The Veil Of Tears

The fact that my parents were Irish though I grew up in the middle of East London made me highly sensitive to the particularity of language. All around me people spoke in the brash and vivid Cockney dialect. But at home my parents still used the vocabulary and speech patterns of rural Ireland.

When particularly exasperated with me, my father would invoke the memory of the language from which he, too, had been exiled, calling me an ‘amadan’ or ‘a gamalog’ (Irish words for fool). My mother, on hearing unexpected news would not say that she had received a great shock or surprise but ‘a terrible land’, as if someone had picked her up and thrown her in the air.

Being a Catholic family we regularly said the family rosary and I was always particularly struck by the words of the prayer with which it ended, the first few lines of which are as follows:

Hail holy queen, mother of mercy
Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.
To thee do we send up our sighs
Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.

At least that is how the version we used to say began. Nowadays, I think people say valley of tears, vale being a rather old-fashioned and self-consciously poetic usage. But when I was little I thought it must be ‘veil’ and I often tried to imagine what a veil of tears would look like. I thought it must be a bit like an large spider’s web festooned with raindrops. It is an image that has never left me.

How I miss the music of my parents’ voices! I can hear them even now, rising and falling as they recited the prayers at bedtime. It will soon be two years since my mother died of cancer. Whenever I think of her last days on Earth and the pain she suffered, I am tempted to reach for that veil of tears to cover my face from the world.

Brilliant Idea Anxiety

I was visiting a school on Monday and one of the teachers asked me whether it often happened that a writer came up with an idea for a children’s book, submitted it to an agent or publisher and the idea got stolen. This is a very common fear among people who are starting out on the long journey to becoming professional authors and the good news is that there’s nothing to worry about.

This fear, which I shall call Brilliant Idea Anxiety, is based upon a misunderstanding of how writing works. The fact is that it’s never about one absolutely magical idea. That’s just for the movies. In reality a novel is a bit like a joke. Two people can tell the same joke; one will make you laugh, the other will make you cringe. It’s all in the delivery.

Part of the problem is that people get confused about originality. Of course originality is important, incredibly important, but originality doesn’t necessarily mean thinking up new stories. Shakespeare was astonishingly original but all of his plays are based on stories that already existed. It was what he did with those stories that counted.

Audiences don’t turn up to see Macbeth over and over again because Shakespeare came up with the astonishing idea that three witches would tell a man he could not be beaten until Birnam Wood came to his castle and then his enemies cut down branches from that very forest for camouflage and crept up on him. No, that idea creates a nice little ironic twist but the reason the play stays as evergreen as the boughs the soldiers wear on their heads is the way the play is written: the characterisation, the control of irony, the manipulation of narrative and, above all, the language.

The truth is that no-one really owns ideas. They always emerge out of a cultural backdrop and their development is contributed to by a multitude of individual realisations. All that an author owns is his or her text, the code we produce that can be replicated a million times anywhere in the world.

So if you think you’ve got a brilliant idea for a story, don’t get anxious about sharing it with the world – get writing. If your writing is good enough, your book will sell; if it isn’t, it won’t. It’s that simple.

Dancing at your daughter's party

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I work with a lot of writers whose ambition is to write for young people. In doing so, I see the same misconceptions occuring over and over again. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight one of the absolute classics. I call it dancing at your daughter’s party.

The way this mistake manifests itself is that the author makes the adult characters much more interesting than the child characters. Now why on earth would someone who supposedly wants to be a children’s author do this? The answer is simple: they’re really writing about themselves. The story is only masquerading as a children’s book. Actually it’s nothing more than an enactment of the author’s fantasy of recognition.

I’ve read stories about parents with wonderful secrets that are gradually discovered by their children, whose function in the story is mostly to draw back the curtain on their parents’ hidden abilities and gasp with wonder. I’ve seen novels, apparently about a child whose mother has tragically died, but which turn out to be all about how his or her father bravely copes with the loss of his wife and then fortuitously finds himself another woman. I’ve read about magical dads, gifted mums, eccentric uncles, even wonderfully enlightened and (I shudder to say) sexy teachers.

Frankly, it’s embarrassing. So let’s get this straight. If you’re writing a children’s book, then the central emotional journey should be the child’s. Obviously, as with any general rule, there can be exceptions to this. Animals are child-substitutes. So are magical, or fairy-tale creatures, like hobbits. And there are a few (but only a few) examples of books about adults that were specifically written for children. On the whole, however, it’s a golden rule that a children’s book should be about children.

Of course adults will almost certainly have to appear in the stories and when they do so, they should be properly rounded characters with histories that stretch back beyond the beginning of the book and futures that extend beyond its climax. But they shouldn’t be the stars of the show and the child characters should not exist just to facilitate their narrative. Otherwise you’re like a dad at a Christmas party dancing in front of his teenage children and their friends. And believe me, that’s not cool.