James's Book About Fighting by Paul May

There was a time when it was my job to help small groups of children learn to read. These were children who found reading difficult. Because we wanted to know if what we were doing with them was working, we assessed their reading very carefully before we began and then checked afterwards to see if their reading had improved. In most cases the improvement was huge. As you may know, reading is often assessed in terms of years, as in 'she has a reading age of 12'. By this measure many of those children progressed years in a few months.

A lot of the work I did involved reading picture books. We didn't just read them once. We read them many, many times. We read Each Peach Pear Plum, Peepo!, Mr Gumpy's Outing, The Cat in the Hat, Frog and Toad, Little Bear . . . This was essential because many of the children knew almost nothing about books. Perhaps the most striking instance of this came from a boy called Andrew when we were reading Each Peach Pear Plum. I realised at some point that he had no idea that the picture on one page had anything to do with the picture on the next page. He saw each one as a completely separate thing. They knew these books extremely well by the time we were done. One 8-year-old came up to me in the corridor one day and said: 'You know that book we've been reading? (It was Each Peach Pear Plum) I can read it with my eyes closed. Listen.' And he recited the whole text there in the corridor, perfectly. (I've told that story before, but it's worth repeating.)

I used a lot of different techniques and resources. Elements that were fundamental were the close reading of picture books, a variety of fun, interactive phonics games, and other activities based on the  books. And then there was book-making. It was book-making that really brought home to me just how little many of these children knew about books. 

One of my favourite activities was making mini-books of 8 pages. These were made with an A5 sheet cut in half horizontally and then folded into a book. Stapling came later in the process. What we would do was this: I would ask each child (mostly there would be in a group of four or five) what they would like to write a book about. They were usually a bit puzzled by this idea, but I'd explain to them that they could write about anything they liked, and, importantly, that I would write the words down for them. So, for example, I said to James, 'What do you like doing?' and James said 'Fighting.' So I said 'OK, you can make a book about fighting. What do you want to say?' James said 'I like fighting.' 

You get the idea. I wrote 'Fighting by James' on the cover in my nice, clear teacher's writing and 'I like fighting' on the first page, and James got on with the pictures. It was true, by the way, James did like fighting and he didn't mind getting hurt and he often got told off for it, and we put that in the book too. But writing the book was only the beginning. Luckily for them the children didn't need to search for an agent or a publisher. When the books were written we marched downstairs to the office. There I would disassemble the books, lay the pages on the photocopier, print one side then the other while the children looked on with absolutely no idea what I was doing!

This is another reason I remember James's book so well. We got back upstairs, I cut the sheets and I stapled together five copies of his book, then handed all the children a copy so that we could all read James's book together. They were completely baffled. I remember them saying things like, 'Why is his book like mine?' 'Why are they all the same?' It wasn't as if they hadn't seen multiple copies of books before. Group reading was a thing, and they never said things like that about all the copies of Mr Gumpy's Outing, and they'd actually watched these books being duplicated on the photocopier and cut up and stapled together.

The point of all this was that reading was, for most of these children, an alien culture. Why were they learning to read? What was reading for? What were they going to get out of it? If they didn't know the answer to those questions the process would be about a million times harder, and that's why the first steps in the process need to be about reading and enjoying as many books as possible before anyone ever starts trying to get you to spell out words using the alphabet and the sounds those letters represent. Some children, like Andrew, have no idea that a book can tell a story.  Most children, having learned to speak their native language and understand it when they hear it spoken, have never thought about it in terms of words or letters or sentences. They've never had to analyse it, but the moment you start to see it written down you have to start to think about those things. Margaret Donaldson said in her 1984 book Children's Minds: 'Perhaps the idea that words mean anything - in isolation - is a highly sophisticated adult notion, and a Western adult notion at that.'

It was in order to address that disconnect that I had a kind of ritual when I taught in Reception (4/5 year olds). I'd sit down at the computer with a new child and ask them to tell me about their house or family, just anything, really, and I'd type it as they spoke. Then I'd print it and say: 'This is what you just told me.'

Sometimes they'd read it back, word for word, especially if it was short and simple, but that wasn't the point. The point was to show them that these black squiggles  represented the words they had said, and that they were words, and that later, when they'd drawn a picture to go with the words, they'd still be able to read them. They'd still be there tomorrow, next week, next year, and, magically, other people could read them too.

