Twelve Steps to Punctuation by Steve Gladwin

We feel ashamed about many things. Some of these are easy to share and others not so, but sharing the more difficult things can bring a form of healing and even a catharsis. This is what always seems to happen at the end of certain books where an act or statement at the right time will in turn set right many of the bad things which have gone before.

Then there are those things which aren't quite as easy to share. I have been an abba blogger now for over eighteen months and so I feel now is the time to share my guilty and perhaps not so closely guarded secret.Maybe some of you have guessed and are already shaking your head or brandishing a metaphorical red pen as you read my monthly thoughts. No it’s not the fact that I waffle, although I can well imagine that were there a twelve step programme for wafflers, I might be one of the first through the door, (you certainly would – ed!)

Let's instead conjure up the darkened room or cellar where myself and my fellow sufferers are sitting in a semi-circle while our doughty facilitator allows us each our turn to speak. Almost before I'm ready, it's my turn. I stand up awkwardly because this is my first time and I can’t yet believe that the suffering and embarrassment of my fellows can be in any way be equal to mine. I clear my throat and hear a tiny squeak of a voice confess that -

‘My name is Steve and I’m a bad punctuator!’

‘Welcome Steve’, says a roomful of fellow bad punctuators, and I feel a little better. Then I tell everyone else why I am here tonight.

The young writer contemplates a life of punctuation failure!

The Pupil’s Tale

‘It was a long time before I knew I had a problem with punctuation. I went to a pretty good school but it was never really emphasised and certainly no-one picked up much on things like the use of commas, or the correct use of ‘and’or‘but’ and certainly not the - to me at least – wholly pointless colon and semi-colon. Maybe it was because I was thought to be a good storyteller right from the infant days of picture story, to junior school composition and right on through secondary school into higher education. So praise concentrated on all that rather than criticism of my more obvious technical deficiencies. Or maybe - as seems more likely, I either remained completely oblivious of my writing’s failings or else ignored them, (either of these approaches the oblivious or the stubborn – would be equally like me!)

When I wrote my first proper story, ‘The Chronicles of Action’ in my new red notebook, my parents and sister chose to enjoy it rather than offer criticism.. When I wrote my first play, ‘Is the Sultan Guilty?’ (he wasn’t!) for the Hereford School House Drama Competition, punctuation wasn’t the issue either. Maybe spelling was, but I would steadily improve at both that and grammar and besides it was plot the judges were looking for.

The Tutor and Marker’s Tale

'As I began to write more and more stories and less and less plays, the dreaded punctuation became an issue. Ironically, part of my Further Education work at two of the three colleges I’ve taught at was as an English teacher for GCSE retake students. In the two full years I taught there, over 70% of the students passed. Their work involved studying the Welsh poets Meic Jenkins, and RS Thomas, as well as Arthur Miller’s ‘A View from the Bridge’ and at least one creative composition and written comprehension. What can I say! Despite my not being able to teach correct punctuation or grammar, (because I may not have recognised it as such in 2005,) a huge percentage of them passed. In summer 2006 I even served as an examiner for Paper One for WJEC and there were no clanging alarm bells for that, only a question mark about my generosity marks wise  What I remember instead is marking 450 papers and going slowly mad while despairing of the quality of any than about fifty of them, (mostly the same school). One poor soul had simply written on the right hand page, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this.’ This simple confession broke my heart just a little. Overall however I was glad to have been able to give two years of my best to help no more than thirty five students of varying ages through a hurdle they had already refused..

My editor in disguise to protect her anonymity!

The Editor’s Tale

None of this would have mattered normally for we all go through life with crosses to bear and most are a great deal worse. In the meantime I just carried on writing, saving the occasional embarrassing moment. One of these came when I sent in the first part of a serial fantasy story for a site called keepitcoming.  The editor liked my story but was a little miffed at some of the technical stuff. Didn’t I know that the inverted commas go after the full stop or comma? No maam, I honestly didn’t, and will try to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I did try after that. but you wouldn’t believe how hard it was, and I still get it wrong now and then. People never talk about how this sort of thing feels and do you know, we really should.

What changed everything was when I sent a hopeful MS of my first real attempt at a children’s book to Pont Books here in Wales, and got a positive but qualified response. This led to a deal of re-writing where only once did my wonderful editor let rip with her frustration at a small part of my technical deficiencies, (in this case the inverted commas weren’t misplaced, there were just too many of them).

I look back now - as I’m sure many writers do - at the standard of what I sent her. My submissions are still not wonderfully set out and I think my dyspraxia has as much to do with that as anything, but I try and comfort myself by thinking an editor or agent must have had a great deal worse. 

