I Love You, So I Have To Leave You

I’m organising my leaving do.

No, I’m not quitting An Awfully Big Blog Adventure, but after four years officially on a career break, I have now finally resigned from my teaching job. There is no going back, and it seems right to mark the transition properly.

Do you miss school? people ask me frequently, and I always answer, cynically but truthfully, that the only thing I miss is the money. They will then tend to go on, But you loved teaching! And you were so good at it! Yes, I did, and I was. And when I teach now – at Arvon; in workshops; for organisations like the Irish Writers’ Centre or Story House Ireland, or as part of my role as Royal Literary Fund Fellow, I love recapturing the buzz I felt over twenty years ago when I started teaching English in a large secondary school.

The kind of teaching I do now - SCBWI Ireland all-day course in Cork

But that buzz faded, or died, or did whatever a buzz does when it stops buzzing. Not because I was getting older – I’m still in my forties – but because so much of what made the job enjoyable was being eroded, year on year. Partly it was the crippling admin burden; partly the increasing teaching to the test, which sucked so much of the joy out of the subject. It’s hard to remember why you love literature and language when you’re constantly checking assessment objectives and attainment targets, and even harder to impart that love to young people. It was hard to be expected to leave everything I know about writing -- as an award-winning professional author -- at the classroom door. 

I’ve followed recent debates about what the current emphasis on grammar at the expense of other aspects of language is doing to our children. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/10/bad-grammar-gove-english-killing-children-love-language-adverbials-digraphs

I went to rather an old-fashioned primary school in the seventies. We learned grammar; we even parsed sentences, and when I got to secondary school I had a head start when it came to learning Latin and modern languages, because I knew the correct terms for everything and how a sentence worked. But that knowledge was imparted along with a huge dose of enthusiasm and creativity, and with minimum jargon. I was taught by teachers who had themselves been to school several decades before: they had learned grammar; they understood it, and they were able to pass on that knowledge confidently.  There was no sense that they were teaching it because someone in Westminster had decided they had to.

me as a grammar-loving eleven year old

I love grammar because I was taught to love it by people who understood it. I loved my subject, English. I mourn what is happening to it within the school curriculum and am glad no longer to be part of it. When the GCSE course in my area got rid of literary comprehension in favour of analysing DVD covers (‘multi-modal texts’) I thought I was in an alternative reality, and one for which I didn’t much care. I wouldn’t recommend teaching English in the school system to anyone right now, not if they really love the subject, and that makes me feel sad and almost disloyal. After all, pupils deserve to be taught by those who love the subject!

Recently I did a morning’s creative writing with a cohort of English PGCE students. They loved the chance to be creative and imaginative: I just hope that things change again soon so that they are able to bring this creativity and imagination to their teaching.

Tacking up the Metaphorical Horses – Ruth Hatfield

Last month I wrote about my galloping story, and the delight of chasing after its flicked-up hooves. I didn’t have the time, then, to think about why it was going so well, but I think I’ve now realised part of the reason:

I turned off the ‘edit’ switch.

This does mean that my story starts as one thing and goes on to be many others – horses change colour, people disappear into the wings one moment then turn out to be long-lost in the next, a sedate journey turns into an abrupt van chase, some incredibly dull things are pondered at great length and one of the main characters begins the story crying over a broken clock but within three pages turns out to be a brittle, single-minded person who sheds tragedy with the nonchalance of a spring moult. Or maybe that’s a terrible way to describe it. Who cares? I’ll deal with it later. Later, when I’m editing.

I think I had begun to edit as I was writing first drafts, in pursuit of better structure and clarity, and it was a terrible habit to slide into. I know that editing as you go along (or even before you put words on the page) does work for some people, but it really didn’t for me. I became conscious all the time that I was Writing a Book, instead of just indulging myself in a wild, amusing speculation. The result was joyless.

I went to a school recently to do some workshops, and one of the lovely and enthusiastic teachers said that she hoped I would impress upon the kids the importance of editing, because they were always so reluctant to do it. Inside, I felt metaphorical heels digging themselves in. Of course revising and reworking is vital, and it’s important to learn that the more effortless and light a piece seems, the harder a writer has probably worked to make it so. But for some of us, editing is painful, turgid and difficult, and we need enough faith and joy in our original work to make it worth all the effort.

I didn’t want to tell those kids to bear in mind the importance of editing. I wanted to tell them – Splurge! Vomit! Gallop! Get it all down – none of it is wasted IF YOU ENJOY IT! Happiness can be hard to come by, sometimes. If something brings you pleasure, that’s an end in itself. If you think it’s worth it, when you’ve had your fun, you can bring out the dissecting kit and start slicing it apart and pulling out its entrails. But make sure you’ve given yourself the best chance to enjoy the journey first.

I didn’t do the Dead Poets Society lecture, of course. I just got on with trying to deliver my workshop in what I hoped was an encouraging, freeing way. I’m very aware that there are many different ways to enjoy writing – I remember an interview with Agatha Christie in which she said something about how she enjoyed all the planning but found the actual writing itself a dead bore (god knows what she thought about editing). I guess what I’m thinking about at the moment is that fact that in the quest to improve my storytelling, I went too far into territory that doesn’t suit me. Advice about how to write books is always interesting, but perhaps you should only take on board advice that your heart agrees with, in one way or another.

In short, I suppose that when I’m tacking up my metaphorical horses, I’ve learnt that if I spend an hour grooming the pony till it gleams, then the whole ride remembering to keep my heels down and my elbows in, I might ride nicely but I probably won’t feel it’s been time well-spent. A quick brushing-off of mud and a canter up a hill – that’s more like it!

And (obligatory SATS dig) don’t get me started on the idea that you can’t write proper stories until you can understand complex grammar…