***

I once said without thinking properly, in a meeting about children learning to read, that children learn to talk without any teaching, and the person leading the course said: 'That's not true. Their parents teach them. Their mothers mostly.'

I came across a Spanish teacher on the internet somewhere recently who said: 'People talk about learning a language by immersion, but the kind of immersion you can manage as an adult, maybe by going and living with a family in a foreign country, is nothing like what happened when you were a child. Just imagine if you could find someone now to do the job your parents did back then.  They'd be with you every hour of the day, repeating words and sentences back to you, chatting to you while you played, encouraging you, getting excited as you learned each new phrase. From the moment you spoke your first word in the language they'd be with you, and it would go on for years. Even before you spoke that first word they'd have been telling you stories and singing you songs, maybe even before you were born. Just think what you'd have to pay someone to do that for you now, as an adult learning a language!'

The quality of the teaching and learning at home may vary, but most children reach school age able to communicate pretty well in their native language. They can almost certainly understand spoken English better than I can yet understand spoken street Spanish. I've been comparing my experience with that of my son, who spent several years living in Finland and can speak Finnish well enough to fool a native into thinking that he's Finnish himself. It was a kind of immersion, as all his friends were Finnish. And yet he said to me once, 'I don't know proper Finnish. I can just talk to my friends.' Unlike him I started learning Spanish from a school textbook and learned lists of verbs and puzzled over grammar. Unlike him I'm probably still a long way from fooling anyone into thinking I'm Spanish. Speaking and understanding a language, and reading and writing it are very different things, and crossing the boundary between them can be difficult. Constance Garnett, translator of 71 works from Russian to English, was never comfortable holding a conversation in Russian.

As adult language learners we tend to start with the written language and move across the boundary to the spoken. Children learning to read are crossing the boundary in the opposite direction, exactly the same boundary my son was talking about when he said he didn't speak proper Finnish. 

You know that feeling, when you're learning a foreign language and you haven't really attempted to have a conversation yet and you're anxious about making mistakes or not pronouncing words properly? That almost never happens to a child learning their own language at home, and I don't think it happened with my son in Finland. But if you're not very careful, that's the feeling a child is going to have when they start learning to read, when they start crossing that boundary. Because, for some of them, there is so much they don't know, and so much they can get wrong. That feeling can paralyse adults into not opening their mouths, even to order a croissant and a coffee in a French cafe, and it can have the same effect on a child learning to read.

Luckily, there's a remedy. When you're trying as a teacher to fill that huge gap that exists in some children's experience of written language there's nothing better than the hundreds of brilliant picture books that have been produced by so many brilliant children authors and illustrators over the last fifty years or so. 

Except, just maybe, the books that children write for themselves.

Reading the Carnegie, an illustrated compilation of my blog posts about 84 Carnegie medal winners is available from me at https://maypaul.blogspot.com/ The PDF is free. All you have to do is leave a message.

A Funny Old Journey in Children's Publishing - Joan Lennon

It began back in the 20th century with writing short stories (and I still recommend that as a really useful place to learn, especially for writers who want to write novels) and peddling them to Cricket Magazine. They would take maybe 1 in 3 of what I submitted. Enough success to keep me going.

Stories grew into novels. I had an agent who was, well, useless. And then I was taken on by Fraser Ross Associates. Best move I could have made!

Over the next decade or so, my agent (Lindsey Fraser) worked her tiny socks off, and got my books accepted by different traditional publishers at a rate of 1 or 2 a year. (Different publishers liked different kinds of books from me, so that's the way it went, since I kept writing different kinds of books.)

The grass was green, and time passed.

And then, it stopped. Getting published dried up. I hadn't run out of ideas. I wasn't writing worse (I think I was writing better - well, I mean, it'd be pretty sad to have spent all that time and effort and not got better.) I still finished things on time (I understand that deadlines for writers are hard even when deadlines for publishers are squishy soft), took editing on board, wasn't a diva. I'd done school visits, festival events, taught creative writing workshops, blogged and been polite online. My agent worked hard and harder. But that particular stage had come to an end.