  

Anyway the happy ending to this part of my story is that the book she spent so much hair tearing time over, ‘The Seven’ was eventually published in 2013 and was then short listed for the Tir Na N-og prize.. She had used all of her considerable technical skills and experience to draw the sow's ear technical elements out of my baby and turn the story into enough of a silk purse to impress a panel of judges. I will always be grateful to her for that.

The Raven calls and complains about the punctuation!

The Raven’s Tale

Sometime in October, my need for punctuation twelve-step therapy caught up with me and just when I thought I was doing well. Our wonderful book ‘The Raven’s Call’ – a new way of using stories and the old cycle of the year to help deal with loss and change – went out into an unsuspecting and cruel world and as it turned out, as Richard Duke of Gloucester might put it, ‘scarce half made up.’ Due to a sequence of accidents, the proof-reading hadn't been done and all my deficiencies were suddenly out there for all to see, thus obscuring the effort I’d taken on the stories and their so important message. The first comment we got back was that although it looked beautiful, there were errors throughout.

Luckily few copies had gone out and the people we sold them to or gave to contributors, came to see the book for its qualities and not its deficiencies. We even started to joke about it being ‘the quirky original’ Now, as we await the re-launch of the book I try not to feel so embarrassed, but it’s not always easy. It doesn’t of course help that I am dyspraxic, because of course part of that can be about missing the things which are right in front of you. I am not, needless to say, a driver!

Eats, Shoots and Complains.

At the end of Bill Bryson’s hilarious 'The Road to Little Dribbling',  his latest UK travelogue cum diatribe, he writes down a list of all of his pet hates. It’s clearly a wonderful exercise and we should all try it and maybe have.

.

I have a substantial list of such things but high on the list would be any books which hanker after perfection in things like punctuation or grammar. It might be highly amusing for some people to notice where their local grocer or publican has misplaced his apostrophe, but for all they know the whole business might for him be one continuous hell and he’s just had a stab at it and hopes to hell he’s right. Too many of these pedant’s guides to perfection ignore the very real truth that most people and yes even professional children’s writers, don’t possess enough skills to know where one thing should go and another be missed off. Instead people do well to do as well as they do in a lot of cases and I should know!

But now the time has come for change and an end to our lifelong shame. So come forth my fellow sufferers from your caves and underground concealment. Come forth and be guided into all your future success and a light now longer dulled by feelings of guilt or inadequacy.

That then is my story. Thank you for listening.'

PS This blog is doubtless littered, like my others, with punctuation errors and the occasional bit of bad grammar. Count them by all means but please don’t tell me or I might go home and take my ball back.

PPS The group asked me to leave by the way!

        

Steve Gladwin - 'Grove of Seven' and 'The Year in Mind'

Writer, Performer and Teacher

Author of 'The Seven' and 'The Raven's Call'

www.stevegladwin.co.uk

Slaying Your Darlings by Steve Gladwin

Sometime last summer I planned a murder. Before I ever carried it out I had – like anyone with such an exacting task to perform - to give careful and meticulous thought to the method. I could not for example just dive in with a sudden slash to the throat or hand over the cup of deadly cyanide with my most winning smile! To begin with I would have to introduce myself to the victim, ingratiate myself with her and then alas having gained her trust, move in for the kill.

Luckily I am not really a murderer and reading about it in a lot of detective stories is hopefully as close as I come. But what I was planning at the time did feel like a murder. What I was actually planning was a literary death and it was made all the more poignant that in order for her to die, I would first have to introduce my character, have me and my potential audience warm to and grow accustomed to her and then kill her off in a rather wasteful, almost casual way.

Well as the book with my lost, brave heroine is currently trying to bag an agent, I live in the usual hope of success we writers have and therefore don’t want to give any more details in case she’s up there jostling for position with J.K. and David Walliams some day. So her name and the actual nature of her demise will in the meantime remain a secret.

The scene of my crime (Sssh)

But planning,( and sadly executing) a literary death, did get me to thinking both about the effect of the death of a character and the various ways in which we do it.

I wrote a version of this blog before Christmas and in it I talked about how two literary and one movie deaths had had such a great effect on me. Realising that the final result was perhaps veering a little too much away from a children’s book blog, I’m going to leave leave Inspector Morse and the character of Kevin Laine in my favourite series of fantasy books, Guy Gavriel Kay’s wonderful ‘The Fionavar Tapestry’ for another time. Instead I will again weep long and copious tears about the death of Boromir in the film of The Fellowship of the Ring. Before I do however there is a connection between the second and third of these because Guy Gavriel Kay actually spent a year as Christopher Tolkien's assistant on ‘The Silmarillion’.

