a very real place that she loves, not somewhere that she's made up. Here she describes part of the stables: Here and there a ray of white light came slanting through a broken roof tile, against which you could see the golden motes of dust in the air. It looked mysterious and enticing. And in such a place, would you not expect magical things to happen?

I was so enchanted that I sent off for three more of the books in the series, and also a memoir by Lucy Boston of her early life. What I am very interested to see is whether the books will appeal to my eight year-old grandson, who is a keen and very good reader. Their world is a very long way from his - but it's also a very long way from mine. We'll see.

A few Draft Zero nuts & bolts if you fancy picking them over - Rowena House

On a self-imposed deadline to finish the first draft of my seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress this month, and with less than four thousand words to go, I might actually make it. Fingers crossed. Then, a few months stepping back to let it stew. Phew.

Meanwhile, a rushed post here because - argh! - this week the plotted end turned out to be rubbish. Cue confidence collapse. Which might have been a form of procrastination. An unwillingness to reach The End after years of working part-time on this one story.

Anyway...

The trick that helped to stop panic from setting in as the denouement crumbled before my eyes was the notion of Draft Zero. Emma Darwin did a great review of the various forms of these beasties on her endlessly useful Substack this week. Here’s the generic link as I can’t track down the specific one, but please do have a look around for it. Emma's advice is alway brilliant, imho.

https://emmadarwin.substack.com/

Over the past year, I’ve found Draft Zero most useful as a way to convince myself that this is just a first version, something to edit. There are no darlings that can’t be killed off, even denouements that are the result of years of planning!

I’m writing towards An End, not The End.

I’ve also recently refined my Draft Zero scene planning system, having belatedly realised that what shows up on the page is a sort of half-way house between the outcome I anticipated would work and how the creative act changed it AKA typing as storytelling AKA the antithesis to long-form outlining.

The first time around, a scene is what happens between intention and execution. A Draft Zero.

Being a structure fanatic, I have developed a matrix for plotting suchscenes without wasting too much time. So, in case it might help anyone else trying to plot less, here is a worked example.

First, I locate the scene within the Act, with the current one highlighted.

For my current Act 3, these scene headings are: Q-Factor (from James Scott Bell) – revised gaol/plan – plan goes wrong AKA High Tower Twist (Save the Cat for Novelists) – Dig Deep AKA psychological self-revelation (Truby) - New Moral Action - Final Battle – Resolution – Final Image.

For the actual scene plan, I borrow from Story Grid, the online resource, rather than the book. Scene driver A [not necessarily the protagonist] wants to achieve X WITHOUT causing or revealing Y. This came from an open email, so I don’t feel it’s stealing their idea to share it here.

Next, from John Truby's Anatomy of Story: a) how does A plan to achieve their desire, b) what is their underlying desire, including how it's changed from previous scenes, and c) what is their motivation. Truby is very good on the differences between plans, desires, and motivation. I find the distinctions help a lot.

Here’s how I laid out the plan for my current New Moral Action scene.

Story Grid Tom wants Beth to help him set William free WITHOUT alerting the prosecuting magistrate.

1) Plan: to persuade Beth they are both going to hell if they let William die in the castle.

2) Desire: to save himself from psychological death by escaping from Beth’s control.

3) Motive: he cannot accept his return to the conformist half-life of a wilfully blind servant.

From Mckee, I set a diametrically opposed force of antagonism. That is usually a character with the opposite desire to the scene driver’s, though it can be an external event or inner state. In this example, Beth wants to persuade Tom that William cannot be freed without risking a hundred lives.

Finally, the polarity switch of a story value = free/imprisoned, frightened/brave etc. For Tom in this scene the switch is oppressed/assertive.

Finally, the outline contains a read-on prompt, usually either a cliff-hanger or a significant outcome that drives the story in a new direction. I haven't worked that out yet, so please fill in the blank!

Leaving all that to bubble away for a day or three usually improves the plan, but that doesn’t mean it will translate onto the page. Often, the action or character development turn out to be less plausible than anticipated. Sometimes, a Eureka! moment arrives to improve on the plan. Other times, the whole thing turns out to be rubbish and I have to start over again. But at least the plan is there as a basis to analyse what worked, what’s missing or ill-conceived, and where missing or new bits might fit, either in an earlier or later scene.

