Inside The Mind Of A teenage Girl

During July and August I teach Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Students come from all over the world and they’re mostly pretty wealthy. Last week in a tutorial we were looking at a short story one of my students had written. In places her English was a bit shaky.

‘I didn’t know what word to use here,’ she said. ‘What do you call the person who is responsible for looking after the children and does some of the cleaning in the house?’ She didn’t mean the mother.

One of the things that I like about being a writer is that it’s a very democratic business. Being rich and powerful doesn’t necessarily help. My first published stories were based on my own life. One of them was about working in a pie factory. Another was about labourers on a construction site. I didn’t need to do any research because I’d done it already in real life.

In the middle part of my career I wrote a series of novels with teenage girls as the protagonists. People were always saying to me, ‘Mr Keaney, how do you, a man, manage to get inside the mind of a teenage girl so successfully?’

The answer was simple. As the father of two teenage girls I was exactly the person my wealthy student was trying to describe. I cooked for them, cleaned up after them and ferried them around. I was effectively their servant. And the servant always knows exactly what’s happening in the house.

There Is No Such Thing As An Ordinary House

One of my students asked whether she should describe the ordinary house in which her character lives. She could see that somewhere exotic like a fairy kingdom needed describing but the house in her story was more or less like her own childhood home and she was afraid to bore the readers with it.

Whenever I get a practical question like this, I try out the solution before offering it. It’s surprisingly easy to tell people to do something and then find you can’t do it yourself. So I looked around at my own house to see how easily it could be described.

It is some years since my children left home. In their absence the house became very neat, very tidy, very professional-looking. The walls were all painted in Farrow and Ball colours, a grandfather clock ticked comfortably in the dining room. There were flowers in a vase on the bureau.

Then the grandchildren arrived. Very soon there were crayon marks on all those white-with-a-hint-of-posh walls, hand prints on the windows, face-prints on the mirrors. Alcoves where reading lamps had stood were now stuffed with garishly-coloured plastic toys, wooden bricks poked out from under sofas. Children’s beakers littered the sink.

The house could very easily be described, I realised, though it would not necessarily make the kind of picture I had aspired to when I had imagined the calm waters occupied by those happy individuals whose children have reached maturity and are at last able to arrange their own affairs.

I stood in my living room recalling the way our youngest grandchild had repeatedly puked up her milk in her first few months and I knew exactly what I would tell my student – that every carpet has its own stains, that even the hieroglyphs that decorate the Egyptian pyramids do not have a richer story to tell than the crayon on the walls of my hallway, and that, however familiar it might seem to you, there is no such thing as an ordinary house.

Flash Cards and Fondling - How To Do Setting

I have been working on setting with my students. It's something that some of them have trouble with, particularly when the setting is a part of the contemporary built environment. Somehow if the story is taking place somewhere we're not used to, like an ancient forest, then it's easy; but if it's a shopping mall people assume there's no need for any description.

Some years ago I wanted to write a scene in which two teenagers were having their first date. The girl was epileptic and as a consequence her parents were over-protective. She hadn't told them about this date and she was worried that she might be seen by someone she knew. She was also worried about what the boy would think of her, worried that she wouldn't know what to say to him, worried that if he found out she was epileptic he would be horrified, and worried that she might have a seizure right there in the café.

So there was plenty to focus on. Nevertheless, when I read the scene through it seemed insubstantial. I realised that there was hardly any setting. I'd based the venue on the Haagen Dazs café in London's Leicester Square. So I decided to make a special trip there, for research purposes you understand, not just to pig out on ice cream.

The place was crowded when I arrived and I took the only free seat. To my left was a very smartly dressed young Asian couple and they were snogging. Actually, snogging is not a strong enough word for what they were doing. Utterly oblivious to their surroundings, they were practically eating each other.

On my right, were two young Arab women wearing burkahs. One of them had a shoe box full of home-made flash cards with Arabic words written on them. One by one she was taking the cards out of the box and showing them to her companion who was frowning earnestly as she struggled to pronounce them correctly.

In the twenty minutes I was there a whole procession of characters came in off the street - glowering Goths, noisy tourists, harassed looking parents with over-excited children, even a couple of police officers with a weakness for whipped cream and macadamia nuts.

When I went home and rewrote the scene I put in everything I had seen and this time, of course, there was far too much detail. I had to strip a lot of it out at the next draft but I kept the Asian snoggers and the two young Arab women because they were a gift and because I could never have made them up.

So that's what I've been trying to tell my students. Setting isn't just architecture; it's everything that's going on around your characters.

No More Choo Choo Trains

One of my students isn't very keen on dialogue. She writes beautiful vignettes composed of crystalline imagery and carefully observed detail. But absolutely no dialogue. Since it's obvious that she already knows how to do this trick and since she's come to Cambridge to learn something new, I set her a writing assignment with the instruction to include a decent chunk of dialogue.

