Reflections (26 page)

There is a good side and bad one to the freshness with which children come to things. And in the same way, there is a good side and a bad to the way the adults run it all. On the good side, there are enormously high standards. None of the editors I have worked with would have accepted much in the way of clichés. None of them have ever let me get away with any muddle in any plot, nor with any factual inaccuracy; and though some have queried things that struck them as peculiar, they have always been delighted by originality. This naturally has put me on my mettle. Knowing that everything I wrote was going to be subjected to extreme and shrewd scrutiny, I take pains to get the finished manuscript
right
, if I can. The bad side is of course that adults are a prey to fashion—and to fashion in its hardened-off form, as conventionality.

Yes, I know children are too. I can imagine the present fashion for mobile phones, despite government health warnings, turning into such a convention that teachers will say, as they say “Open your books at page nine,” “Get out your mobile phones and call up the weather forecast.” Perhaps they already do. But, unlike children, adults do have the last say in any matter to do with books.

For example, when I first started writing in earnest, it was perhaps lucky that I wanted to write fantasy for children, because anything whatsoever with magic in it was regarded with contempt as “only for children.” The great outpourings of adult fantasy that I am currently trying to deal with had barely started then, and anyway they were not considered at all respectable. Even in the little enclave of juvenile writing, fantasy was looked at sideways and people tended to ask why I didn't write Real Books.

The convention then (it was more than fashion) was for these Real Books, in rigorously contemporary settings in which children were confronted with present-day problems—divorced or abusive parents, bullying, poverty, physical handicaps, all those things—and kids were supposed to be helped by reading them. Around that time I remember going to a talk given by Jill Paton Walsh who seemed to me to say the last word on this kind of book. “If you know two people who are divorcing,” she said, “would you give them each a copy of
Anna Karenina
? Can you imagine a less helpful book? Yet people do this to children all the time.”

I went away and thought about this deeply. And it seemed to me, and still does, that facing this kind of problem in your life is actually what most fairy stories do; and they do it much better than any realistic story because they can distance the trouble with magic, cool it off by setting it so often in a strange country, and make the reader able to walk round the bad stuff, pretend it isn't theirs, examine it, and then solve the problem along with the hero. And, what is more, have fun doing it.

This was the first time that I had seriously understood that around each fashion or conventional notion—each fixed idea held by those adults who managed books for children—there is what I came to think of as brain space. That there is a way to duck around these notions. You can show you know the convention is there, find a way to use it, and carry on.
Dogsbody
was, I think, my most successful swerve around the prevailing fashion for books about problems. It helped to take a dog's point of view. Dogs tend to think more about their next meal than the situation in Ireland. But I had a go with
Power of Three
and another with
The Ogre Downstairs
. The Ogre had a really bumpy ride around conventional thinking. One publisher insisted I send a synopsis, which read things like “Toffee bars come alive with animal spirits, commit suicide on radiators,” upon which he concluded this wasn't about problems, it was just mad.

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 ancestors. 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.