Free-wheeling and Unfettered - Joan Lennon

Let me share with you some structures, made by a child, before the tidiness and homogeneity of the world's expectations have come in and said, NO! That's NOT how you do it! It won't be long before the flamboyance is lost and the complete and untrammelled ignoring of physics and general laws of architecture are suppressed.

I'm not dissing physics or the laws of architecture - I'm not an idiot! - I'm just celebrating imagination that is free-wheeling, unfettered and unselfconscious. (Apparently, my room is the one with the blue triangle and the view. I'm chuffed to be invited and will stay as long as it lasts.)

Sir Ken Robinson has insightful things to say about this kind of creativity in children and in human beings generally, which you can access on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SirKenRobinson) or Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/sirkenrobinson/) and longer talks on Youtube.

And thank you to children for reminding us.

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

Childly perceptions - 2 - Clémentine Beauvais

In last month's post I talked about those childly perceptions friends tell us about, and I got some lovely comments - thank you, Susan, Sue and Brenda! (Sue: I meant this by door closers!).

Sue also commented:

'I thought that when you grew up, there was automatically a World War, because My grandparents had one when they grew up, and so did my parents. Jolly, eh!'

Jolly indeed, and it reminded me of two more childly perceptions I hadn't mentioned:

The ineluctable kidnapping

When I was a child, I was convinced all children got kidnapped at some point in their lives. It was the 1990s, in France and Belgium a time marked by the terrifying, and enormously mediatised, abductions and subsequent deaths of a number of young girls by Belgian kidnapper Marc Dutroux. I was hardly ever allowed outside, we had endless stranger-danger type talks, short TV programmes, classroom discussions, etc. Clearly, I heard so much about the whole thing that I ended up thinking at the same time that it was an inevitable fact of life, yet that it was my duty to somehow avoid it when - rather than if - it happened.

The terror lasted well into my teens, and I wasn't the only one. In fact my closest friend was so scared of being kidnapped, too, that at the age of 14 or so, she confided in her psychologist about it (she was seeing a child psychologist for other, though not entirely disconnected, reasons). The dialogue, as she recounted it to me, went something like this:

Friend: When I walk down the pavement, I'm scared of walking on the curb side, because a car might pull in, open a door and take me. But I'm scared of walking too close to the buildings, because then a door might open there and take me.

Psychologist: I think you should walk bang in the middle.

We do find it funny today, but I remember that at the time we took that advice extremely seriously.

The Eternal German War

A friend of mine, as progressive and liberal left as anyone, was walking down the street with his then-5-year-old daughter, and suddenly the child said, pointing at a homeless lady: 'She should just go back to her country!' My friend, horrified to hear that, proceeded to tell his daughter that it was an extremely cruel and unfair thing to say; I don't know who's put that idea in your head, he said, but [cue long clumsy impromptu political lesson about economic inequalities more or less tailored for 5-year-olds].

'Plus', he added, 'not everyone's got a country to go back to even if they wanted to, you know! Maybe this lady comes from a country that is at war.'

Upon which, the five-year-old gravely nodded. 'Ah!...' she said, struck with sudden, empathetic understanding. 'Germany...'

I actually love those two childly perceptions because they interpelate us as children's authors too - where could they possibly have got the idea that Germany is permanently at war and that being kidnapped as a child is something like a fact of life?

Sue's comment also shows how much childly perceptions are generationally variable, and I wonder what childly perceptions are developing as we speak. What are today's tiny kids believing about the world, about themselves?

About door closers?

-------------------------------

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). She has also written a picturebook illustrated by Maisie Paradise Shearring, Hello, Monster! (Thames and Hudson, 2018).

MY IMAGINATION by Val Tyler

Hay Festival.

I love it.

People don’t only read and talk about books, they inhale them.

