Childlike writers who escape reality

Writing is a solitary activity. Not all, but many writers are shy, retiring people who best express themselves through the written word.

A lot of children’s authors have used their stories as a way of insulating themselves against the real world. Many never really grow up, despite their seemingly sober, grownup outer appearances.

Perhaps this is the main quality that connects our greatest children's writers. 

J M Barrie

For many, J M Barrie is the epitome of the children's author who never wanted to leave childhood behind. He, after all, created Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. Perhaps Barrie's psyche was scarred when his older brother David died aged 14 and he tried - in vain - to replace him in his mother's affections. Was it from this tragedy that sprang the idea for the boy who never grew up?

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen was another childlike and naive man. He never married and was uncomfortable around women. He was essentially a child in an adult's body.

Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame wanted life always to be like his childhood growing up close to the river in Cookham, Berkshire, where he had first learned to escape the harshness of the real world (his mother died young and Grahame and his siblings were sent to live with their grandmother). He became a bank worker, rising to become Governor of the Bank of England, a respectable and, dare I say, dull post? Was this an act of escape for the man who based the timid Mole upon himself? Despite dramatic and tragic incidents in his life - he survived a shooting incident at the bank and his son committed suicide - Grahame did not seek adventure, forever wanting to inhabit the cosy, safe world of Mr Toad, Ratty and Mole in the Wind in the Willows.

Lewis Carroll

Some authors – Lewis Carroll, Dr Seuss – seek refuge further by hiding behind pseudonyms. For them, does the creation of this extra layer, a protective skin, provide another way of keeping reality at bay?

Dr Seuss – Theodor Seuss Geisel to give him his real name – was certainly very bashful, with a pathological fear of speaking in public. On the rare occasions he did give public addresses, he resorted to reading a comical rhyme – albeit touched by Seussian magic – in place of a speech. There is a short, but very revealing video clip on YouTube of Seuss smiling at, but saying nothing to, an interviewer late in his life in San Diego.

He never lost his childlike playfulness. Many stories abound of his childlike naughtiness, recounted in the excellent book by Judith and Neil Morgan, Dr Seuss and Mr Geisel. One particular favourite of mine was the time he went into a shoe shop and switched all the stickers indicating what size of shoes were on display.

Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a brilliant, reserved and reticent Oxford mathematics don. He was a man with two sides. On one hand he was Dodgson, the quiet, shy, reserved Victorian gentleman bachelor, a genius in his field. On the other he was Carroll, the dazzlingly creative author of Alice in Wonderland, possessed of a quicksilver wit shot through with a bizarre and darkly comic imagination. The pen name Lewis Carroll clearly allowed the mild mannered mathematician and logician from Cheshire to release his wild and childlike side while offering him the ability to return to the quiet, dusty world of academia when it all became a bit too crazy.

Roald Dahl's writing hut

One could never describe Roald Dahl as shy and retiring. He was the opposite - belligerent, opinionated, domineering. Yet he never lost the ability to recall what it was like to be a child and this is evident in what he wrote.

Nevertheless, like these other authors, he had the desire to escape into his writing. How else do you explain his desire each morning to seek refuge in his little whitewashed, yellow-doored shed at the bottom of his garden where he would sit in an old armchair and swaddle himself in an old sleeping bag so that he had created for himself a womb-like workspace?

There are other authors, of course, not all children's writers - here I'm thinking of P G Wodehouse and Charles Schulz - who escaped into their own childlike fantasy worlds.

So, who would you include in the list?

Writer's nugget #4: Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman's uniquely brilliant imagination knows know boundaries and happily dances in any genre or medium. He has written many children's stories. Coraline is perhaps my favourite. Others include The Graveyard Book for which he won the Carnegie Medal.
On his excellent blog he recently spoke about writing for children. You just need to scroll down a bit.

Oh! the places his imagination goes: Neil Gaiman

Here I also offer you Neil's advice on how to write. Enjoy!

1. Write.

2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7. Laugh at your own jokes.

8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Goodbye Maurice Sendak

Sad news today.
Possibly the most influential writer and illustrator of children's picture books died today.


Seminal work from the brilliant Mr Sendak


 

Maurice Sendak, who was 83, will forever be remembered for his brilliant, groundbreaking Where The Wild Things Are.

I read it at primary school, probably at the age of five or six, so in about 1973 or 74 and I have never forgotten it. I felt from the start that this was a book about me and my imagination. I had no problem identifying with Max. I WAS Max. I'm sure every child who read it felt exactly the same.



Maurice Sendak and his creation



  

I was a child who stared out of the window a lot. I daydreamed a lot, spent much of my time scribbling stories and scratching pictures on paper with crayons and pencils.

And I see, from the New York Times's obituary, that Maurice Sendak was exactly the same as a young boy. And he never forgot what it was like to be a child with his head in the clouds.

Thank you, Maurice Sendak, brilliant daydreamer.

Writer's nugget #3: Morris Gleitzman

I first came across Morris Gleitzman's work through a stage version of his brilliant Two Weeks With The Queen.