She comes to our next session with another beautifully turned vignette. 'Hmm,' I say, after we have read it aloud. 'Tell me, what do you like about this piece of writing?' She picks out a piece of carefully observed detail. 'Yes, I can see how pleasing that is,' I agree. 'And what do you think is missing?' She's not sure. 'What about dialogue?' She points to a few lines of dialogue. 'Let's look at these, shall we?' I write them up on the board. Then I remove all the he saids and she saids. 'Okay, now what is it?' I ask.

It's a poem.

That's how the week starts. It ends with me looking after my grandchildren who are one and two years old. One of our regular outings is to the railway station to watch the trains which they are both very enthusiastic about. Each time a train arrives in the station, or rushes through without stopping, the older of the two turns to me and demands, 'More choo choo trains!'

'There will be more choo choo trains,' I tell him. And for the present he is satisfied. But at last there comes a time when I have had enough of standing there watching my grandchildren watching the trains. 'Time to go home,' I announce. Faces fall. Enthusiasm turns sour. But we cannot stay there forever.

The truth is that there is always a time when you must say bye bye to the choo choo trains even if they are beautifully composed with carefully observed detail and crystalline imagery.

The Pleasures Of Fiction

I'm currently teaching Creative Writing to a group of American students in Cambridge. It's a real delight because Cambridge is a beautiful town and the students are highly-motivated young people.

They're also incredibly polite! In fact, I've had to dissuade them from calling me Doctor. I don't think I'd feel terribly comfortably with that even if I did have a doctorate. But I don't - just a first degree in English that I picked up more years ago than I care to remember. The reason I believe I'm qualified to teach the course is not my academic credentials; it's the twenty-nine years I've spent as a professional writer.

One of the questions I asked in the initial tutorials was what books they'd enjoyed reading recently. One of the students looked down at the ground. 'It's a bit embarrassing,' she said, shuffling awkwardly in her seat. I didn't know what to expect. Was she going to own up to a secret porn addiction? I waited anxiously. Finally she looked up. 'I don't know if you've heard of A Game Of Thrones,' she said.

Just in case you've been living on Mars for the last fifteen years, A Game of Thrones is the first in a series of colossally successful fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list last year and the series as a whole has garnered a raft of awards. Deservedly so, in my opinion, because it's a terrific piece of storytelling.

So what exactly is going on here? How is it that an intelligent young woman is ashamed to admit that she has enjoyed a good book? Of course, there can only be one reason: it's because it's popular and that has to mean it's trash, right? She clearly imagined I was expecting her to say that she'd been curled up with Proust for the last six months.

Actually, I understand all too well this young woman's thinking. Somebody asked me recently whether studying English at university helped me become a writer and they were surprised when I said that I didn't think it had. Yes, I learned a lot about how literature works but I also acquired a lot of unhelpful notions about high art along with a great deal of reverence for the canon of literature. Those notions and that reverence had to be unlearned in the years that followed because all it did was make me feel inadequate and come between me and the enjoyment of a great story.

Good Writing

I am half way through the First Draft of my next novel. I know this because the story already exists very clearly in my head. I’m not a writer who explores the story on paper, at least not these days. I explore the story in my head for ages before I set to work. Then I write an outline, merely to remind myself of everything I want to include, since it’s quite easy to forget great chunks.

Working in this way leaves me with the opportunity to work on the writing itself, rather than trying to devise a story and write it in the best possible way at the same time, which strikes me as a bit like cycling down the road carrying a parcel.

When I say that I want to work on the writing I mean that I want to get it as good as I can by my own standards. Everybody has different ideas about this but for me good writing should be almost invisible, like the glass in a shop window, so that the reader only sees the goods on display. I’m not interested in writing that calls attention to itself all the time like some leather clad rock star standing in the spotlight producing endless guitar solos.

As a children’s writer I naturally visit schools now and again. In more than one primary school I’ve had the experience of the teacher saying something like, ‘Now then everyone, I’m sure that Mr Keaney is going to show us how to write using lots of lovely describing words.’ That sort of attitude makes me want to scream, ‘No Mr Keaney is going to do no such thing!’ This is no way to teach our children but of course it comes from the rigidity of the National Curriculum.

Recently, a secondary school asked me to visit and I expressed a certain reluctance because on a previous visit some of the pupils had seemed to have no idea who I was or what I was doing there. I only want to come if you do some preparation for the visit, I said. The teacher sent me back a reply stating that this wasn’t really possible because the curriculum determined what was taught in English lessons and there was no time to deviate from that. What was the point in me coming then, I wondered. Because the school was having a Book Week, she said. So my visit was effectively no more than a box-ticking exercise.

You can’t measure good writing by the number of adjectives used. Nor can you pretend that you are introducing children to literature by having an annual Book Week. These are both simply examples of tokenism. I believe this sort of thing has come about because of political interference in schools. In the UK politicians seem obsessed with micro-managing the curriculum so that it produces a series of statistics. And what is the purpose of these statistics? Purportedly, it is to provide parents with choice. But really it’s just so they can use the figures as part of their own miserable campaign of self-preservation.