Each year as I infiltrate the lively enchanted throng, my imagination takes flight and I am transported to castles on the green hills beyond. Brightly coloured fluttering flags form a welcome to the heroine in an amazing dress, shimmering in the light. She is bright and bold and knows no fear. Valiantly, she dispels evil from the land, the sun shines and…

Well, you get the picture. This flight of fancy isn’t very original and will never make the cut, but most of my musings don’t, they simply evaporate into the mists of time.

When I return to certain places, the surroundings can trigger old imaginings and Hay Festival is no different. I expect to conjure up something bright and lively with colour and happiness.

Each year as I arrive, I look down the tunnel of canvas into the vibrant world of books, their readers and writers. Fluttering flags, bright colours, and the hum of expectation and excitement consume me. My heart beats faster and I am transported to that place where only Hay Festival can take me.

This year was different. For a start, I went on my own. I’d never done that before. Seeing policemen with submachine guns is always a shock, but they’d been around last year too and I am thankful that precautions are taken to protect us.

I was arriving at a time when the children had mostly been taken home. Their parents and other adults who were coming to the 7 o’clocks hadn’t yet arrived. As my bag was searched and I looked down the tunnel of canvas, I was greeted with… well… nothing really. No buzz, only faded colours and, above all, few people.

Hay Festival was deserted.

In its defence, I must tell you there had just been a rainstorm and people had fled in their droves, leaving a festival I’d never experienced before. It was like walking through a ghost town. Few people had braved the conditions. The Festival I knew and loved had been washed away.

As I waited in the queue, I was in a dark place. Hushed tones of bedraggled people transformed in my world to folks full of fear and deception. Someone coughed. Eyes darted towards him apprehensively. A brolly dropped. We dived for cover. Dark shadows seeped from the tent behind us. Men in black uniforms with heavy guns huddled us together. In fear, we shuffled into the marquee, anxious faces, fearful eyes, trembling hands.

A woman shouted ‘Back off’, holding her hand towards us and we cringed into our seats as...

…everyone burst out laughing. Ruth Jones had just slipped into the character of Nessa from Gavin and Stacey. We applauded.

My imagination runs away with me some times.

The Secret Manuscript – by Ruth Hatfield

Hands up – who’s got a secret manuscript? No, I don’t mean that novel you’ve had half-written for years in a drawer, waiting for the perfect ending or the will to finish. I mean the real secret manuscript, the one that you delight in writing – maybe even taking time away from your ‘proper’ writing to write – into which you throw all your worst clichés and ham-fisted phrases, your most stereotypical and devastating characters, your wildest dreams and your uber-wildest dreams. That manuscript: the one you’re never going to show to ANYONE, EVER. In fact it’s possibly the only Word file on your computer which is password protected with the name of your most embarrassing crush.

Naively, it didn’t really occur to me until quite recently that the secret manuscript must be a common thing. But the more I think about it, the more I realise that a lot of us must have one. In my recent break from writing to do a bit of archaeology work, I took my current Work In Progress abroad with me, sure that I would get round to some editing in the evenings. I didn’t.

What I did instead was write my secret manuscript. I’m not, of course, going to tell you anything about it – honestly, you probably can’t imagine how ridiculous and derivative and devastatingly fantastic it is. But I did confess to a fellow writer that I was letting myself write a whole story that purposefully isn’t for public display. Or any display at all, in fact. And my correspondent didn’t think that was at all strange. She referred to it as playing, and noted wisely that we should all give ourselves time to play.

We talk a lot about playing in writing, and I tend to assume we mean playing games – mostly structured games, with some actual purpose. Word games. Imagination games. Little challenges designed to open up our minds and help us learn how to navigate our ways around the realms of our subconscious. I guess I was thinking of playing as being a preliminary stage in the actual writing of actual stories.

But my secret manuscript isn’t that at all. It’s an end in itself. It’s pure lazy pleasure. The writing is purposefully outrageous and horrible. The characters are anything I want them to be. If I want them to be different, they change immediately. If I can’t be bothered to write a bit, I don’t write it. If I want them to break off what they’re doing and have an in-depth discussion of what causes bone splints in horses, then that’s what they’ll discuss.

