Questions And Answers

On Friday I was down in Oxford for the regional final of the Kid's Lit Quiz. As it's a 3 hour drive from my part of the world, I decided to make a day of it and visited the fantastic new Barefoot Books studio for lunch first. I wasn't sure what the quiz was all about really but by the time I left at 6 for the long drive home, I'd had a glimpse of a reality that the persistent critics of schools refuse to see.

The event was brilliantly organised - 30-odd teams of 4 pupils from different schools competing to answer questions on all manner of children's and YA literature - and even as part of a team of authors we struggled to match the scores of most of the teams. The winners scored 90/100 on questions based around themes as wide-ranging as France and Aesop's Fables. The children were bright, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about reading and literature.

This morning I tuned into the Andrew Marr Show briefly until Osborne mentioned how his government was 'transforming' a school system that was letting children down. Well, on Friday I saw at first hand children who were highly motivated and far more knowledgeable about literature than I was at their age (or am now, if you care to check the final scores). The constant peddling of doom about schools and 'standards' for the last twenty-five years has left a huge hole in our national self-confidence. Our elected leaders have hijacked the purpose of education. No longer is it seen as the 'drawing out' and building upon of talents and enthusiasms but merely as a means to produce economically useful adults.

But Friday's experience galvanised my belief that if politicians stopped rubbishing teachers, schools and 'standards' (and by association, children's achievements) and placed some real trust in our schools and children, we'd do just fine without George's kind of 'transformation'.

My Nose Pressed To The Window . . .

I've taken to writing again.


There's something about the summer, even a wet one, that gets in the way of my imagination. On the other hand the summer is always my most productive period for reading, being the farthest removed from teaching. And reading is at the heart of good writing.


This summer I was also spent some time fretting over what to write next. I'd finished a novel last spring and put it to one side as I struggled to develop an idea for a commission. That I failed in my task at first dismayed me. I couldn't take an idea, somebody else's idea, and make it work. But I learnt something new from that.


I remember reading an interview with Mark Haddon, the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time, a few years ago in which he was asked:

"You said in an early interview that you'd always felt like you had your nose pressed to the window of the House of Literature and they were all in there – Ian McEwan was in the kitchen, and Jeanette Winterson was washing up. Are you there too now, peeling the potatoes?"

His answer resonates with me:

"You realise eventually there is no place like that. What keeps you writing is that you don't ever enter a place that feels like home at last. You're still going uphill. There's still a little glowing light in the distance that you're trying to get to. I was writing something recently and I was chuckling at something I'd written, and my wife looked across and said, "Do you think that real writers do that?" And I didn't even notice it was funny at first, because I still think, "Oh, one day I'll be a real writer." "

Writers come in all shapes and sizes but I suppose they all write for a reason. They're maybe not fully at home in the world and maybe never will be. And writing, at least for me, is an act of discovery which draws me away from that feeling even if only for a time. Don't get me wrong. I'm not miserable. I like a pint and a laugh. I'm happy enough. But I've always felt slightly off-kilter, out of line, on the outside.

I could never describe writing as a job because that implies I do it for money, to occupy time or to soothe my ego. And none of those are true. So when I sat down and planned out a new book today, it was because I was driven to do it. 

And it's the book I want to write.

Reading For Writing . . .

This week I find myself down in a pit of self-doubt, reminding me of that childhood feeling - the one that said I could never be as good as the writer of the great book I'd just put down. After a conversation with one of my editors about a submitted manuscript I'm now back to another undeveloped idea, a blank page and a bag of books to read. That part doesn't dishearten me too much. Editors and agents have very specific requirements and often a manuscript can be a good one but is rejected for either personal or commercial reasons. I love the story and if it's never published I'll still have the experience of the process of writing it, which will help.

I've already read one of the books - "A Monster Calls" by Patrick Ness - in a single sitting. It reduced me to tears, which came as a surprise. Films can get me that way but books rarely do. It was beautifully conceived, immaculately structured, convincing, truthful and - above all - powerfully humane. I don't think a children's or YA book has ever affected me as deeply.