As the threads of the story come together towards An End, this system is proving useful. I’m hoping it will also help structure the development edit during which, no doubt, tens of thousands of lovingly crafted words will get thrown out and half the scenes spiked.

On the upside, that might mean I’ll never finish this story and won’t have to think up another one. Yay. Have a lovely creative time, folks.

IMAGINE A PICTURE HERE. BLOGGER AND/OR GOOGLE WON'T LET MY COMPUTER TALK TO ITSELF TODAY;


A daily diary of the WIP is on Rowena House Author on Facebook, a professional page which has a thousand plus followers and around twenty people who see the posts. No, me neither.

Two live bullets and no gun - by Lu Hersey

 Since my father died, I've done nothing but deal with a ton of admin (I call it dadmin), arrange his funeral and start work clearing 97 years' worth of hoarded stuff from his house before it sells. At night I dream I'm trapped in dust filled rooms, where ghost figures flicker in dark corners, moth eaten carpets crumble under my feet, and huge spiders fall on me from web-strewn ceilings, jerking me awake at 3am. 

On the plus side, I've found some interesting things along the way. As a hoarder, my father kept practically everything. It's too late to ask him why he had an alligator skin in the wardrobe, or what the two live bullets (no gun...as yet) were doing in the kitchen cupboard. In fact his house is filled with endless threads to unfinished stories. 

Take the boxes of letters. Not just his - his mother's, his father's, my mother's and even some of his last wife's. Many are self-explanatory and easily discarded, but some leave me dying to know more. Like the one from his sister to my grandfather complaining bitterly about my mother and 'that unspeakable incident in Gibraltar'... My mother? I didn't think she was the unspeakable incident type, so WHAT HAPPENED??

Obviously there are endless photographs. The large filing cabinet in his office, entirely filled with boxes of slides, proved way too much for me. I kept some taken pre 1981 (haven't had time to look at any of them yet, and of course have nothing to look at them with) but left the rest for house clearance. Life's too short for that many slides of other people's holidays.

More interesting were some printed photos from before he started taking slides. In among some black and white photos I'd never seen, there was a picture of my parents holding two babies - only one of which was me. The kind of thing that makes you wonder if maybe you were a twin and no one bothered to tell you. 

And now there's no one left to ask.

Of course he kept every single passport he'd ever owned, along with all the address books (including his mother's, my mother's and his last wife's). I flipped through before discarding them, So many people I didn't know, and so many places i'd never visited. Like driving through towns on your way to somewhere else, and briefly wondering about the lives of all those people who live there. 

Diaries? Tons of them, mostly recent, all totally uninteresting, filled with doctor appointments and bin day reminders - but he'd kept them anyway. The one exception is a Letts Schoolboy Diary from 1939, and what makes it interesting is the content Letts considered suitable for a schoolboy at that time. The bottom of each double page spread has a box with a different, reasonably researched snippet of information on such things as mythical beasts, necromancy, demons, different types of fairies, witches, harpies and Norse gods. I found it fascinating, but I don't think he did. All his diary entries are about visits to the dentist or going on car journeys - a schoolboy life so dull, he'd given up writing in it before March was out. Seems even the start of the war didn't make an impression. 

On his computer I found the start of his autobiography, and thought that might be worth reading. Sadly it stopped before he reached the age of seven. Fair enough. Memoir writing is a lot of effort - and anyway, knowing my father, he'd have left out ALL the interesting bits.

Clothes? The dressing gown alone was one he'd had since before his first marriage. Unwashed, moth-eaten and badly stained. Ew. I think he kept all the clothes he ever owned since doing his national service. And of course he kept all his last wife's clothing, still neatly hanging in the wardrobe just as she'd left it when she died 10 years ago. Presents she'd bought, waiting to be wrapped for unknown children, long since grown up and probably past university by now.

I guess house clearance sums up all the messiness of a life. Few of us manage to tie up all the loose ends before death, and my father was no exception. Even at 97, he was planning for a future while carrying the weight of his past with him, just in case any of it came in handy. 

It's left me wondering whether to make my own house a minimalist haven, or leave tantalising half-finished letters, spicy diaries and cryptic clues to a mysterious past lying hidden in wardrobes and kitchen drawers. Fragments of stories for my children to wonder at. 