And oddly, for something so self-indulgent, my interest in the secret manuscript wanes and waxes. It reached absolute fever pitch while I was away, to the extent that for a week or so I wrote about 3,000 words a day, in the time when I should have been taking an afternoon nap. It’s sort of faded away, now, although I’m sure it’ll be back.

So what was it was all for, that frenzy of imagining, of writing? The answers are simple. It was for fun. It was to remind me that I can be so excited about a story that I don’t want to talk to anyone, don’t want to think about anything else. It was to remind me that in the realm of my imagination, anything can happen, and it doesn’t have to make sense or be realistic or only use one adjective where seven will do perfectly well.

The secret manuscript is having a well-deserved sleep, just now, and I feel much happier about turning back to my real Work In Progress. Because I think the best thing the secret manuscript reminded me of is that I started this writing lark because I enjoyed it, and because my imagination was a place in which I could roam free. It still is that, and it always will be. So the editing I’m currently doing can’t be that hard, or that bad, can it? I’m only editing a story I wrote because I wanted to write it, and it came from a place I controlled, and was happy in. It can’t be as awful a task as I became convinced it was.

Although saying that does remind me that perhaps the best joy of all is that the secret manuscript will never have to be edited. Those adjective strings will stay, the bone splints will stay, the absurd and the heroic and the irredeemably impossible will stay. It feels like a very dirty, guilty, horrific, wonderful, glorious, marvellous, time-wasting secret, except I’m 99% certain that most of you will know exactly what I’m talking about…

The Power of 'I Don’t Know' – Lari Don

I think I’ve worked out where stories live.

I was touring Northern Ireland last month, with the Scottish Book Trust’s Scottish Friendly Book Tour, chatting about my new Spellchasers trilogy. I met almost 1,500 fabulous friendly imaginative primary children, I shared my stories with them, and I encouraged them to come up with story ideas of their own.

In a school towards the end of the tour, one wee boy was imagining an exciting story about shapeshifters chasing each other, and I was asking open questions to prompt him. But suddenly his chase scene ground to a halt.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what happens next.”

His face fell, and I could see his confidence draining away.

“But ‘I don’t know’ is brilliant,” I said. “’I don’t know’ is how I write stories.”

He frowned at me.

I pulled out the half dozen notebooks I keep in my briefcase. “These are filled with questions I don’t know the answer to, and all my scribbled attempts to find the answer,” I said. “All my novels are answers to questions that I didn’t know the answer to when I started.

“‘I don’t know’ means that you have to find out. ‘I don’t know’ means that you have to imagine, invent, discover what happens next. And that’s what writing is!”

The wee boy started to perk up.

“’I don’t know’ is a good thing. It means you aren’t writing something obvious or predictable! ‘I don’t know’ means you’re writing something new and exciting. You might have to stop and think and play with ideas and come up with an answer to the question, but ‘I don’t know’ means you have a story worth playing with.”

The wee boy grinned, and started to think about all the possible answers to fill in his ‘I don’t know’.

And I realised that I hadn’t just been saying something positive to give confidence back to a wee boy and his shapeshifters. I had discovered a truth about my own writing. When I first discuss a novel idea with an editor, I can almost always describe the main character, their big problem, the baddie, and the first few scenes. But fairly soon after that, there’s a point where I say quite cheerfully: ‘...and I don’t know what happens next. I don’t know how they solve the problem and defeat the baddie, but I’m sure I’ll find out while I write.’ And, so far, I always have...

Those are the stories that excite me, the ones with great big ‘I don’t know’s in the middle and at the end, because I want to write them to find out.

That’s where stories live, for me, and I hope for that wee boy. Stories live inside ‘I don’t know’, and the fun is in finding them!