Anyway I’m a fairly hardy and hard bitten male, if a little emotional in places, ( oh well alright - a lot!) but every time I see Sean Bean shot through with those massive Uruk Hai arrows like some fantasy St Sebastian – well I’m all over the place. I’m sure mostly it’s the bloody soundtrack, as it so often is, but I have a further theory. Basically we became so used to seeing Sean Bean not die in every episode of Sharpe that we can’t quite believe that he does and this really is the end. I’ve never got that from the book itself or the much loved radio adaptation, but here I get it every time and please doctor what is the cure?

Of course there doesn’t need to be one, does there, for where's the harm in letting our emotions over-rule our ‘don’t be so soppy’ inner castigator. Of course we need to do the whole cathartic experience far more often than we do, and if more of us did and had, we would surely be a far healthier and happier world.

The death scene of course is a long and for the most part honourable tradition, particularly in the theatre where it can be as hilarious as Bottom’s stop-start approach in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or in most operas where dying sopranos can somehow miraculously summon enough breath and life to give it their last all in a final belter of an aria. There are of course many very sad death scenes, Hamlet’s adding to the already accumulated pile of stabbed and poisoned bodies in the castle at Elsinore, or Cleopatra’s making an asp of herself in Antony and Cleopatra are two that spring to mind, and in Love’s Labours Lost the whole joy of the imminent uniting of four pairs of lovers is unfortunately compromised by the death of the King of France, (thoughtless or what?) The whole mood of the play darkens and maybe that’s why Shakespeare needed the now lost sequel, Love’s Labours Won.

Like a great many people I imagine I was transifixed by the BBC’s recent tribute to Terry Pratchett -Back in Black’, and those of you with eighteen month old memories may remember that he featured in my very first official blog here.

Anyway perhaps I need to give a spoiler alert here to anyone who hasn’t read Terry Pratchett’s last book ‘The Shepherd’s Crown. Are you looking away? Good.

At the very beginning of the book a much loved character, long associated with the author himself is killed off. It’s both unexpected and rather shocking,( although you get enough of a clue if you’ve read the dedication first). It’s also very brave because as the documentary makes out, it was his last book and he knew he was nearing the end. Likewise the character, who’d known it for a long time, so all the preparations made for the literary death were as meticulous as both a fan and reader would expect.

What makes a character someone you simply can’t kill off? I mean look at Stephen King and all the fuss that Misery Chastain’s greatest fan made in ‘Misery’. Then of course there are those characters who return more or less by popular demand, even if the reader has seen them in his or her mind’s eye hurtling to their death from a treacherous waterfall whilst grappling with their arch nemesis!

However when a long running popular character is killed off in a children’s book, there is a different level of responsibility, because we have to look to the possible shocked sensibilities of someone at an impressionable age. This I found out to my cost after my then dentist had bought ‘The Seven’ and given it to her eight year old to read. I wondered at the time why she didn’t seem as communicative as she examined my mouth and was maybe was just slightly rougher. It turned out that her eight year old girl had been somewhat traumatised by the section in which my hero Tony talks to his mum’s ghost. The scene is deliberately casual, but is also - for obvious reasons - somewhat emotionally charged. Tony’s mum looks like his mum and he can even touch her, but eventually she begins to fade as the moon does. As the book was originally targeted at 8-11 year olds but eventually re-assigned to Young Adults she maybe had a point. (At least this wasn’t Marathon Man!

How often, I wonder, does a writer know that he or she will have to kill off a character? How many of us might even find ourselves wielding the savage pen or keyboard without even being aware that we were intending to do so?

And if we do decide to off our favourite, might there still be the glimmer of a second chance of an EastEnders type miraculous revival, or in the case of Dallas and the famous Bobby Ewing shower scene, the dream of a whole series.

Who knows the answer to some of these questions, because for the most part they remain quite rightly a mere gleam in the imagination of the writer. But Should any of my characters encounter me hanging over the page with a certain glint in my eye, be very scared!   

The unkindest cut of all

1. 
   

   

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Steve Gladwin - 'Grove of Seven' and 'The Year in MInd'

Writer, Performer and Teacher

Author of 'The Seven' and 'The Raven's Call'

www.stevegladwin.co.uk

The First Rule Of Death Club by Steve Gladwin

There are many different entrances to the land of the dead.