But on balance, I reckon they'd rather I went for minimalist.

Lu Hersey

🦋: luwrites

X: LuWrites

Patreon: Writing the Magic

The Cup of Tea Test for schools By Steve Way

 Hi, I hope you are all well. I was thinking about writing about a completely different topic but this came to me, appropriately while I was having a cuppa. I hope you enjoy it and may consider acting as adjudicators for The Cup of Tea Test when visiting schools! 

~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Headteachers,

As a representative of authors and other creative visitors, such as actors and illustrators, I would like to thank the majority of you, your staff and particularly the children for making us so welcome when we come to work with the children in your school. We especially appreciate it when you, or one of your colleagues meets us as we arrive and help us with our often heavy and unwieldy bags and equipment. It is always wonderful when one of the children in the school can see that you are looking a bit lost, asks if they can help and guide you to your next location. They are a credit to you.

I hope you won’t mind me asking you not to expect us to work in your school for free. Disregarding the fact that the average income of a children’s writer is considerably less than a standard teacher, I can’t imagine how many of you, or your staff, would volunteer to work for nothing. I know this may be a surprise to some of you but despite enjoying what we do, particularly when we’re helping to inspire the children, we have to pay the gas bill as frequently as most other mortals. Whilst it’s not uncommon for some of the children to believe that as authors we must live in castles, it’s surprising to realise that some of your colleagues seem equally deluded.

For the same reason, it would be appreciated that you ask your colleagues not to be openly resentful towards us and unsympathetically or unsupportively expecting us to provide our full pound of flesh, blood and all when offering our services. It might be worth reminding them not only about the situation already noted but that also unlike them we’re not receiving pension benefits, sick pay or holiday pay and as independent operators don’t enjoy a predictable income. By the same count could you remind them that if we’re kind enough to leave out copies of our books for them to browse through that it’s actually illegal for them to photocopy them while we’re away from the staffroom working with the children. (Once more refer to note above).

It's wonderful that so many of you, or your colleagues, insist on making sure that we are made comfortable when we arrive. I personally believe what I have named The Cup of Tea Test acts as an incredibly precise measure of how successful and beneficial for the children a visit is going to be. Indeed I think each school should be given a rating for the score in The Cup of Tea Test, just like a Michelin score for restaurants. See suggested rating system below.

For schools wishing to enhance their grading in this unofficial test, I do acknowledge that each school has its own arrangements for the production and distribution of beverages for the permanent staff. However, the This Is My Mug! wars are your own business and it would be appropriate for visitors to be provided with mugs that haven’t just been dug up in an archaeological excavation. Also, actual teabags* need to be available along with milk that isn’t green. Alternatively, if you insist on providing us with one of those horrible black plastic mugs with don’t-spill-the-tea-on-the-kids lids on (which would otherwise be a great idea, if you could actually drink through the slits) please could we have one that has been washed since the Norman Invasion and doesn’t make the tea taste like old socks and therefore undrinkable.

I hope you find my grading system for The Cup of Tea Test below interesting, I have found it virtually infallible. Please feel free to put your school forward for an assessment by you next visiting author.

Yours sincerely,

An Aggravated Author

*i.e. not just herbal varieties that have obviously been knocking about for centuries.

The Cup of Tea Test. Created by Steve ‘The Cynic’ Way

5 Mugs: More than one staff member makes sure you have a cup of tea and if not make one for you. The tea is good quality as is the milk. You may even be offered a biscuit or two! Gasp! NB 80+% of schools fall into this category, thank God.

Likely Outcome of Visit (LOV): If, despite being as overworked as teachers in other schools, the staff take the time and effort to make you welcome, it is highly likely that the visit will be a success. The atmosphere that permeates the whole school will be positive, the children and the teachers will be fully engaged in all the activities and therefore staff and students will benefit from the visit.

The cheque for payment for your visit will be handed to you before you leave and before you have to ask.

4 Mugs: You’re accompanied to the staff room but left to make the tea for yourself. However the tea is decent and the milk is not a new life form.

LOV: Probably a fairly successful visit, though possibly in at least one session the teacher will be marking work rather than participating, indicating to her/his class the degree of importance they attach to your visit/contribution.