Lari Don is the award-winning author of more than 20 books for all ages, including fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales, a teen thriller and novellas for reluctant readers.

Lari’s website 

Lari’s own blog

Lari on Twitter

Lari on Facebook

RUNNING WILD IN SUMMER – Dianne Hofmeyr

Do you remember the long dusk evenings of childhood summers? Staying up late, running wild with friends, dashing and dancing about, the sound of sprinklers, the smell of grass, where even the pools of light from streetlights falling on tarred pavement seemed to take on another magic.

Joseph Coello, whose debut poetry collection, Werewolf Club Rules, published by Frances Lincoln, with its wonderful cover by John O’Leary of a werewolf with teddy button eyes, which won the CLPE Poetry Award 2015, maintains running wild as a child was the well for much of his work. Sita Bramachari who was in conversation with him at the Hay Festival, posted a blog on the Book Trust site recently. I hope she won't mind me repeating some of what she said here:  His words really spoke to me about how much free time and living in the open space of the imagination was part of what I longed for as a child at the end of every summer term.

 Joseph Coello: ‘There were no gardens for each flat, so we would play out together in Victoria Gardens and climb the walls. There was a gargoyle there we called 'The Devil's Head' which was a Satyr fountain, chipped and broken and made of marble. We were afraid of it and drawn to it at the same time. It's those days of 'playing out' and imagining that I remembered when I wrote "The Satyr's Head."

An extract from The Satyr’s Head:

We danced in the light of the Satyr's grin,
the limestone details of the fountain,
weathered and mean,
the endless grimace of a friend.

The garden cloaked our tower block's stares,
its trees veiling the aerials, the satellite dishes,.
Its bricks a smoke screen to the traffic's roar,
the yells of our mothers.
Its bushes covering up the smog.
the jam-sweet scent of winter berries
disguising the stench from the bins.

We danced like our fathers told us we could,
spinning in the dead leaves
that spun from our steps,
like wry circus performers.

My own childhood was suburban. I grew up in a row of houses that led to the railway line where two huge stone pine trees grew and spent my summers hammering the sticky cones to get at the pine-nuts, or skipping over a sprinkler on a tiny square of lawn with rainbow arcs of droplets around me. But in the long evenings we ran wild scaring each other in the starlight with bats swooping down from the dark, the occasional ‘sputnik’ juddering across the sky and the sound of crickets, with the white glow of moonflowers and lantana (did you ever see the Australian film of that name?) and deadly oleanders perfuming the night.

None of it meant anything to me at the time. I simply didn’t realise how much the imagination was at work. Did I know then that a setting cannot live unless it’s observed in its details and particulars? And that the emotions that setting evokes are most effective when they are unique?

The writer Janet Fitch speaks of ‘the internal palette’ that keeps her informed. The opening paragraphs from her novel White Oleander could only come from a childhood of knowing oleanders.

The Santa Anas blew hot from the desert, shrivelling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves.

We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three quarter moon.

‘Oleander time,’ she said. ‘Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.’

And now as I read my son David’s debut novel STONE RIDER, tiny sparks tell of his childhood and the hours spent much too high for a twelve year old, in the branches of a pin oak tree or carving a totem pole out of a wooden tree stump – living in his imagination, finding his own internal palette for expressing.

This summer, break the hold of the iPad. Give children a chance to run wild and 'live in the open space of their imagination' as Sita Bramachari puts it – tactile, sensory experiences that can’t be had from playing Minecraft or by ‘colouring in’ – so they can become poets like Joseph Coello or writers, artists, dancers, composers – whatever they want to be. But at least give their imaginations a chance. Let them run wild and ‘play out’.

'We danced like our fathers told us we could,
spinning in the dead leaves
that spun from our steps,
like wry circus performers.'  Thank you Joseph Coello.

www.diannehofmeyr.com 
Twitter @dihofmeyr
Zeraffa Giraffa, by Dianne Hofmeyr, illustrated by Jane Ray, published by Frances Lincoln, is one of The Sunday Times Top 100 Classics for Children in the last 10 years.

