REVELATIONS AND REVELRY

I suspect this may be the last time I get to post before Christmas. This is not through lack of inclination, but more to do with the fact that on Thursday I am going home to my mother’s house and therefore my computer use will be severely limited. Rationed, if you like, because she dislikes them with such a passion. Allegedly. Although an awful lot of online shopping goes on through her laptop for someone who professes to hate them so much.  However, to make my life easier this time round I have something she doesn’t know about – my BLACKBERRY!!!! (Pink). And even when she does know about it she won’t understand what it is or what it does. Ha! Therefore my internet use will remain pretty constant and she will be none the wiser. Genius. It will make for a much smoother Christmas all round. I have bought all the presents now and they are mostly wrapped. They will all be wrapped by Christmas day, just to clarify. And I know this because we are now in the final furlong before the great day itself so my activity will rise proportionately.

Not much actual writing has been done over the last few days. It’s a bit hard to fit it in at the moment. So I mostly content myself with just thinking about the book; which I admit sounds like a wholly useless activity, but it really isn’t. It helps me create the story more fully, iron out any creases, think in a little more depth about my characters and generally bring it more to life. I do aim to work on it over the Christmas/New Year period so hopefully the next time I post I will have more impressive news. Like another 50,000 words written or something. That would be impressive actually because I only have 60,000 left to write in the entire book.

Now, there’s one thing that has stood out as particularly irritating to me recently, and it’s none of the usual things. It crops up every once in a while and has the same, incensing, effect upon me every time. It’s the Enid Blyton ‘debate’, for want of a better word and the subject of India Knight’s column in the Sunday Times this week (this week? Or last week? The most recent one anyway). For the first time in a good few years Enid Blyton has dropped out of the top ten children’s bestselling authors and this is being blamed on the fact that her language is too archaic and today’s children cannot relate to it. Therefore her books have been updated, words have been changed to more modern ones, e.g. ‘Mum’ instead of ‘Mother’, to make them more accessible to children today, or at least this is the theory, hideous though it is. Now India Knight’s point was – is it too much to ask our children to understand that bathing might mean swimming and sweater might mean jumper? Are we not insulting them by assuming that we must provide them with only the words that they are familiar with? Yes, is the answer. By changing the language we are removing from the children any need to extend their thoughts towards words that perhaps are not in everyday use any more. And if you take this concept to its end point one day we won’t ask them to use their imaginations at all, we will simply tell them what it is we’d like them to imagine, which is a dreadful idea. But, this aside, the other thing which I think is of vital importance regardless of impact – should we be changing the language? As far as I’m concerned Enid Blyton wrote her books in a certain era and this is reflected throughout them, in part by her language. And let’s be clear about this, we are not talking about Chaucerian language barriers, we are talking about the odd word being less in use these days. Why should the books be dragged into the twenty-first century from their rightful place? Are we not thus destroying them? Where will it end? Will the language receive another overhaul in twenty years time to give it estuary vowels? Will Anne be given lesbian tendencies and George’s skin colour changed to black to reflect modern societies? The idea is absurd and sad. But it is possible, once you open the flood gates who knows where it will end?

It is acknowledged that Enid Blyton was not a skilled writer; she was a skilled story-teller. The charm of her books lies in the tales themselves and the world in which they are set. They have timeless appeal for children, regardless of relevance to modern life by virtue of the fact that her characters go out and have adventures, they find things to do, things happen to them. School becomes a world of midnight feasts, jokes, tricks and fun. The secret clubs that are created give children power and decision-making abilities that are largely removed for today’s children in our endless march towards all-encompassing risk-aversion. The perils that they are allowed to encounter are unheard of now.  The characters cycle endlessly around the countryside alone and unsupervised, they row boats across rough seas to a derelict castle. They encounter villains. They build camps and stay overnight in them. I think in the Malory Towers books or the St. Clare’s ones there is a swimming pool formed by rocks and filled with seawater that the pupils use; our children wouldn’t even dream of most of this stuff, let alone be able to do it!  The danger is that by updating the language the books will cease to become escapism to the extent that they are now, and by doing so we lessen their appeal. They are stories from another time, another era, and they need to stay there. I was pleased to see that the most recent front covers of the Famous Five have been drawn in the vintage style to reflect this. I could carry on forever, but to sum up: I think it’s appalling, they may as well give Julian a mobile phone, Anne an iPad, stick a DVD player in Kirrin Castle and be done with it. Neither of my girls will be reading the updated versions.

And now with my rant for today over I need to get on with wrapping and packing, etc. to give other things a reasonable chance to annoy me. It’s only fair. So if I don’t get a chance to post again before Christmas Day, I hope everyone has a lovely, lovely time with plenty of  music and carols and decorations and crackers and presents and fun and laughter – and wine.

