Reflections: On the Magic of Writing

  Now let’s turn to positives in children’s literature.

  For a start, the only way we can have everyday life is inside our heads. We do quite a good job of convincing ourselves there is us in there and the world out there, but the fact is we get the out-there by sensory input, which then comes to the brain to be processed. Along with everything else: figures that need adding or multiplying, how to write that important letter, what was the title of that book now? Who wrote that lovely song on the radio? Must phone Mother. How do I deal with Smith? My shoes are killing me—and just look at this crisis in the newspaper! And masses more. You could reasonably say that most of us have the whole world in our heads. In order to cope with this flood of stuff, we have to have the ability to think alongside it, on a sort of different waveband: Hey, these figures add up to my telephone number—hell—I’m overdrawn. What if I write the letter back to front, starting with the hard bit? That book title will come to me if I just forget it. The song sounded Scottish. What if I wait and let Mother phone me—no peace for a month if I do that. What if I tell Smith to go to hell? What if I take my shoes off under the table? What if the newspaper got its facts wrong?

  You’ll notice that this band of thoughts begins to fill with “What ifs.” This “What if” is a sign that your imagination is working. At this level, your imagination is your ability to solve problems. It takes a situation with a missing bit and then goes “What if we try this?” until it supplies what is missing. It can do this in a small way: “Okay, I’ll kick these darn shoes off.” Or it can run through to the very highest levels of speculation, where it can expand beyond accepted ideas and envisage completely new shapes for the future. Even at a fairly mundane level, the imagination is the growing point of the mind: “What if I shook off this stupid fear of Mother’s nagging and simply told her I was busy?” If your mother is like mine, this might strike you as a fantasy. And yet this is just what all advances are in origin, fantasies until someone makes them into reality. Airplanes have existed in fantasy ever since the story of Daedalus; Arthur C. Clarke invented communication satellites as part of a fantasy; a thermos flask figures in several Celtic tales as one of the miraculous Treasures of Britain. And so on. The ability to fantasize is the most precious one we know. Because it solves problems, it has tremendous survival value. And—fortunately—it is built into us so that, unless mistaken adults inhibit us, we all have to do it.

  One of the signs of a necessary built-in faculty is that you enjoy doing it. Like eating, or sex. We all play with ideas. Children, of course, do it all the time, but even the most adult of businessmen in the most boring meeting will say “Let’s play with a few figures here” or “Let’s play around with this idea for a bit”—and this is the right way to talk about it because it helps if your imagination is exercised with a lot of pleasure and in a great deal of hope. Then your “What ifs” go with a verve and you’re really likely to get somewhere. When the missing bit is found, it is often accompanied with wonder and enormous delight. Eureka! I always see Archimedes bounding about punching the air like a soccer player who has just scored a goal, and dripping all over the street.

  People probably thought Archimedes was insane, but actually what this element of play and delight is doing is keeping you sane. To go back to the stream of consciousness for a second: you’re smiling inside your head at Smith’s expression if you were to tell him to go to hell, even while your imagination is also warning you this would be most unwise—you can envisage Smith bringing a lawsuit—but still, it’s a lovely thought and it makes you feel much better. It’s hard to tell if the lovely thought is a joke or a fantasy—and in fact jokes and fantasy are very closely connected. Both are ways of keeping your mind cool enough and clear enough to deal with a difficult situation.

  When I write, I find that when I am dealing with a difficult situation—particularly the kind of difficulty I mentioned earlier that is imposed from an outside source and before which children are mostly helpless—I nearly always make it funny. By this I do not mean unserious. To take an example from Black Maria, my latest book, Aunt Maria, the lady in the title, is a monstrous old lady who uses her age and infirmity to manipulate everyone around her. Worse than this, she plays on people’s guilt in order to force them into very narrow traditional roles according to sex—certain things are “women’s work” or “men’s business” only—and toward the end of the book she frankly admits to boring people on purpose, getting them so fazed with tedium that their minds are not able to work. In other words, Aunt Maria is in the business of closing down the imagination for her own ends. She eventually closes down the boy, Chris, into an animal—and there is a hilarious episode when Chris tries to get his revenge by invading a polite tea party in wolf form. I gave little whinnies of laughter while I was writing this, and I still find it funny, but it is serious all the same. Because Chris has been closed down, rendered a wild animal—you could say that Aunt Maria has made Chris into a delinquent by her treatment of him.

  I venture to say that more important things can be conveyed like this, playfully, while people laugh, than by any other means. Even if you don’t take it in on one level, you do on another.