The fragility of the imagination – by Lari Don

I sometimes feel unreasonable when I say that I can’t write in my lovely bright study, unless the house is quiet and I know I won’t be interrupted. (I know it’s really annoying for my family, and fairly contradictory, since I can write in noisy cafes, libraries, bus stations, train carriages and staff rooms…) But I know that in order to put my whole self into the world I’m creating, I need to feel confident that I won’t be distracted. And I’m discovering that sometimes there’s just too much life and stress and STUFF going on, for me to be able to create stories.

I’ve been thinking recently about how easily the creative process is derailed, and about the fragility of a writer’s imagination.

Last week, Nicola Morgan, a writer I greatly admire, for the books she writes and for the wisdom she shares about writing and publishing, wrote a powerful post about how she’s struggling (temporarily, I hope) to write fiction, rather than non-fiction. Her post made me think about my own writing.

As well as novels, I write retellings of old myths, legends and folktales. Fewer facts and more magic than most non-fiction, but even so, I find this process, the craft of retelling something that already exists, fairly robust, much less likely to be disrupted by someone asking what’s for tea, or by more fundamental disturbances in my life.

However, I find the process of writing fiction, creating the new world of a novel, much more fragile.

One of my novels crashed and burned a year or so ago. An idea I was entirely committed to, characters I loved, a world I was fascinated by, questions I desperately wanted to answer… And it died. I spent months researching it. I wrote 21 chapters. Then it just died.

I couldn’t see where the story was going. So I abandoned it. Put all the books and research notes into a cardboard box.

And then I put that box with all the other boxes. The packing boxes.

Because that book crashed and burned in a year when I moved house twice. A year in which I sold a house, failed to buy another house, moved out of the first house anyway, lived in a (wholly unsuitable) rented house, finally bought another house, and moved house again.

And I will never know whether the story collapsed because of fundamental problems with the idea, or because of the disruptive circumstances under which I was trying to write it.

I will never know, because I just can’t face opening that box and re-entering that story, even though I suspect the essence of the story is fine, and it was just too hard to create that world inside my head, when the world outside my head was so unstable. So that book is probably dead.

But a book which is NOT dead is the one I’m currently writing. I’ve had an unsettled couple of months, when it’s been hard to get the peaceful focus I’m beginning to realise is essential for me to write fiction. And I had a minor crisis last week, when I was on the verge of wondering whether my current novel was falling apart.

But then I realised I’ve been trying to sort out the central plot problem during a General Election (always a busy time in our household) and while one of my children has been on exam leave (giving me no daytime hours to write in a quiet house.)

So, rather than packing this book in a box, I’ve reminded myself about the fragility of my creative process, and I’ve decided not to make any big decisions about the plot until I have time to think in peace and quiet and calmness. (Next Monday, I hope!) I’ll give myself time to get back into this world in the way that works for me, rather than panicking and abandoning it, and souring my relationship with this story and these characters for ever.

What writers do is very strange. Perhaps we don’t admit that often enough. Writing fiction, for whatever age, is essentially quite odd. We invent worlds, and live inside them. We do it convincingly enough to invite others to join us in those worlds. We invent people. We have close and emotional relationships with entirely imaginary people. We give our characters lives, make those lives dramatic and exciting and painful, then sometimes we take those lives away.

That’s a very weird thing to do. It’s precious, it’s delicate, it’s fragile. It needs nurtured, not forced. And it can never be taken for granted. Writers have to be allowed to admit that, to ourselves first of all.

 PS – I’d really like to thank Nicola for her honesty last week. It helped me think about my own creativity and its flawed fragility...

  

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 22 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. 

Lari’s website 

Lari’s own blog

Lari on Twitter

Lari on Facebook

Lari on Tumblr