After you politely ask for payment you have to follow the secretary or head teacher around the school to find the counter-signatory.

3 Mugs: Questionable mug. Disappointing tea (or the horrible plastic mugs with lids, see above). Plus you feel guilty every time you make another brew. Milk has a history.

LOV: Some degree of point to your being there. High degree of possibility one teacher will ask you – in front of the children – if you mind if they rearrange the books in the library area while you work with the children. Of course you [expletive] do but can’t say so in front of the children. See above.

Alternatively, you will be expected to work in a space that turns out to be a hub in the school through which several classes, staff and numerous others will pass, repeatedly interrupting your presentation. Possibly this will also turn out to be the space used for the children’s lunch, which you will be turfed out of just as you’re getting to the highlight of your interaction with the children. The head teacher will later complain that the children didn’t get as much out of your visit as she/he had hoped.

You may be asked to resend your invoice, as the previous one will have been lost and wait several weeks for payment.

2 Mugs: You are shown into the staffroom then abandoned. The only mugs available appear to be on shelves assigned to each teacher. In any case no teabags appear to be available. A container marked ‘Coffee’ has a brown stain around the inside of its base. The milk is 50 shades of not white.

LOV: It’s highly likely that the staff will not attend your presentation, an extreme possibility being that you are joined by one TA for a workshop with four classes. The teachers apparently relying on osmosis or some other exotic means as a way of knowing how to follow up the session.

Expect the cheque to arrive around the time your overdraft charges accrued while waiting exceed the payment.

1 Mug: Entering the staffroom makes you feel like you have ended up with a role in a B movie western where you play the part of the unwelcome stranger in the unwelcoming saloon.

Forget any form of beverage, though the milk may by now have evolved into a life form that might as well join you in your session. At least some of the children may restore your faith in humanity.

Speaking of children ensure that you record the invoice in your effects, so that hopefully your grandchildren may benefit financially from your visit.

LOV: At least one of the teachers is likely to tell you, as the children enter the classroom, that they are collectively useless and that you ‘won’t get anything out of this lot’ (NB Ignore this as you probably will, much to the annoyance of said teacher). Alternatively, they will completely ignore children misbehaving and undermining your presentation. They see you as a glorified supply teacher and consider discipline your domain while you’re with them. In other cases they will make such a pantomime of admonishing the children they take over the task of undermining the session.

A pantomime also adequately describes the process you will have to go through to extract payment from this institution. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The adventures of 'Bongo the Armadillo' may appeal, amongst others to reluctant readers and writers. This is because each 'adventure' is short - though bizarre or surreal - but follows a recurring structure that may make reluctant readers more comfortable and which reluctant writers can follow.

ISBN 978-1549517372

ASIN B074VBHCQ9

By the way, most of Bongo's adventures begin while he is having a cup of tea!

The Beck, written by Anthony McGowan, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

 

        This new short novel by Carnegie Prize winning author Anthony McGowan is excellent. Funnier than his wonderful 'Lark', but equally insightful about adolescent characters, families, and the natural world. 

    Thirteen-year-old Kyle, 'only ever got left with Grandad when all the other babysitting options were used up. It was like when you look in the cupboard for some biscuits, hoping for maybe a Jaffa Cake or a Jammy Dodger, and all your find is a cracker.' Grandad's boring and embarrassing (insisting on wearing his Elvis impersonator wig). But of course Grandad actually leads Kyle into a naughty scrape, into becoming friends with a girl, making his tormentor bullies change their minds about him. 

     After showing Kyle the wildlife in and around the beck, and also showing where developers are about to concrete that life out of existance, Grandad intends to do something naughty, borderline illegal, to stop this from happening. But then he's hospitalised with a stroke, and Kyle decides to do the deed himself. So the triumphs of friendship and protecting wildlife are properly his own achievements. 

    Thought-provoking, involving, moving and funny, this makes a very satisfying read, and a quick and accessible one as you'd expect from Barrington Stoke.

    Oh, and Grandad's three-legged dog is called Rude Word. 

Build a library, build a reader - Anne Rooney

Peck, Peck, Peck — a favourite in Berlin

  I have a grandchild in Berlin who will be one year old next month. When he was born, I struggled to think of a new-baby present that would have more enduring value than the usual (but essential) baby items. And suddenly it became obvious: books. I will buy him a book a month until — well, until he doesn't want them. Or until 18. The books will grow with him, so his first books are baby books, but they will change as he changes.