Death is not a thing we joke about, but perhaps we should do it more. A few years ago, through a project called Are You Having A Laugh, I tried a fresh approach with year 6 children in Powys. I spent a morning entertaining them with daft stories and clown routines, before, in the afternoon, telling them three stories, each of which contained a loss of some sort. All I did after I’d told the last story, was to ask the class why the stories I'd told in the morning, and those they’d just heard - were different. This led to the simplest of discussion, after which they composed stories and drawings of the Green Children, (from Kevin Crossley Holland's adaptation) and the sad giants, (An African myth of the Mensi people) they’d heard about. The schools all said how much they appreciated the gentle approach and how easy it would be to take it further in their own work.

Some may be more daunting than others!

Miss Bertram copyright Rose Foran - The Raven's Call 2016

Just recently I have come rather late to a particular party. Now too often such things will follow a familiar and frustrating pattern. You know the sort of thing - you arrive to find only lemonade and a giant bottle of lager so cheap that the bottle could double as a weapon, the buffet has long been picked over and, utterly starving, you reach out for the last piece of raspberry pavlova, (insert personal preference!), only to find that some big bloke with tattoos has first dibs on it. Well yes, I have been to parties like that, but the party I’ve joined has thankfully none of those features because this particular party is ‘reading children’s books’ You, of course, have all been there from the start feasting, on a regular series of tit bits, with a full range of wine and spirits to call on as well as the cheap lager.

As I said in my last blog, I read an awful lot when I was a child and have done so intermittently since. In recent years of course I’ve Rowlinged and Pullmaned, and on several joyful occasions, Almonded, (but more about that in a while). Only in the last year however, have I made a serious return to those towering shelves of childhood with their sometimes dog-eared books. Apart from the usual sources I have been considerably aided by the wonderful Charney and Folly Farm invention of book swaps in which, in return for foisting my gaily coloured flimsy on unsuspecting fellow authors, In return I have come away with a huge bag of swag. Recent adventures have taken me across trackless siberian wastes,  or had me listening to the whispering of grass. I have gone through seven hells of care home and trod the shining sands of Pembrokeshire. To everyone involved, much thanks, but at the same time I have chased books recommended by fellow authors and ones I’ve just happened to come across.

 - while others may seem far more familiar.

There are those which may appear to be well trodden, familiar walkways -

So many of those books - whether given, borrowed or swapped- deal with the theme of loss, - just as my own book The Seven does - and each one deals with it in a different way. Sometimes the land or the ruler is so cruel that it might be a pleasure to die and escape both. Or a character you cannot imagine being dead suddenly and shockingly is. Even in the books where death doesn't lie raw and bleeding, there may be the shadow of the lost sibling or parent.


Death is of course ever present from the moment we are born to grow (hopefully gently) rather than suddenly towards it. However what being a reawakened lover of children’s books, (yes I know - where have I been?), has made me realise, is just how many wonderful and sensitive books there are out there dealing with it. 

In a previous blog, I discussed the idea of an author’s intent - when he or she chooses to adapt a myth or traditional tale - and how it might differ from say a storyteller, who might find the audience who feel that they own that story, sitting unsmiling with folded arms in front of them as they perform. I suggested the idea that as long as the original intent is in some way ‘honourable’, the story can take any amount of ‘mucking about with’. There was an interesting discussion following my blog and I’ve thought about it a lot since. Among the thoughts I’ve had, is of course that it also depends on whether we have anything new to say. When it comes to the theme of death I’ve come to the conclusion surprisingly, that there may be multiple new things to say and ways to express them.

The book I’ve just finished is David Almond's A Song For Ella Grey. Yes as usual I’ve come late to the party, but this time - and perhaps even more gladly - I have come late to the wake.

How do you go about putting fresh clothes on a myth so old that it is part of the land it was born in, as much as the language? Perhaps one way of doing it is to give the story a new birth in a new land.

How do you write something new about love when so many words have already flowed? And how can there be a new way of capturing that particular combination of joy and pain? Perhaps you literally put a new mask on it, so that - as Brecht would have it - both the character and you the reader, peer out not through unfamiliar eyes.

- while there are those which may take an entire lifetime.

And how on earth do you write something new about death when all the grief and tears have been swallowed, washed and wrung out? Just maybe, like David Almond, and so many more of you, you create a world or a feeling so moving and believable, that for the short blessed time you inhabit it, you come to no longer fear it, and when at last you come away from it, and time returns once more to it’s natural state, you are forever changed, and despite all the loss and grief, you would not have it any other way.

The first rule of Death Club is that we talk about it far more than we think and the authors of children’s books do it better than anyone.  

'You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself

Buddha

Finding The Awen Part Two

‘If Music Be The Food Of Love?’