This funny, sad and moving story was staged by Alan Ayckbourn's Stephen Joseph Theatre Company at the Old Laundry Theatre in Bowness-on-Windermere and I was reviewing the play for the local newspaper.



Morris Gleitzman

Gleitzman bravely tackles the subjects of cancer and its effect on children. Ayckbourn's adaptation was one of the best things I've ever seen in a theatre - 17 years later I can still remember it vividly.
Here, then, is Morris Gleitzman talking about how he goes about writing those wonderful, funny, challenging stories for young people.

"I have to plan things in advance. Once I know who my main character is and what their story is in general terms, I start planning the story into chapters. I write a few sentences about each chapter – notes to myself about what happens in each chapter and how the main character is feeling. I usually do more drafts of the plan than I do of the book itself. Ten drafts of the plan sometimes (17 with Belly Flop), and usually only two or three of the actual book. I need to know how the story will end before I can start writing the chapters. Sometimes, though, the ending changes as I'm writing. I revise the plan a lot as I'm writing the chapters.

Two Weeks With The Queen

"Almost none of the incidents and events in my books are from personal experience. I make them up. (OK, some might be from experiences I've forgotten.) But the emotions in the stories are not made up. I don't know how to invent emotions. I can only use the emotions from my own life. We all share the same range of emotions, which is why we can share the feelings of the characters we read about. So part of the storytelling process for me is to find interesting and unusual reasons for characters to have the emotions that the rest of us experience every day for familiar reasons. I'm lucky, I can write just about anywhere. I prefer not much noise and no distracting views. I keep the curtains in my writing room at home closed all the time so I can pretend it's night. I write better at night."

http://www.morrisgleitzman.com/maq/fst_maq.html

So that was Christmas!

Just a couple of quickies following Christmas...

Elisabeth Beresford with Great Uncle Bulgaria

So sad to see that Elisabeth Beresford died on Christmas Eve. The Wombles creator was 84. Shame that it took so long for her books about the inhabitants of Wimbledon Common to come back into print (see my last blog). Still, at least she lived to see it.

Meanwhile, did you see the BBC's adaptation of Richmal Crompton's Just William? It was excellent. Daniel Roche (the hyperactive Ben in Outnumbered) was superb as William and writer Simon Nye did a wonderful job on the script.

I read a few of the William books as a child after my dad press ganged me into it (he's not much of a reader, my dad, but he had very fond memories of Just William). I always loved them.

Daniel Roche as William Brown and assorted Outlaws

It was great to see my own daughter, who is seven, falling about laughing at William's exploits. Just shows that some things are universal.

Let's hope they do some more episodes.

Welcome back, Wombles!

It's fantastic to see Elisabeth Beresford's Wombles books back in print.

Well done to Bloomsbury for putting these timeless classics back on the shelves at our bookstores.

I've always found it incredible that Beresford's tales, which were ahead of their time in highlighting the importance of looking after the environment, should ever have dropped out of favour.

Anyway, they're back, with gorgeous new covers.

I'll write more about Great Uncle Bulgaria, Orinoco, Tobermory, Madame Cholet and the rest soon.

Happy Wombling!

The craft of Robert Westall: Visiting Lindy McKinnel




Bob Westall with cat at home in Lymm

It's always a thrill to speak to writers about their craft, particularly if it's somebody you admire.

Sadly, I never got the chance to meet Robert Westall, one of my favourite children's authors.

He died in 1993 at the age of 63. He was at the height of his creative powers, but he left a wonderful legacy of storytelling.

The next best thing to an encounter with Mr Westall, however, is to meet Lindy McKinnel, with whom he spent the last six years of his life.

She was one of the earliest readers of his work and the person who encouraged him to send off The Machine Gunners to a publisher.

Without her, he would not have seen this marvellous story published nor would he have won the Carnegie Medal. So we owe her a debt of gratitude.

I first spoke to her three years ago for a magazine article to promote the launch of The Making of Me, a collection of autobiographical pieces Mr Westall wrote.

But as I've said in an earlier posting, I always felt I'd only scratched the surface.

So I was thrilled when she agreed to let me visit her recently at her home in Lymm, Cheshire, to talk about this fine author's work.

This was the home he shared with her for the last six years of his life. It was here that he wrote at the kitchen table - one of his beloved clocks (he was a keen antiques and clock collector) is still on the wall over that table.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Robert Atkinson Westall was born on October 7, 1929, at 7 Vicarage Street, North Shields. An only child, Bob - as he was generally known - was nine when the Second World War broke out. The relentless air raids on the North East coloured his outlook on life and provided the thrilling background to his first book.

In The Making of Me, Bob described himself as a “bad writer” from an early age. Drawing and painting were more suitable pursuits for his talents early in his life.

Indeed, it was art he studied at Durham University and, later, at the Slade School of Art, before he became an art teacher at Sir John Deane’s Grammar School in Northwich where he was head of art and head of careers.

He married his wife, Jean, and they had a son, Christopher, who was to provide that initial inspiration for his breakthrough as a writer.