  I do want to convey something when I write. I don’t want to teach or preach. But I want to convey, responsibly, the experience you have when your mind is working as it should, and this means working very hard usually, though you’re too busy to notice it, opening up new ideas with wonder and pleasure. Of course it helps if I am, myself, working at the same sort of pitch. And generally I do. I sit there, in the best chair, scribbling away, forgetting to eat, being a nuisance to my family, and occasionally annoying them acutely by bellowing with laughter and falling out of my chair. Most of my books get written at such fever pitch that it puzzles me afterward to say how I thought of this or that idea. For instance, while I was writing this speech, my husband was reading a book called Hexwood which I have just finished, and he chuckled appreciatively at a remark one of the characters made. I looked up and said, “He said that, not me—I’d never have thought of saying that.” It was almost as if the book had been writing itself.

  That’s probably as it should be, if I am to start to catch the way the mind works. In some ways, a fantasy should be like a dream, where the mind is working hard, but not in your conscious control. And I think this is partly the source of John Masefield’s mistake in The Box of Delights. He had all the elements of a dream there, and forgot that it should, ultimately, be in his conscious control. A dream, after all, seldom has a plot like a story has, and in this kind of writing the story is all-important. No one—particularly a child—is going to forgive you if you don’t tell a story, first and foremost. I love telling stories. Finding out what happens next. And the bit where it all starts to come together at the end is the most marvelous thing I know. The conscious control generally comes in at the next stage, the second draft, where I work long and hard at making sure the story hangs together logically on all its levels. Part of my responsibility, which is reinforced by the number of adults connected with writing for children, is not to turn out shoddy work.

  But there is an odd fact: the logic of a story and the way its plot leads is not the same as the logic of a particular book. Each book has its own personality and its own drive—which often leads in surprising directions—and that personality has to develop in the first page or so. If it doesn’t, then I am not ready to write that book, or that book is not ready to be written (it feels like both ways), and I put it away. When the personality does develop it actually dictates the style—the language—in which the book is written, and this is one of the things I am most at pains to get quite right in the second draft. It is something like trying to convey the exact atmosphere of a dream, if you get me. We’ve all had dreams in which the events don’t add up to the feeling the dream gave us.

  The really difficult thing is that the book has to give that feeling.

  But the main way in which a fantasy resembles a dream is that it works
on more than one level, just as the brain does. I’ve already talked about the way the humor is liable to operate on two levels, one laughable, one very serious. Now I want to add in everything from the deep-down semiconscious level, where your brain mostly talks in symbols, right up to the surface story level—and if possible everything else in between. This is where all the adults necessarily associated with children’s books are a great help. They practically ensure that I write on more than one level, because it’s only fair that I give something to interest them as I go along—and they are going to know a lot more than children, and I can count on that. This does children no harm at all. I agree here with T. H. White in The Sword in the Stone when he claims it is actually good for children to encounter matters that seem above their heads. It gives them something to aim for.

  Something to aim for is really what all this is about. This is where the adults who make the mistakes I talked about earlier truly are in error. They know—or assume—that being adult is very dreary because the world never gives you half what you aim for. What they forget is that aiming for the moon and getting halfway there, gets you farther than if you just aim for the roof and only get halfway upstairs. People’s achievements in life depend quite startlingly much on what they expect to achieve. Now all children know they can achieve adulthood. All they have to do is wait. They need something more than this to aim for.

  I find this something more comes mostly from myths and folktales. When I write at fever pitch, I find my story usually pulls them in whether I intend them to be there or not. Well, they are the earliest forms of fantasy. The beauty of these tales is that they come to pieces like Lego, and each of the pieces has shape and meaning on its own, so you can have a fleeting glance at Hercules here, base this section on Puss in Boots there, or take Cinderella and put her bodily in the center of the story there. A further beauty is that in such stories you find all the troubles and problems of this modern age—any single one you care to name as long as it is archetypal—becoming timeless and distanced, so that you can walk round them and examine them without feeling helpless. This is where fantasy performs the same function as joking, but on a deeper level, and solves your problems while keeping you sane. It is no accident that the majority of folktales at least have a happy ending. Most of them are very deep-level blueprints of how to aim for the moon. The happy ending does not only give you gratification as you read it, but it also gives you hope that, just maybe, a fortunate outcome could be possible. Your brain likes that. It is built to want a solution.

  I prefer to have happy endings when I write—though my books do not always allow me them—on the grounds that it is better to aim at the moon. I would like to think that some day I shall write the perfect fantasy that acts like a dream on many levels at once and conveys the experience of the brain working joyfully flat out—and is a sort of blueprint of how things should be. But you know how it is with aiming for the moon. I don’t get there. Each time I think, Damn it! That’s not it either! It’s quite a good book but it doesn’t do what I’d hoped. But then I think that quite possibly somebody is going to read it and get influenced for the rest of their life. And, as I said at the beginning, I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility, and I think to that person, “All right. Someday I’m going to get it right for you.”

  Lecture Three: Why Don’t You Write Real Books?

  In her third talk in Australia, Diana explores the nature of “Real Books.” The talk was based on an article she wrote for a children’s science fiction edition of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, issue number 140, published in October/November 1987. The talk took place at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney.