That was yesterday. Today I write with that same feeling of "I could never write anything as good as that". But I'm trying to write myself out of that feeling here. It never stopped me as a child. It never stopped me as an unpublished writer. Why should it stop me as a published author? If I can somehow put myself back at school and see myself as a learner, I can reap something from the admiration and professional deflation I felt as I put "A Monster Calls" down. What was it that made the book so compelling?

In school I find that the most creative writers are often children who are avid readers. They aren't necessarily the most competent writers, but their ideas and their ability to build them into a story set their work apart. I suppose that extra exposure to good writing just sinks into the sub-conscious somehow. I always encourage a bit of well-disguised 'stealing' from authors at that age because it builds confidence and cements an understanding of what makes some stories successful and others not so successful.

After finishing "A Monster Calls", I went to the supermarket. Loading the boot of the car with the weekly supply of Cheesy Wotsits for the locusts, I moved aside a box containing books from my last school visit in July. Books by me. Books you can buy in a bookshop. I felt (a little bit) better.

I empathise with the British athlete who just came on the TV at the Olympics, knocked out in the first round of the hurdles. Like him, I need to get back to training, change something, do something better, ready for the next story.

Getting started . . .

I'm currently in the middle of a term's residency at a school in Staffordshire. I visit every Wednesday to work with a class of year 5 children, some of whom have previously found it difficult to engage in the process of writing. My role, using drama as a stimulus, is to get them started on the road to seeing themselves as writers.

 They're brilliant kids, with plenty of life and stories to tell. They engage in the drama with enthusiasm and no little skill. They 'get' stories and characters and motivations in quite an adult way. Last week we had a 'village meeting' to discuss the issue of an abandoned wolf pup being allowed to stay with a character. One boy, a reluctant writer, was superbly articulate in role as a villager in a way he may find difficult still on paper.

 If we 'teach' speaking and thinking, through drama and the fantastic 'Philosophy For Children' developed by Sapere (google it) surely the skills to commit that thinking to paper will come much more easily? My conviction that this kind of active learning, married to core writing skills, stops kids becoming bored by prescriptive literacy lessons with their tedious targets and quick fix strategies for adding two adjectives or starting sentences with an adverb . . . yawn. It may get the school a level four but it won't turn their learners into writers for life.

Back in the class, we make a book with a title page and they draft a killer opening paragraph. The results are promising. I talk about some of the relevant issues I have to deal with when trying to engage readers in my stories. They begin to realise the challenges but aren't daunted. There's no test at the end, I assure them.

But the tests are there in the background in every primary school in the country. They skew the way learning is presented to children so that those who are difficult to engage are more likely to get less of what they need.

When it's time for lunch, many of them want to show me stories they've written at home or ask me questions about writing. I show them my notebooks with scruffy handwriting and scribbles and drawings and stubs of ripped out pages. They seem impressed that I find writing a struggle too, but perhaps they're beginning to see why I stick at it.

Who says children don't like writing?

A Century Of Stories . . . .

Yesterday we travelled across to Grimsby to celebrate my grandad's 100th birthday. He was in good form and listened carefully to my dad's speech about the tumultuous changes of his century. When my dad said that in 1912 the first shaky aeroplanes might have been seen in the skies, he shouted out "Zeppelins!" But he hasn't been bewildered by these powerful changes. Only the other day he asked my brother-in-law if he should get broadband. I suppose with that kind of forward-looking mentality and an open-mindedness to change, he's watched the many stories of his century (including two world wars) unfold and still wants to know what will happen next.

On the way home we drove into the setting sun on the M62 and I realised I'd grown up around storytellers; grandparents and parents and uncles and aunts who wanted to talk and make sense of the world through tales that were sometimes comic, sometimes slightly darker. My Nana had the ability to tell the same story - about the Sunday School teacher eating a sandwich into which a wasp had crawled - but in many different ways. My grandfather still remembers huge amounts of detail about his first job as a delivery boy in 1926, the year of the General Strike.

