Reflections: On the Magic of Writing

  I was very lucky, however, that there was a huge interest among those who dealt with children’s books. There were innumerable good writers and Kaye Webb to publish them all in Puffin Books. The stilted kind of book where the entire so-called adventurous plot took place in the school holidays had been forced aside by the Narnia books, and by the time I started writing it was completely outmoded. The plot could happen anywhere, at any time, and there was much more freedom. But the downside of all this interest was “caring.” Caring meant you weren’t supposed to set children a bad example, and this became a fashion and a fetish. I remember the huge and ridiculous outcry there was at the children swearing in Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners. My book Eight Days of Luke was turned down by a publisher on the grounds that children shouldn’t strike matches, and then, when it did see print, it was accused of diabolism—but luckily not too seriously.

  Along with the caring, there grew up an obsession with genres. No one had worried too much about genre up to the point where I started to write the Chrestomanci books—after all, they were all called children’s books and the enclave was a little small to start splitting it up. But now the people concerned with children’s books thought about genre. Charmed Life was one of my books that was impelled into being by this obsession, to some extent. At this point I was looking for brain space around the idea that the best thing was to show the reader that everyone has within themselves the power to achieve something—it is just a question of realizing this. But I was simultaneously annoyed by the way that things like alternate worlds were considered exclusively the property of science fiction. So I set the book in one. Later, I tried the same swerve into brain space with horror, and wrote Black Maria as a horror story that wasn’t one, if you follow me. But before that I wrote Witch Week, in another alternate world.

  Witch Week was my response to another fashionable obsession, that all witches were intrinsically evil. Are they? Even when almost everybody is a witch? And there had been a spate of racial bullying in schools just then too. Witches are an admirable example of people who are “different” but probably can’t help it. But that fashion for deciding witches were intrinsically evil was one of those that came and went. It went out soon after I wrote that book and then came up again in the 1990s, when Witch Week was banned in libraries in the state of Massachusetts for having the word “witch” in the title. There’s not much you can do about this sort of fashion except wait for it to go away.

  Other notions come and go too. The passion for Real Books modulated into a fancy that fantasy was bad for people because you ended up not knowing what was real. This was quite strong around the time I wrote Fire and Hemlock, and indeed it may have pushed that book into being. There was enormous brain space round that idea. I had long wanted to write something where the magic could be so close to seeming like an accident, or a child’s not understanding some adult matter, that the child herself might end up doubting the magic. I have always been very pleased with that book because the magic did indeed end up like that, to the extent of motivating the plot.

  But then there was political correctness. I have never been clear quite what this is or was, because the rules seemed to change every month. Under its influence, my search for brain space around it became like a rush down a slippery slope, dodging the latest manifestation in a sort of wild slalom. I think this particular set of fashions was what finally pushed me into writing for adults for a while instead.4

  But now there is suddenly plenty of brain space again. Books are long, in this current fashion, which alone gives a sense of freedom—and I’ve always worried about length: the feeling I shan’t be able to cram all the story into two hundred-odd pages. I shall be pleased about that—at least until someone sends my book back on the grounds that it’s not long enough. And children’s writing has, thanks to the Harry Potter phenomenon, burst out of the little enclave where it has been for so long and has become something the majority of adults are not ashamed to know about. Above all, writing that deals with magic, the supernatural, and other worlds has become almost respectable—even conventional. As you saw from the beginning of my talk, this brings all sorts of constraints with it, and I feel sure it will bring more—I do not, for instance, like the indications I have seen that this is bringing about an increase in sloppy practice and pushing the conventions of adult writing into writing for children. But there is much more freedom to write, and I am not grumbling. Or not really. Or not yet.

  Our Hidden Gifts

  This inspirational talk was given at the December 2008 Speech Day of Kendrick School in Reading. It was arranged by Diana’s son Richard, a teacher at the school.1

  I would like to say a few words about how gifted we all are. All of you sitting here have, among you, abilities that are practically countless. Some of you will be aware of some of the gifts you have, but you won’t be aware of all of them, for the very good reason that the exact circumstances that will allow you to show these gifts have not been invented yet. Think of them as your hidden gifts.

  To show you what I mean, think for a moment of the very earliest people to make it to Europe. They arrived at the end of the Ice Age, when it was, to say the least of it, very, very cold, and took up residence in some caves somewhere in the middle of France. According to the pundits who studied their remains, they were exactly like us. I mean exactly like us. They had the same physiques, the same brains, and probably looked a lot like us—give or take a certain amount of hair. There were no scissors in those days. Scissors were among the many things yet to be invented. No one had discovered iron or other metals. No one had even invented the wheel. They had fire, but that was it. It says a great deal about how gifted they were that they survived at all.