It took a while to settle on this plan, so he got six books the first time. If I see him in a month, I give him a book directly. If I'm not in Berlin, or he's not here, I buy the book from Curious Fox, an English language bookshop in Berlin and they deliver it to him. (I did try buying the books here and posting them, but the postage cost more than the books and they took forever to arrive. And I don't use Amazon.) I am buying him books in English, though not necessarily English books. This month's book is by a Brazilian writer and was first published in Portuguese (see Penny Dolan's post yesterday on Guilherme Karsten's Are You a Monster?) Instructions from his kita are to use English at home and German at kita/school to build a bilingual child. 

He's not obliged to keep the books. He/his parents can pass them on to younger children if he outgrows them, though it will be nice if he does keep them. I might have a stamp made up so that they can stamp each incoming book.

These are some of the books from his first twelve months. They include some favourites from my daughter's childhood that she specifically asked for, I'm not being unimaginative!

Clive Penguin, Huw Lewis Jones and Ben Sanders, Little Tiger, 2024

A Boy Wants a Dinosaur, Hiawyn Oram and Satoshi Kitamura,  Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1990

Where's Mr Puffin? Ingela P Arrhenius, Nosy Crow, 2022

Peepo! Janet and Allan Ahlberg, Puffin, 1997

Funnybones,  Janet and Allan Ahlberg, Puffin, 1999

Hoot Owl, Master of Disguise,  Sean Taylor and Jean Jullien, 2016

Shh! We Have a Plan, Chris Haughton, Walker Books, 2016

Peck, Peck, Peck, Lucy Cousins, Walker Books, 2013

Are You A Monster?  Guilherme Karsten, Quarto, 2023

Next month's book will be How Long Is That Dog by John Bond, HarperCollins, 2025.

ARE YOU A MONSTER by Guilherme Karsten

When I go to the Children's Library on Mondays, I am always looking out for good stories to read aloud  to the Under Fives Storytime group.  Some books work well read out loud to a group, while others - though just as good as stories - are better for quieter sessions or for reading at home. 

My choice today has a black cover, which can immediately put people off. Books are expected to have white, light, colourful pages and bright covers. This one doesn't.  Thoughout, though there are dark pages, others are white, or red or yellow or pale blue, the colour balanced with the play of the story. 

                                     

The central character is a greenish-yellow monster, and the book has a direct attitude: the solo monster character starts by boasting, and then asking questions. He insists he wants to know if the reader is a monster too.  

                            

ARE YOU OR ARE YOU NOT? Do you have a long, pointy tail? No? Do you have long pointy nails? No? Show me your BIG YELLOW EYES . . . No? 

Obviously the reader has not, so suddenly, cleverly, midway through the text, the monster calls the story to an end.  'OK. I'M DONE. YOU ARE NOT A MONSTERY. You can close this book now. THE END  BYE-BYE.

                    

Then, in case the reader is upset by the sudden ending, the Monster checks again. 

                        

Show me your teeth again. A HUGE mouth. Interesting! Can you make a LOUD noise like GRRR or ROARRR? Can you walk like a monster STOMPING HARD ? Can you? 

Of course, the Storytime group can join in and do, with encouragement. Can you now do all three together? I love the traditional cumulative framework there behind this telling!

The Monster is, at first, delighted to have found such another scary monster in the reader . . . except that now, the Monster suddenly starts to feel a bit scared of such excellent scary monsters itself . . .  and eventually the real ending to the story arrives. 

Which I will leave you to find out for yourself.

Although the reader needs to put a bit of ooomph into the reading, and allow time for joining in, the story itself moves along swiftly and amusingly. Karsten has created a book that is great fun, beautifully structured, and that uses language in an interesting way: one that I'd enjoy using over and over again.  For small family books sharing as well as for 'louder' readings.

Additionally, after enjoying this book myself, I found, while searching for images, that it was also the BookTrust Storytime Book of the Year 2024.  Well done, Guilherme Karsten!

                

Penny Dolan 

ARE YOU A MONSTER? was published in 2023 by Happy Yak, an imprintof the Quarto Group. Guilherme Karsten is both the author and illustrator.