This is only one step away from writing fiction. The stories are mostly already present in the world when you come to write them. It's just a case of finding a way to make the break and set them down on paper or on screen, to reorganise them, to alter characters, mix stories together, change everything again until you arrive at something that works. My dad made that break, writing plays, novels and poetry on his typewriter in the front room after tea in the 1970s and 1980s. He still does it - like a compulsion to record what it feels like to be alive.

So when I'm asked where ideas come from, the answer is usually that for the most part they are already there. The only thing that separates a good joke or a long tale about an incident at work or a family saga told by your friend from a written story is the compulsion of the writer to set it down physically and work on it ( again and again ) until it does its job. I'm growing into the idea that writer's block is a myth. The ideas are always there. What might be lost though, is that compulsion to write and understand your own story.

A Sense Of An Ending . . .

It's been seven weeks since my last post and in that time I've reached the downward slope towards an ending of my novel. At nearly 35,000 words I feel like I should be aiming to finish in another 10,000 or so words. But there is a problem; a good one, but a problem nonetheless. The ending which I originally planned has changed. That's not in itself unusual. But what is different now is that if I go on and tie up all the loose ends that a reader might demand, I'd write another 10,000 words and the climax of the story would be too far away from the end of the book. I feel that the characters have developed a new story beyond my sight, a story that could just make this novel into a 70 or 80,000 worder. Mmmm. Or is it just another story, another book?

Of course, we know there is no such thing as an ending. Stories in real life don't just end, even with death. We know fictional endings are a necessary illusion, but we still demand them.

I recently read a snotty review of my latest book (most of them are favourable by the way!) by a blogger who said she/he thought the last two chapters were too clever for her/him and went over her/his head. Of course, writers shouldn't get precious about this kind of thing. People are entitled to an opinion. But it did make me think about the ending. But re-reading it, I still think it's just a case of lazy reading. The clues are there. I think a reader has responsibility for their reading as a writer does for their writing. If everyone said they couldn't understand the ending, then fair enough there's something wrong with it. But if you're the only one, then read it again . . .

So endings can be controversial. I prefer an ending where the reader has to interact with the text to decide how it 'ends' rather than be spoonfed the author's ideas. And with this novel drawing to a close now I have some big decisions to make to get it right.

New Year, New Book

I stumbled out in the late afternoon today with Barney. The ground in the Pennines is water-logged after what seems like weeks of rain. We walked half way up the hill behind the house and down to a quiet little valley where the stream was roaring with water. Barney, as usual, paid no attention to the grim weather, continually chasing his mangled ball into the stream and bringing it back proudly for me. He lives in a constant state of optimism.

New Year's Day is traditionally full of hope, cold and crisp. But today, the weeks of poor weather and indoor living had got the better of me and all I could create in my head was the miserable premise for an adult short story that mirrors the pessimistic economic climate. Barney fetched the ball and wagged his tail and got excited about repeating the same game. Then the sky cleared in the west, the direction in which K had driven after lunch to see her mum. The clouds were stained with orange and it reminded me of a scene at the end of my new children's book, The Court Painter's Apprentice (Catnip, mid-January).

"They stood there for a long time in comfortable silence, as the sunlight slowly dripped beyond the horizon like syrup. And each knew that the other was composing a new painting in his head."

In the hour since I'd left the house with Barney, everything had conspired to make me optimistic, to send me back to my desk to write. I remembered why writing for a young audience is such a challenge. Without ignoring the difficulties and hardships that everyone endures, children's books need a sense of hopefulness. Often adult literature can be at the same time brilliant yet leave you feeling despondent. And that's no way to be. One of my favourite adult books is the relentlessly bleak 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, but even in that difficult book, the orange boiler suit at the end is for me a symbolic image of hope.

So, the weather, an animal and an hour of solitude and reflection did the trick, on an arbitrary day when you're supposed to buck your ideas up. And when I got home I found a lovely review by a reader who really "got" the ideas in the book. So now I'm really smiling . . .