My last YA novel Walking Mountain was traditionally published in 2017. It was nominated for the 2018 Carnegie and went out of print. And though I've gone on writing and my agent has gone on submitting, nobody since has said yes.*

Sound familiar? I know I'm not alone in all this!

So I'm nailing my colours to the mast: once I've finished the current WIP, I will have 2 young adult and 2 adult novels ready and raring to go, and they and I will be setting sail on the sea of self-publishing.

The next stage. Interesting times...**

* I'm talking about children/YA fiction here. Because of a kind invitation from Joan Haig to join her in collaborative non-fiction books, there have been 3 non-fiction yes's from Templar: Talking History, Great Minds, and a solo venture Revolution! (out later this year).

** Since writing this blog, I have been wallowing about in contradictory information and advice about different self-publishing routes - DIY, aggregators, retailers, etc. - and how and if the way the world is going suggests NOT going down the Amazon/Kindle road. Onwards, regardless!

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

FEBRUARY FIRST by Penny Dolan

February, and I'm pondering on why it so often seems a hopeful month.

Perhaps it's because all the December and early January festivities are over? The glitter, the tinsel, the lights and decorations are packed away in boxes. The guests have come and gone, and all the events and outings enjoyed. Rooms have been righted, sheets and duvet covers washed and dried, and spare pillows stowed in the linen cupboard. Even that Ghost of January's Past - the haunted dread of the tax return - has been faced, sent and paid. All is done and over, and the new year has truly begun.

Today, the first of February, is a traditional Irish celebration known as St Brigid's Day or, in older traditions, as 'Imbolc'. The feast falls halfway between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, and marks the start of the lambing season, the time for plant new seeds and, with the growing daylight, the beginning of Spring.

February 2nd is Candlemas, a day in the Catholic calendar associated with the blessing of candles and candle-lit processions. This feast is also known as the Presentation, the day when the Holy Child was taken to the Temple for the first time. Liturgically, Candlemas is also the conclusion of Christmas season, so any fading fir trees or sets of nativity figures should definitely disappear from view.

Meanwhile, February 2nd, in America, is also famous as Groundhog Day and not only for that film. From a Pennsylvanian-German 'hibernation' tradition, this day is when a groundhog emerges from its burrow. If the groundhog - or, back in Europe, a bear or badger - sees its own shadow, the animal will retreat into its den, and winter will continue or six more weeks. However, if the groundhog pops its head out and sees no shadow, spring will be arriving early. 

What? This 'shadow or no shadow' idea puzzled me: who wouldn't want sunshine and a bright day? Who'd want weather that was grey, overcast and with no sun or shadows? 

The answer, it seems, lies in a traditional belief that a bright, clear Candlemas day would herald a prolonged winter. Though there's a pleasure in playing with such old cultural beliefs, I feel sure, in America, there are more things to worry about right now.

But, here and now, what do all those hopes and traditions tell me?

That if I - or you - didn't make or keep those start of January hopes and resolutions,  worry not! Today, the beginning of February is the moment to begin again. This is the time when the daylight becomes stronger, and when spring starts springing. Today, early February, is the real 'start again' season. 

If you are not already settled and busy - as I know some ABBA bloggers will be, the amazing souls - what and where will you be going? 

Is it opening up your big novel project, making more time for 'fill the well' experiences, joining an online writing course or group, sorting through that file of scrappy ideas, deciphering those scribbles on the run still in your pocket notebook, finding that file of hidden, half-forgotten poems, or even wandering through one inspirational book or another.

February feels very much a month for beginning, for finding some sunshine, with or without shadows. Good luck! 

(And of course - oh bother - there's always St Valentine's, available from all good and less-good supermarkets, stores and screens near you . . . Ignore?)

Penny Dolan

The Wrong Handle by Sheena Wilkinson

 Writing is so weird. 

This time last year I finished a book. Nothing weird about that; I'm a writer. My agent sent it on submission. Nobody bit in the first round – sadly, nothing weird about that either, these days. But this wasn’t the usual ‘it’s too quiet to be commercial and too accessible to be literary’ verdict. Instead there was a suggestion that the book lacked something more fundamental; people didn’t even like the pitch.