  Now, since they were so very like us, it follows that they had the same abilities; but most of these must have been hidden because the way to use these abilities hadn’t been invented yet. It was all right for the ones who had a gift for art: they could do cave paintings. But the real flowering of that gift actually had to wait thousands of years for the exact right time, in Renaissance Italy, for people like Michelangelo and Botticelli to come along. The ones who had all the abilities to make a lawyer were probably quite happy too, because they could settle disputes and stop fights—although there must have been times when the rest of the tribe rolled their eyes at the cave roof and said, “There she goes again! Hit her, someone.”

  But how did the people feel who were born with all the abilities to be a concert pianist, or a nuclear physicist, or banker, or—well—all the other things we can be nowadays?

  The usual assumption is that they mucked in with the rest of the group, making the best of things. People say that if you’ve never heard of a thing, you don’t miss it. But I think that is only half true. I’m willing to bet that large numbers of these cavemen had yearnings and forward-looking inklings flitting through their minds from time to time. Picture the young woman, tastefully dressed in tiger skin, with her hair greased into fashionable rats’ tails, who goes into the cave and hits her head—for the hundredth time—on the bit where the roof is low. “Dammit!” she says. “Why can’t I just press something and have a light here?” Or there is the man trudging for miles across the tundra, carrying a heavy dead animal. His feet are killing him, his arms are aching, and he is frozen to the bone. He would be thinking, “If only there was some way to get back to the cave without walking!”

  My impression is that we all still have these inklings. My own is a strong desire to fly. I don’t mean I want to boringly go on an airplane: I’m thinking of antigravity here, zooming on my own power above all sorts of interesting countrysides. I also dream of flicking to another, alternate world. I am quite sure I am adumbrating hidden gifts that some of my descendants are going to be able to use properly when the time is right.

  When you have such inklings, don’t dismiss them out of hand. Not having these sorts of notions is the way to stagnation. You can see this from the later history of our cave people ancest
ors. The climate warmed and living became easier. So what did these people do? They went and sat on the shores of seas or lakes and did nothing. They stagnated and ate seafood—at least, beside the lakes, it was mussels and minnows, but they still did nothing. There are piles of their rubbish where they sat, quite squalidly. This stasis is what comes with peace and plenty, unfortunately. I call the frame of mind that goes with it the “Oh no!” way of thinking. If someone wanted to use his/her gifts for something different, the rest of the tribe said, “Oh no!” If someone suggested building a boat or going inland, they said, “It’s against the rules,” or “It’s not traditional!” or “The gods don’t allow it” or, more hysterically, “He’s a heretic” or “She’s a witch.” What they really meant, of course, is “We don’t want anything to change.” And this went on for thousands of years.

  It was literally millennia before humanity pulled itself up by its bootstraps and started making use of people’s hidden gifts, for taming horses, for instance, or cultivating crops, or domesticating cows and sheep. The static times must have been maddening for the ones with these ideas.

  But they do come round, more than once, the times when humanity just sits there and says “Oh no!” to anything new. The “Oh no” party is always with us. You can hear them now in the people who refuse to admit that the climate might be changing. They say, “It’s just a blip in the weather,” or “The scientists are being alarmist,” or simply and complacently, “God will provide. We’re okay.” And it really is important not to listen to them, just as it always was. Someone somewhere undoubtedly has the right hidden gift to cope with the coming conditions, but he/she has not recognized it yet. That person could be you. Or if it’s not your hidden gifts that are needed this time, they might be just right for the next time. So please don’t disregard any of the strange notions that come into your heads. They are certainly prompted by your hidden gifts. Just remember how incredibly gifted all human beings are. Thank you.

  Characterization:

  Advice for Young Writers

  Always ready to give suggestions and advice, Diana wrote this piece to help aspiring young writers.

  Your characters—the people in your story—are the most important part of what you write. They are the things that make the plot work. Things don’t just happen. People make them happen. They do this by deciding to do one thing rather than another; by reacting to one another (“I like this person, I hate that one, this other person is a fool”); by having strong beliefs about life; by being vain or selfish; and sometimes by being feeble and not doing anything at all.

  It follows that you have to find the right people for your story. It is no good, for instance, if the story you want to tell concerns someone getting to be king of the world, and you make that person feeble and timid—or, if you do, it would have to be a story about how this person got to be king by a set of accidents and misunderstandings. This would be very different from a story of a strong person forging on through all sorts of barriers, and getting to be king in the end. See what I mean? The kind of person the story happens to makes all the difference.