Merry Christmas!

XXXXX.

DISASTER! A fully-fledged disaster has occurred in the world of Sarah Haynes. You all know that I indulge in the occasional glass of wine, well, last night my eldest daughter sent one flying across the keyboard of my laptop. I reacted quickly – and volcanically – but it became clear this morning that the machine has died a death. This is very sad but it did occur to me that if you’re going to die then being saturated in wine is probably the way to do it. As an emergency measure I was using an external keyboard connected somehow to my computer but this was difficult because some of the keys worked on my laptop and some didn’t so I had an interesting time typing things on two different keyboards and not being able to see what I was writing half the time.  Luckily, we are the type of family who have spare laptops in the loft and so I do have a temporary one. Don’t panic – I will still be able to fire my innermost thoughts and observations into the worlds of Twitter and Facebook. I cannot imagine life without the internet now actually. Would it be possible to exist?? It was sad but inevitable news the other day that the OED will no longer be produced. Apparently people are not buying dictionaries any more but using the internet for definitions. I understand this, but games of Scrabble will never be the same again. I’m getting more used to Twitter now by the way, and I have nearly 100 followers. For those of you on Facebook, you will all have seen the great big fuss I was making to get 100 fans on my Facebook author page. I’m now up 116 at the time of writing and considering having the same sort of foot-stamping episode for Twitter.

Anyway, in other news, over the last few days my husband has been reading Things He Never Knew. This was for the first time – he didn’t read it as I wrote it. And I hesitate to say that I forced him into it….but….well….I kind of forced him into it. To be fair, it really isn’t his sort of book, it’s commercial women’s fiction, and I’d just like to make clear that this isn’t his usual chosen genre, but unfortunately I don’t write the philisophical stuff he favours. I genuinely wanted his opinion, he reads a lot and is a very intelligent and thoughtful person and I knew that he’d give it to me straight, good or bad. So I signed a copy for him, wrote nice things inside and presented it to him. He really didn’t have a choice. Obligingly, he began reading it immediately, which is harder than it sounds because I was watching him like an absolute hawk; studying his face for traces of emotion – smiles/grimaces – and generally trying to assess whether he was enjoying it or not. I held back from asking him because I wanted to wait until he’d finished the whole thing and I managed to wait until he was one chapter away from the end before I finally gave in to my ‘now now now’ mentality and demanded “Well???”. He looked at me and just simply said “Brilliant. It’s brilliant.” Obviously I then demanded a complete in-depth rundown of exactly what he thought and felt and why (not restricting myself to the book) and his responses were both gratifying and obviously truly held. So there you are – my husband says my book is brilliant. I realise that it’s only a small step away from saying that my mother thinks it’s brilliant, but still. I sent a copy to her as well but unless she’s reading it aloud to the flock of cats as their bedtime story I can’t imagine that she’s had the time to finish it yet.

There was another interesting dimension to having my husband read my book and that was forcing me to think about how I develop my characters. This was because he kept quizzing me suspiciously as to how I knew so much about the characters emotions when I’ve never been in that situation myself. I know that sounds very cryptic but you’ve all seen the back cover blurb – or you SHOULD have done seeing as it’s plastered all over here, my website and my facebook page – and I don’t want to give too much of the plot away. So anyway, I tried explaining that it’s not real, I have made it up, but he simply kept saying “Well you must have got it from somewhere.” And he’s absolutely right, I did. My IMAGINATION!

So it got me thinking about how I do create my characters and where the elements come from. I’ll write about it next time because it is quite interesting and there’s too much to say for now. But every time I think about the actual creative writing process I am inevitably drawn back to a description I once read in a book of how Enid Blyton used to write. I bought the book (a biography of Enid Blyton by Barbara Stoney; absolutely excellent) last year in Corfe at Ginger Pop, the Enid Blyton shop. It’s a fascinating shop, lined with her books; she was a prolific author. An estimate puts her total book publication at around 800 titles, not including decades of magazine writing. I can’t see myself achieving that. Anyway, in that book Enid Blyton describes creating her stories, and she says that it was like watching a play and writing down what happens and this is the best description of writing fiction that I have ever found. Except for the manuscript that I am currently working on – for that I am literally watching what happens and writing it down. Friends and relatives: you have been warned! On which note, thank you to anyone who has recently left me a comment or clicked ‘like’ on my Facebook author page. It’s an easy thing to do and is a great help to me. And if anyone does have any questions/comments/concerns/queries, or just wants a chat, you can email me at sarah@sarahhaynes.me.uk.  I’d hate to think that I have to write 800 books before I get any fan mail.