I wasn’t thrilled, obviously: in my mind I had written a fine historical novel, women-centred, gritty and heartfelt. Exactly the kind of book I – and, I thought, thousands of women, liked to read. But that didn’t seem to be what editors were picking up on. My agent was keen to pull the book from submission rather than flogging a dead horse. I was working on three something elses – True Friends at Fernside and Miss McVey Takes Charge, which came out in the second half of last year, and an untitled and troublesome dual timeline, so the fiction-writing-and-editing part of my brain was not idle.

Sometime, my agent and I agreed, I would have a good look at the abandoned book and see if I could rejig the pitch to make it more appealing/commercial. I didn’t envisage having to do a major rewrite. 

And then, on retreat in December, I read the book again for the first time in months. Not only did I now agree that there was something fundamental missing; I knew was it was. Not only that, but all the ingredients to make the book hookier, tenser and darker were already there. Always had been. There was even – something new for me – a murder. Or rather, there was a death which I – the writer – hadn’t realised was a murder. As for the murderer? Well, she’d been there all the time too. 

my view on retreat 

I’d love to say that I rewrote the book quickly, that my agent fell upon it with glee, that six editors went into battle for it and that it sold at auction for squillions and became the book that revolutionised my career and my fortunes. I mean, that might happen; if I didn’t believe that such things were possible I wouldn’t still be a novelist. So far, after that wonderful week on retreat when so much revealed itself to me, it’s been a matter of trying to steal an hour here and there in between mentoring, teaching, report-writing and school visits.

the kind of thing that stops me writing all day every day 

But every few days I realise something new about the story – sometimes I even wake up with it in my head, and I feel so glad of the chance to remake it. I’m reminded of Cousin Helen’s advice in What Katy Did. Not everything saintly Cousin Helen says has stood the test of time, but her idea that ‘Everything in the world has two handles… One is a smooth handle. If you take hold of it, the thing comes up lightly and easily, but if you seize the rough handle, it hurts your hand and the thing is hard to lift’ fits in very neatly with my book.

I had got hold of the story by the wrong handle and I couldn’t grasp it easily. Now I have the right handle and it’s only a matter of time. 

There's still hope for those squillions! 

 

Puzzling

I wonder whether other SASSIES suffer from the same problem I'm regularly confronted with?

I have an idea for a story. I start to write and the ideas flow. I'm enjoying myself. But when I reach - roughly - the halfway point, the ideas that got me going just... dry up. I sit there, trying to think of ways to proceed and everything I come up with feels wrong. I might even write it. But it keeps feeling wrong. 

And I know it.

What started out as fun becomes anything but.

I haven't found a solution yet.

An Ordinary War

 This year, I am planning to publish a book which has been a very long time in the making. It's inspired by the experiences of my father during the war: he was one of those who didn't get away at Dunkirk. He was captured on the way, and was a prisoner of war for five years.

Like many - probably most - survivors of war, he didn't talk very much about his experiences. Eventually, he began to tell a few stories, mostly funny ones. Towards the end of the last century, when I started writing seriously, I began to write some of them down. We would sit by the fire drinking whisky - me with ginger, him with water - and he would talk about things that happened in the forests of Poland all those years ago. Often, the stories were the same ones repeated: sometimes, his face would darken, and he would say something that hinted at grimmer truths. Once, we were talking about eating - he always ate hearty meals, but never snacked, never put on weight. He said something to the effect of: "You don't know what you're capable of until you've been really hungry." And then lapsed into silence, clearly remembering things that he wasn't going to talk about.

Some time after he died (which was in 2004), I decided I wanted to write a novel based on his experiences. Because the books I was writing were for children and young people, it seemed natural to aim it at young adults. I soon realised that there were massive gaps in my knowledge about what had happened to him, and I began to do research. I'm not a trained researcher, I'm not an academic - I have a degree, but it's in English, not history. So it was an exploration, perhaps, rather than an investigation.

And it was fascinating, and immensely rewarding.

I will write more in future posts about this process. But in this one, I just want to tell you about one little thing - the thing that, if I was trying to be poetic, I could say fanned what was a spark into a flame.