  It’s a real pleasure to start answering this question. People have been asking me, “Why don’t you write Real Books?” ever since I had my first book published. Sometimes they ask it by implication, sometimes they ask it outright—but they never stop asking it.

  The question first came from close relatives, who were ashamed to tell their neighbors what I did. My mother-in-law, indeed, clearly felt that the only excuse for my not being solely a wife and mother would have been that I wrote for adults—provided of course that I did not write what she called “popular fiction.” Because I was unable to oblige her in either of these requirements, she preferred to pretend that I did nothing but bring up her grandchildren. This could be very awkward at times. There was one occasion when she was due for a visit—arriving at teatime, for which she always required a heaped plate of sandwiches and at least two different kinds of homemade cake. I was in the middle of trying to produce these items, when my dog came in soaking wet and managed to convey to me that he was freezing and uncomfortable and needed to be dried off now. We were not in our usual house, but he nevertheless led me to the towel cupboard and opened it to show me what he wanted. And I thought, “That was clever! How does it feel to be that intelligent, but without hands or speech? Wait a moment!” And I had the idea for Dogsbody—and I had it so pressingly that I had to race away and get down at least the outline of the first chapter. The result was that when my mother-in-law arrived, there was no cake. I explained and apologized, naturally, and my mother-in-law, having made it clear to me that I had committed a major solecism, then said, “Poor Diana—the children keep you so busy that I don’t blame you for going to sleep.” It was then that I realized that my books were so unreal to her that they were assumed not to exist. The odd thing was that, whenever I had a new book out, she always insisted on having a copy, in order, as far as I could see, to put it on a special shelf in her spare bedroom, ostentatiously unread.

  Well, you can live with this kind of thing. But the question also shortly came at me from every other quarter, often in insidious and indirect forms. It came in the embarrassed look from the hairdresser, if I said what I did. Or the same look from the wives of my husband’s academic colleagues, who would then gush on about this charming little book about frogs they had just given their grandchildren (“Such lovely little pictures and almost no text!”)—the implication being, I always suppose, that what I do must be about frogs, with pictures. Or I will get the question in another form from teachers, who suggest that I should write about “real” things like racism and unemployment. Sometimes the teachers claim that fantasy is too difficult, or “beyond the average child,” but a lot of them complain that it doesn’t give them opportunities for class discussion of important modern issues. Tough, isn’t it? As time went on, I kept getting the same question in yet another form from adult fantasy fans. When I first started writing, there was no such thing as an adult fantasy fan; they appeared in numbers about ten years later. These are always male, with interesting things written on their T-shirts, and they come up to me at conventions and explain that they would read my books—probably—if only the jackets looked less juvenile. Oddly, their female counterparts don’t seem to experience this problem. Most recently, I have had a whole crop of letters from guilt-ridden students. These are mostly in their first year at university and not altogether happy in it, and they are afraid that there is something wrong with them because they’re still rereading and enjoying my books at the advanced age of eighteen or nineteen.

  But the real heavy brigade, the hardest of all to answer, are roughly two-thirds of the head teachers of Great Britain. I get to recognize these the moment I enter a school on an author visit. The male head advances on me with an outstretched hand, prepared to spare me half a minute of his time—and I know now to hold my hand stiff, because he is going to scrunch my knuckles. He does, always. As his hand tightens like a vise, he always says, “I haven’t read any of your books, of course.” Always of course. The female head doesn’t approach. She stands chilly yards off and says coldly, “I only read biography myself, of course.” Note again the of course.

  The proper response, I suppose, should be, “What are you people doing not reading books someone has specially written for the children in your charge?” But I never say it. I am too an
noyingly polite. Besides, I am continually bemused by the way the question—particularly in this form—is on the same lines as “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” And the other thing that bemuses me is the way the question takes so many forms. Even at its simplest—“Why don’t you write Real Books?”—it is truly protean in its implications.

  Before I start to answer it, I’d like to take a look at these implications.

  The first implication—my mother-in-law’s—is that writing fantasy for young people is not respectable in a woman, because a woman’s function is solely to bring up children, but it is probably peculiar enough to keep a secret record of. This rather resembles Dr. Johnson’s strictures of a woman preaching, which he likened to a dog standing on its hind legs. I think it is this aspect of the activity which so embarrasses the hairdresser. But my mother-in-law is also worried by the fact that anything written for children is necessarily going to have a wide appeal. It is, in its very nature, what she would call “popular fiction.” My husband’s colleague’s wife widens this assumption, by concluding instantly that this means it is going to be largely without content though possibly quite pretty. And lurking under this is the assumption that none of it can be either worthwhile or any good. The teachers who feel thwarted of their class discussions pick up on this assumption: to their minds, the only real or worthwhile literature is concerned with current modern problems posed in a narrative that purports to be a slice of everyday life. There is a further implication here—that such problems are only real if they are acutely distressing to read about and maybe even insoluble into the bargain.