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.

Are You Talking To Me?

A large part of my time at the moment is taken up with other people's language. For two days a week I look after my grandson who is learning to talk and on a further two days I sit in a room in a college in London and students come to see me to discuss problems with their writing. What surprises me is how similar these experiences sometimes are.

The other day, for example, a young woman came along with an essay that had been failed by her tutor - unsurprisingly, since it seemed to have been written in accordance with an alternative set of grammar rules from that commonly in use by the rest of us. 'Let's just take a look at these first three sentences,' I suggested. 'It seems to me that they're really all one sentence.'

The young woman frowned and shook her head. 'No, they couldn't be,' she said firmly. 'Why not?' I asked. 'Well a sentence has to be twelve words long, doesn't it?' she said, as if this was a truth that even a babe in arms was well aware of. 'Um, no,' I said.

She gave me the sort of look you normally reserve for someone who tells you that the second hand car you are considering buying was owned by one old lady who only ever used it to drive to evensong.

Well that was what she had read on the internet, the young woman insisted, and she had struggled for hours to get every sentence the same. 'It was really hard,' she added. 'And now you're telling me I've got to do it all over again!'

At least my grandson doesn't get his rules from the internet. Instead, he makes them up himself, along with some of his vocabulary. Bread-sticks, for example, are soozies. Goodness knows why. Yes used to be Ah. Now it's Och, as though he had spent some time in Scotland.

Recently his mother told me about a new expression which seems to mean, Who's that? 'I don't know where he got it from,' she protested, 'but whenever there's a knock on the door he looks up, frowns and says something that sounds exactly like arsehole.'

And indeed just last week my grandson was having his midday nap in the spare bedroom upstairs and I was sitting on the edge of the bed reading when he woke and sat up. At the same time the tree-surgeon who was working in our garden came in by the back door and walked through the hallway downstairs.

My grandson's eyes widened and he looked at me. 'Arsehole,' he said.

Funnily enough that may be exactly what the poor young woman who had to rewrite her essay was thinking.

The Shape-Sorting Box

My grandson has a shape sorting toy. I'm sure you've seen one. It's a brightly coloured plastic box with a series of differently shaped holes: a square hole, a circular hole, a triangular hole and so on. There are also a number of matching plastic shapes and the point of the toy is for the child to push each shape through the correct hole and into the box.

When my grandson feels like it he can correctly sort some (though not all) of the shapes. But only when he feels like it. On other occasions he will determinedly try to push the triangular shape through the square hole or the square shape through the circular hole.

It's no good pointing out to him that it's the wrong shape for the hole. He knows that. He just wants to make it into the correct one by sheer determination. He wants to bend the toy to his will. It usually ends up with him shouting out loud and throwing it away in disgust.

When I'm not looking after my grandson or writing children's books, I'm the Writing Fellow at Goldsmiths College, London. I sit in my office and people come to see me to talk about the problems they experience with their writing.

Today I saw a young woman who felt she ought to be getting better grades. It was clear just from talking to her that she was intelligent. So I asked her to show me one of her essays. I only had to read the first page to see what she was doing wrong. She was approaching the task as if she were writing a historical novel. I think you should try tackling this more systematically, I suggested. You need a clear introduction in which you state what your argument is going to be, then a series of paragraphs, each dealing with a specific aspect of the topic under discussion, and each following its predecessor in an orderly sequence, like a set of steps leading the reader neatly to your conclusion.

Actually she knew this perfectly well. In fact, she agreed wholeheartedly with me. That was exactly what she ought to do. So why was she writing like this instead? Because she wanted to do something more individual, something more creative.

But it's not really creativity that's required here, I pointed out. At least not the kind of creativity you might apply to writing a novel. The point of an academic essay is to demonstrate you've understood the topic. You show you've read what the authorities on the subject have to say, and considered how their arguments apply to this case. That way your tutor knows you're making progress.

She knew that too but it just seemed so boring. So very disappointing. Her eyes misted up. She had hoped university would be more interesting. I felt immensely sorry for her, trying so hard to push herself through a university-shaped hole. I can still remember what that felt like even though it's a very long time since I was at college.

After she'd left it occurred to me that next time my grandson throws the shape sorting box across the kitchen , I must try to remember what's really going on in his head. He's not just having a tantrum. It's more complicated. I'm asking him for an essay but he wants to write a novel. No wonder he gets frustrated!