I knew that at the end of the war, Dad had ended up in a camp called Fallingbostell, in north-western Germany, from which he was liberated and then repatriated. In a book I was reading called The Last Escape (a wonderful book, by John Nichol and Tony Rennell), I came across a picture of several emaciated prisoners sitting on the ground, smiling and chatting. One of them looked very much like Dad. The photo was attributed to the Imperial War Museum, so I rang them up to see if they could tell me any more about the men in the picture.

They suggested I should make an appointment to go and see someone there, so I did.

They couldn't tell me any more about the identities of the men in the picture, but they did give me useful suggestions about other avenues I could follow. Their first suggestion was to go to the National Archives in Kew. Every prisoner who came home was supposed to fill in a form, detailing how they'd been treated, which prison camps they'd been in and so on - information which I didn't have.

So off I trotted to Kew, and explained what I was after. The assistant warned me tat the records were not complete: everyone was supposed to fill in a form, but not everyone did. My heart sank. A trait I shared with my father was a deep dislike of form filling. There wouldn't be one for him, I felt sure.

The assistant produced for me a large folder - I expect now that everything's online, but that wasn't the case then - containing the forms for Dad's section of the alphabet. I turned the pages carefully, aware that this was a precious resource, not really expecting to find one for Dad.

But then, there it was. Reginald Bernard Course. I hadn't expected it to be in his handwriting, instantly recognisable from all the letters I'd received over the years. And it wasn't just the handwriting. The answers were brief and to the point, and some were quite brusque. I could absolutely picture Dad, impatient with forms and pen-pushers, wanting to be away, wanting to go home, not interested in making a fuss about what had happened to him. I could almost hear his voice.  I stared at the form, and tears came. I wiped them away surreptitiously, and hoped that no-one had seen.

Brief as the form was, it gave me some answers. it told me where he'd been. It told me he'd tried to escape, three times, once with his old pal Shep, whom I'd taken him to see a few years before.

And it gave me the urge to carry on, to follow the trail.

On deadlines & writing deliciousness - Rowena House

Oops! Long time no post. Apologies. My excuse: I’m finally on a deadline after nigh on six years nibbling away at my seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress, with three (max four) months to get Draft 1 developed, polished, and proof read, including an entirely new narrative perspective on the same events, told in alternate chapters, decided upon last year.

So, about one quarter to one third of a novel to write in three/months. That’s do-able, right?

The writing gods are [ATM] being kind in letting me get on with it, but that’s very unlikely to last on recent form with life duties, so I’m writing and editing daily whenever I can.  

Updates on RowenaHouseAuthor on Facebook if anyone feels like joining me for this last dash, followed by more reflective thoughts about the story, its history, how I’ve bent history and invented stuff, and whether that’s justifiable etc. That’ll be from May-September as I write the critical commentary for the PhD, of which the novel is the main part.  

More good news. I have four readers! Two supervisors and two examiners. Hurrah. While not exactly No. 1 bestseller stuff, four readers are enough to order myself not to waste their time with any residual Draft 1 slop (slop being a 2026 version of Hemingway’s more graphic/honest description of Draft 1). 

Luckily, last November, when I should have been writing an ABBA post, I was en route to one of the classiest, most instructive and motivational retreats I’ve ever been on.

It was a week at the Moniack Mhor writing centre in the hills outside Inverness, Scotland, a place that lots of fine writers have recommended and was high on my wish-list even before they announced that the historical fiction retreat would be led by Lucy Jago, author of A Net for Small Fishes, set just after mine and a lovely, very well-researched read, and Andrew Miller – squee – fresh off the Booker shortlist, whose Land in Winter was the winner in bookshop if (sadly) not on the podium. His Pure has been a touchstone for the voice of this WiP for years and a comfort go-to read for more than a decade. 

To top it all, the other retreaters were super talented, including a dear writer friend off the MA in writing for young people at Bath Spa, Eden Enfield, whose prose for both young people and adult I vastly admire. Honestly, who needs to get published when such deliciousness awaits?

To keep the deliciousness going, I’m thrilled to have been invited by another writer-for-young-people-turned-adult-historical-novelist, Liz Flanagan, to one of her launch events for her English civil war novel, When We Were Divided. 

So looking forward to celebrating its publication with her up in Heptonstall next month (where I haven’t been since 1985) and then getting lost in her story.

Happy writing, editing, reading, plotting, dreaming.

PS I got both copies signed. :0)