Treading Softly

Today I am reading the first full-length manuscript of a very close friend. It’s a delicate business. I have to be completely honest of course, but I am also incredibly aware of how much this manuscript means to the person in question; how much work went into it and how raw and naked they feel handing it over to me to comment on.

This is something you tend to forget when you have been writing books with a certain measure of success for a number of years. But it’s important not to forget; at least not if you want to help people, rather than simply trample on them.

I remember the very first time I read my work to an audience. I could hear my own voice as if I were detached from my body. Every word I uttered seemed excruciatingly awful so that I wanted to crawl away and die. That was more than twenty five years ago but the experience is still burned into my memory. Fortunately, when I looked up the audience were smiling. Even so, I wasn’t sure they weren’t just being nice.

The trouble is you get to a point where you have put so much work into a manuscript that you no longer have any idea whether it’s any good or not. This is particularly true when it is your first manuscript. You feel like it’s you soul you’re passing around for other people to sample. I am reminded of the last line of Yeats’ poem, He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

It's The Way You Tell It

For the last couple of days I’ve been reading an extremely long manuscript by an aspiring author. It’s absolutely full of basic errors in punctuation, syntax and vocabulary. One of the biggest howlers was when the author meant to write etcetera but actually wrote excreta instead.

Reading something like this, I understand why some agents have a reputation for being grumpy and unapproachable. Why would anyone think they could send out a manuscript so full of errors? I suppose there are only two reasons. Either they don’t see the mistakes or they don’t think they matter. Either way I’m reminded of something the best-selling author Ken Follett wrote.

Most writers I know are interested in obscure questions of spelling and grammar. For example, is there a difference in meaning between "each other" and "one another"? Some people say that "each other" should be used where just two people are involved and "one another" for three or more. Copyeditors may correct a writer who fails to follow this rule. But some authorities maintain there is no difference, and certainly ordinary speech does not distinguish between the two.

 Are you thinking this is a perfectly trivial question? If so, you probably aren't going to be a professional writer. Words are our tools, and subtle distinctions are important even if readers are not consciously aware of them. When I first came across this business about "each other" and one another" I was mildly panicked at the thought that I might have been misusing these phrases all my life.

Writers are generally fascinated by puns, word games, variant spellings, regional dialects, forms of pidgin English, new coinages, and everything to do with the language they use. In the same way painters are usually fascinated by the way light falls on surfaces and changes the way things look. You'll never be a writer if you don't love the language you use.

Mr Follett wrote this in the introduction to a book called Writing The Blockbuster Novel. Now I don’t actually aspire to write a blockbuster novel myself but I do agree that if you’re not fascinated by language, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to become a writer. After all, there are plenty of other ways to express yourself.

Writing a novel is not a simple matter. So many people seem to think that it’s all about coming up with a great story. But it isn’t.  Of course you do need a great story but it’s the way you tell it that counts – the language that you use. Get it right and agents will not hesitate to sign you up, editors will gladly wave contracts in front of your nose, foreign publishers will bid for the rights to your book, etcetera. But get it wrong and your manuscript is just a great big pile of excreta.

 

Christmas

I once ran an evening class in Creative Writing. I didn’t particularly enjoy it because some of the students were very strange indeed. There was one man, for example, who reminded me of an autistic Sherlock Holmes. He was in his thirties, tall and thin with very straight brown hair, a high forehead, prominent cheekbones and an aquiline nose. He hardly said a word but every week he came to the class with a slightly different version of the same story, each time apparently convinced that he had written something quite new.

The story generally started something like this: ‘I hear a key turn in the lock. The door creaks open and they enter the house.’ He would then go on to describe a group of people of varying number, but always at least two, walking slowly and carefully up the stairs of a suburban terraced house which he often protrayed in immense detail, right down to the pattern of the wallpaper. They never spoke; all were too intent on their purpose. In their hands they clutched knives and forks.

The narrator who was clearly in a state of great agitation, grew more and more terrified as he chronicled the progress of these mysterious individuals, through each of the bedrooms in turn. Only when they finally stood outside the door of the uppermost bedroom, did it become clear that he was telling the story while strapped to a bed inside and that the silent individuals who stood ready to enter the room were members of his own family whose purpose was to eat him alive. See what I mean when I say, strange?

I asked him once what inspired this story. Christmas, he told me.

Well I hope your Christmas wasn’t too much like his. Mine was very, very relaxed. Nice food, music, dvds and pleasant company. I didn’t turn the computer on for two days. But I could hear it calling to me all the time, whispering my name in the dead of night.

There would have been no point, of course. Writing is all about concentration and I find it impossible to concentrate for at least a week before or after Christmas. It’s a writer’s wasteland: a great swathe of the imagination blanketed in snow.

But a thaw is coming. I can hear the sound of trickling water. And so I have turned my computer back on and I am looking forward to returning to work. No one has eaten me alive, I’m pleased to say. And I very much hope the same is true for you.