On the first night of my first Charney in July, Ruth, Tortie and John were asked to select the three books they would take to their desert island. They were also asked to select one piece of music. As a person somewhat shamefully ill versed in children’s books, (see final placing of our team in Charney Quiz Night),  I ended up thinking more about the music I would choose.

We must have all mulled over the equivalent of our eight gramophone records and had tremendous difficulty whittling them down to eight. However I suspect that the world is divided into those who do and don’t appreciate music and those like me, who simply couldn’t exist without it. 

I was brought up in a household where we only really listened to classical music. Apart from occasional excursions into the world of easy listening with the likes of Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass, (aaargh) and records of children’s favourites like Thunderbirds, we were resolutely classical with a large C. I do remember Eye Level - the theme from Van Der Valk by the Simon Park Orchestra once sneaking past the guards but, apart from a slight slackening of the regime when my sister and I were allowed to watch the Christmas Top of The Pops on the portable in the “other room’, we got to hear very little else.

'ome milady'

The reason for this was simply that my dad didn’t want to listen to things he didn’t like. (Mum just put radio 2 on every morning when he was at work). They had met at a Grimsby Operatic Society and continued to sing in local choral societies until they moved to Somerset several years ago. My mum was a well known amateur soprano who could well have turned professional if she hadn’t had us. My parents still have in their possession, a programme of The Messiah, where mum is the soprano soloist and the later to be Dame Janet Baker is merely in the chorus!

Maybe I should have fought against classical music but instead I came to love and embrace it with a warmth and trust which has never left me. As a ten year old I got up on one of the dining chairs and conducted Bach or Tchaikovsky to my heart’s content. I sang in schools choirs and played flute in school and the local youth orchestra and of course I played a lot of records. At the age of seventeen my dad introduced me to Wagner and The Ring in particular. For my eighteenth birthday invitations, he did me a beautiful white chalk drawing on black of Siegfried breaking the Wanderer/Wotan’s spear. I must have been the only eighteen year old to receive the triple live album Yessongs from his mates and Karajan’s ring cycle from my parents!

Thomas Stewart as Wotan/Wanderer in a rehearsal photo from St Francisco Opera' s production of Siegfried in the Ring Summer Festival of 1985

This post however is not all about my early grounding in the music that I still love, but about how it has continued to inspire and accompany my writing. As I write this blog I am listening to Karajan’s (him again!) classic recording of Mozart’s Magic Flute and before that Simon Keenlyside singing of Schumann songs; my current passion. Music is always with me and normally I I cannot write without it. The book I completed a few months ago was variously accompanied by Dvorak symphonies, Brahms piano concertos and Bach’s Mass in B Minor. I have had many happy creative moments with Tchaikovsky, Smetana’s Ma Vlast and of course Wagner.

I have however an awen composer, one guaranteed to get both my creative and spiritual juices flowing. Such a composer is Vaughan Williams and I am returning the compliment by writing a novel about him. It would not be exaggerating to say that without him there would probably not have been any writing in the last however many years. My book The Seven was written almost entirely to his symphonies number 3 and 5 and some of the most profound and sometimes sad moments in my life have been accompaniment by the final 'passacaglia' movement of the fifth. Writing ‘The Enchantment of Mr Williams’ I have had several pieces of VW as regular accompaniment but particularly Flos Campi. Donna Nobis Pacem and Sancta Civitas, That's a fair mix of an erotically charged hymn based on the Song of Songs, a war requiem, and a vision of the apocalypse.

I have also picked up some wonderful quotes while researching him. When told by a rather intense and god fearing fellow composer that ‘I wrote my requiem almost entirely on my knees’, he replied.

‘Really. I Wrote all of Sancta Civitas sitting on my bum!’

VW possibly sitting on his bum, (image thanks to www.gustavmahler.eu)

For all those intense years of listening I’ve realised in the last few months that I have hardly ever really listened to music properly It has always been either in the background  or accompanying work. What has in so many ways provided me with 'awen' has in others deprived me of listening.

Now I have a complementary experience to the former. Instead of inspirational background I can see and feel more of what is beyond.Like a Shakespeare play which you come to know as director or actor rather than simply as reader or audience member, the resonances go deeper. If you are lucky they also leave you forever changed.

So what took me so long? And how about anyone else? Is music part of your daily diet, awen to your writing, or just a blessed nuisance?


References

Find out more about VW and his music through the official society

http://www.rvwsociety.com/

The amazing archive of the long running radio show which started all the trouble!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs/find-a-castaway

My book, The Seven.

http://www.gomer.co.uk/index.php/the-seven.html  

My adventures in story and drama.

https://gwernseven.wordpress.com/