Westall the author, however, was slow in emerging. He had a few pieces published by local newspapers early on. Later he sharpened his writing style as a freelance journalist (fitted in around his day job at the school), writing art reviews for his local newspaper in Northwich.

But while his journalism was crisp and to the point, he felt the novels he was writing were the work of a “complete idiot”, riddled with clichés.



Bob Westall with his son, Christopher

It wasn’t until 1973 when he was 44 that he began writing in earnest. He wanted to describe to his young son, Christopher, what it was like growing up in the North East during the Second World War.

That desire impelled him to write The Machine Gunners.

Lindy McKinnel’s twin daughters were in the same class at school as Christopher Westall and it was in the 1960s that she first encountered Bob Westall.

She took an interest in his writing, his architectural articles and illustrations in Cheshire Life mostly. But she also read some of his early attempts at fiction.

She says: “He used to give me all these things - they were very mixed. The articles I liked, but the stories he was writing were too long and about things that were historical, about Anglo Saxon princesses, that sort of thing.”

But when she read The Machine Gunners she felt this was something different. He’d scribbled the story in school exercise books. It was written purely for his son as a way of recreating his own childhood in the North East during the Second World War.

“It was terrific,” she says. “I encouraged him to send it off. It was turned down by Collins but was published by Macmillan.”

It won him his first Carnegie Medal (he was the first author to win that prestigious award twice; The Scarecrows earned him his second medal).

“He was stunned when he won,” she says.

Bob was well into his forties and it was like the creative floodgates had finally opened, as stories and novels began to pour out.

But tragedy was around the corner. In 1978 when he was 18, Chris Westall was killed in a motorbike accident. Bob and Jean Westall were devastated. Sadly their marriage would not survive.

By this time, Lindy McKinnel had moved from Little Leigh, near Northwich, to live in Lymm with her four children following the death of her husband.

In the late 1980s, Bob Westall went to live with her.

“Bob began writing full time. He’d retired from teaching and from his antiques shop. I used to go out to work and leave him at home writing.”

Having a world-famous and award-winning children’s author living under her roof was one thing; having all his papers, antiques and clocks cluttering the house was quite another.

So he bought a cottage around the corner, to which he would disappear each day to work on his writing. The cottage became available after a scene that was almost like something out of one of his stories - a gas explosion destroyed the two neighbouring cottages, which had to be rebuilt.



The cottage in Lymm where Robert Westall wrote

 It was at this cottage that late masterpieces such as Blitzcat were produced.

These were busy years for Bob. Although he is known as a children's author, Mrs McKinnel says this was the early pigeonhole he was put in because of The Machine Gunners. But many of his other books are distinctly adult, yet marketed as for young people. "It was a problem not just for Bob but also for his publishers," she says.

So what about Robert Westall's craft?

“He wrote short stories when they occurred to him and the novels during the summer holidays,” says Mrs McKinnel, describing the years when Bob was working as a teacher.

“The difficult thing was getting the idea for the book. Once he had the germ of an idea he could always think of the rest. When he was writing he didn’t talk much. It was intense and it didn’t take long. He would sit and write solidly for five or six hours. A draft was done within a month. He would give it to me to see what I thought.”

His stories tended to fall into three distinct categories - those about the Second World War (The Machine Gunners; Blitzcat), cats (Yaxley’s Cat; The Christmas Cat) and the supernatural (The Wind Eye; The Scarecrows; The Stones of Muncaster Cathedral).

His ghost stories were heavily influenced by M R James and their simple use of suggested horror are reminiscent of the great Edwardian writer.

Bob Westall died in April 1993. His ashes were buried in the cemetery at Northwich alongside his son, Christopher, and wife Jean.

A special memorial service was held for Robert Westall a few months after his death at All Saints' Church, Thelwall, a village close to Westall's Lymm home. In attendance was Michael Morpurgo, who gave a reading.

(I’ve only recently discovered this. Coincidentally, this was the church where I was married in 1995. Bob Westall had a particular fascination for Thelwall and had thought about writing a book about it.)

“Bob had made a bit of money by the time he died. I wanted to set up something in his memory. That’s what led to the Seven Stories project.

“I’d heard there was a lady working at Waterstone’s in Newcastle who wanted to set up an archive of children’s writers’ and illustrators’ manuscripts.

“It seemed very apt.”

So The Robert Westall Charitable Trust was formed and £100,000 was given to Elizabeth Hammill to kickstart her dream project, Seven Stories, the Centre for Children’s Books in the Ouseburn Valley in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

That initial donation by Mrs McKinnel acted as seed money, as Elizabeth needed to raise £7 million to get it off the ground. It took 10 years and Seven Stories finally opened in 2005.

Bob’s archive was originally on permanent loan there, but within the past few weeks Mrs McKinnel has given it to the centre to keep. Within the fascinating building (comprising seven storeys, giving the name a double meaning) is a Robert Westall Gallery.

For more information about Seven Stories, visit its website, http://www.sevenstories.org.uk/ or call 0845 271 0777.

Further information about Robert Westall can be found at http://www.westallswar.org/.

* Thanks to Lindy McKinnel for her help in relation to this blog post.