  Some writers try to solve this matter in one of two ways: in the first, they have one main character who is a sort of stooge and observer, and have events and personalities happen in front of this person. The result is that the observer character becomes just a window for the reader to look through, with no discernible personality, and the plot is a set of disconnected episodes. What you get is a sort of variety show and not a story at all. A very good example of this is Alice in Wonderland, but it is not a method that anyone should imitate unless she/he is actually a genius.

  The second way is worse: here the writer decides on a set of names (usually hard to remember) and has these names doing what the story wants them to do, without the reason for what they do being part of these named people at all. I think the hope here is that if you work them hard enough these cardboard figures will turn out to be real people in some way. In fact, it ends up with the reader puzzling about why Ertyulop ran off with the treasure, when in the last chapter he/she was trying to defend it. Or why Asdfgh suddenly decided to go on this quest when there was nothing in it for him/her. Or even why Oknmb abruptly starts to hate Ertyulop.

  So how do you get it right?

  You have to consider all the characters in your story to be real people. You have to get to know them, before you start, as if they were well-known friends. This applies to every single person in your story, not just those with leading roles. Look around you, at your friends, enemies, and most irritating aunts, and apply what you learn to whoever you put in your story. Each of these people will have a differently shaped body, for a start, which causes them to walk, sit, and gesture in a different way from the rest. Their hair will grow in an individual way—and hang over their eyes, or not, when they are excited. Some people’s teeth will stick out, or be false ones. Some will make gestures all the time, others will remain still. Most important of all—because this is what chiefly appears in a written story—each of them will talk in a different way. Listen carefully, and you will find that every single person has her/his own special rhythm when they speak. Once you know the rhythm of your character’s speech and can get it written into what they say, the chances are that this character will strike readers as a real person.

  The other thing about real people is that they have jobs, hobbies, and a life outside the place where you usually meet them. This is another thing that you should be careful to know about your characters. Nothing is less convincing than a person who only seems to come alive at the moments when they take part in the story. Make sure you know what they are doing when you are not actually writing about them—what they have for breakfast, what their outside interests are, the kind of clothes they buy. Then, even if you don’t actually mention much of this, the person will have proper depth.

  Knowing what each person is like offstage, so to speak, is often a great help to writing the story. Let us say, for example, you are stuck in the writing because the plot demands that your main character finds out a vital fact, and you have no idea where she/he can get it. Then, fortunately, you remember that nervous old Mr. Buggins next door has a junk shop down by the market. Your main character can drop into the shop and—behold—the vital fact is there in the shop window. If you had not known this about Mr. Buggins, the story might be stuck indeed.

  But take care: there is no need to go on about a character and put in all you know. This is another way to produce a cardboard effect. The fact is, you need to know, but the reader doesn’t. Long descriptions of someone’s appearance and lifestyle are a total turn-off. But if you know, it will come over without your having to tell it.

  We come now to a thing you have to know best of all, and that is a character’s inward life. Again, you do not have to go into it in detail (unless it is vital to the plot or particularly odd and interesting) but you do have to know what makes a person tick. If, for instance, you are writing about a mild and timid person, but the story requires that this person suddenly becomes fierce and bold, you have to know from the beginning that, somewhere in this person’s psyche, there are the seeds of boldness. If you know that from the start, then hints of this will get dropped, and it will not seem wholly unlikely when this person suddenly rushes upon Uncle Bill and bites him in the neck. And this goes for the mind of every person you wish to portray. The kind of people they are inside gives you the reasons for what they do in the story.

  There is a lovely bonus that comes with knowing your characters from the inside out. If you have got it right, there will come a moment when they start acting like real, independent people. They will do things and say things that even you do not expect. Let them. They will add immeasurably to the depth and excitement of your narrative.

  All this applies particularly to the baddies in a story. You have to remember that villains are real people too. They have reasons for what they do, and motives for the way they behave, and they do not, as a rule, regard themselves
as evil. They are acting for a cause, or out of deeply held convictions which have led them the wrong way. A lot of writers forget this. They make the baddie give evil laughs and rejoice in his/her wickedness—or worse, they wriggle out by making the villain mad. And they have the villain with no outside life except to torment the hero. The majority of bad people are not like this. It is much better to consider them as just like other people, but nasty.

  And here is a tip, something I often do. Make your baddie someone you know and dislike. Use a real live person. Then there will be no trouble in making him/her convincing. You know them anyway. People are often shocked when I say this. But, since no bad person ever thinks of themselves as bad, these live people will always fail to recognize themselves and there is no harm done. Besides, they deserve it. So look around you. There must be someone bad that you know. Use them. And another bonus will be that the rest of your characters, because they are reacting to a real person, will start behaving more like real people too.

  Something About the Author

  This autobiography was provided for the Gale Autobiography Series Something About the Author, Volume 7, published in 1988.