WORDS AND MY WRITING SUMMER
Geraldine McCaughrean’s recent CILIP winner’s speech in June called on writers to flood children with words, thereby giving them the tools ‘to reason their way out of subjugation. You need words to think for yourself.’ Publishers, she went on to say, have a responsibility not to dumb down. We master words by meeting them head on, not by limiting vocabulary and making it more accessible by over simplification. She was making a plea for literary fiction.
The idea being, if you can read and write well and have a large vocabulary, you can capture ideas and make better, more forceful arguments. When you put words together on a page, and get them in just the right order, something magical happens. You make an argument, and that argument can be persuasive and clear. That takes skill, and a writer needs to hone that skill.
McCaughrean’s speech resonated with me. With recent events in politics here and abroad, it has been brought home that now especially we should not be complacent about the power and importance of words – the skillful manipulation of words wins political arguments. More then ever, we need to be able to make persuasive arguments, not least when we are faced with the proliferation of so called fake news on social media.
All writers have to work hard at their craft (McCaughrean compares it to quilting) and spend exhaustive amounts of time paying attention to detail. As the sociologist Richard Sennet (Senior Fellow of Capitalism and Society at Columbia University) said in his book The Craftsman, you need 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of your craft, whatever that may be. But before you give up right now, the good news is, in theory, crafting a sentence, saying it in just the right way to express a thought or describe an action, gets easier with practice.
At a talk at The Blake Society in May, The Art and Craft of Storytelling, Phillip Pullman explained the overarching theme of his new book was ‘looking’ and that the principal subject of his work was Consciousness (see footnote). When asked by a member of the audience about Mindfulness as opposed to Consciousness, Pullman looked askance, then wryly, and rather mischievously said he didn't understand why you would want to think about nothing (mindful meditation), when he preferred always to think about something - a sentence construction, for example. Not surprising for a man whose stock in trade is making arguments, notably against the power of the established church, and whose Twitter account bears witness to his political engagement with the issues around Brexit.
Increasingly children’s authors are being asked to tackle the world’s dilemmas, and in doing so nudge their readers to question things - problems of migration, police brutality, free trade, globalization, climate change. Perhaps it is time to stop the navel gazing, the ‘why me’ question, and turn our attention to what is going on around us. Instead of scaling down to the single individual and his or her experience, fetishizing the cult of self, authors for young people should perhaps be emphasizing the bigger perspective.
In July The Children’s Book Circle hosted a panel discussion panel on mental health in Young Adult Fiction. The panel dwelt at length on the responsibilities of authors to avoid romanticizing mental health issues. I was interested to hear one of the panelists (who wrote a successful novel about a teenage girl dealing with OCD) say she felt the discussion had moved on from victimhood to underlying causes - she felt it was more important to delve into issues of social inequalities, for example.
In my current work-in-progress, I try to do both - explore one girl’s experience of poverty and her struggle to self empowerment against the tyranny of an increasingly unequal society, in which the gap between rich and poor is widening, where many young people’s lives are determined by a caste system imposed by those who have wealth and advantage and a vested interest in maintaining them. My character has to rely on her instincts, increasingly aware she cannot trust the adults to save her. Her struggle is to understand how to make the right choices to survive, and it is her voice, her ability to break her silence and express her dilemmas through powerful use of language, which empowers her to gain control over her world.
‘Consciousness is truly amazing – it is the essence of you – the redness of red, the feeling of being in love, the sensation of pain an all the rest of your subjective experiences, conjured up somehow by your brain.’
New Scientist 23/6/18
