Yearly Archives: 2012

Just Write the Damn Book

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I hardly know you, but for the past ten minutes you’ve been talking at me about how much you’ve always wanted to be a writer some day. Of course you need to find the time, the energy and the right word processor. But you’ve got the ideas already, God knows you’ve got the ideas. You’ve got the story and the characters and the setting and you’ve been taking me through them in such mind-numbing detail that my eyes are swimming in the tears of my painfully unyawned yawns.

And as I marvel at the treasures of politeness I’m able to scrape from the utmost confines of my interpersonal skills toolbox, my internal monologue is on a very different autopilot to the one that makes my social persona interject ‘Oh, that sounds really interesting!’ at occasional intervals of your synopsis-telling session. In fact, what’s going on inside my head is more or less akin to this:

JUST WRITE THE DAMN BOOK!!!

If you want people to care about your story, just write the damn book!

If you want to know how good your ideas are, just write the damn book!

If you want to know if you can write, just write the damn book!

If you want to be a writer, just write the damn book!

If you want to write a book, just write the damn book!

A writer is someone who writes. I don’t care if they write well or badly, if they’re published or not, if they write for children, adults or kangaroos. The necessary and sufficient condition is that they write. If you don’t write the damn book, you’re not a writer. If you don’t write the damn book, it’s not a book.

You really want to know what I think of your story?

That is, until you write the damn book.

Are you writing yet?

Clem x

 

 

Writing Funny Things When You’re Sad

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Last year, when I wrote the first instalment of Sesame Seade, I didn’t have a care in the world. Gaily bedight, I carried my mini-computer around Cambridge and typed away in various coffee shops and all the Frappucinos in the world smiled at my enthusiasm and little birds sang songs of joy in the blue skies. Easy to be funny when things are generally fun.

And then Sesame got sold, and suddenly there is A Deadline for book 2 of Sesame Seade (Gargoyles Gone AWOL). But just at the time when I was supposed to start writing it, I ran into some quite unfunny personal difficulties, and suddenly it wasn’t as easy-peasy as it had been to write what is essentially supposed to be a lolarious book, as opposed to a supreme tear-jerker.

And thus I discovered what happens when you try to write something funny when you’re sad:

1) The Woody Allen syndrome: Every joke ends up being a sad sarcastic comment about your own existential crisis. Which, of course, is endlessly fascinating to nine-year-old readers (not).

2) The Laurel & Hardy syndrome: Since I can’t do verbal humour and sophisticated jokes anymore, let’s cram the page with slapstick comedy! Ha-ha! Look at her falling over! Brilliant if you want it to sound like your heroine’s lost all her brain cells somewhere between books 1 and 2 and has also become completely malcoordinated.

3) The Recycling Bin syndrome: Hey, there were some funny passages in book 1. What if I changed a word or two and recontextualised them in book 2? Works wonders if your readership is exclusively composed of goldfish.

4) The Mission: Impossible syndrome: If I can’t make it funny, at least I can make it HYPERACTIVE with like A LOT of ACTION and people who RUN and JUMP and at some point there’s a BANG and a WHOOSH and who cares about humour when there are SHRAPNELS???!!! There are many problems with this, the first being that I don’t know what shrapnels are.

But you’ll be glad to hear that after a lot of dilly-dallying and soul-searching and obsessive synopsis sessions (writing a synopsis doesn’t require humour), I finally managed to get going on Gargoyles Gone AWOL. And lo and behold, once you stop angsting about how unfunny you’ve become because of the unfunniness of your current situation, you realise that forcing yourself to write funny things not only works – just like it used to – but also cheers you up.

Bibliotherapy I guess, but the other way around.

Clem x

Discovering the New Book

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It’s always an exciting moment: opening the parcel with the publisher’s stamp on it, and taking your first author copy out of the bubble wrap. Cool and relaxed writers not like me probably peel off the sellotape with a yawn, fish out a book while munching on an organic cereal bar, hmm-hmm their way through the pages, and put it down again as if nothing particularly more exciting than updating Firefox has happened to them recently.

Not so, let me tell you, on this side of author-land. I arm myself with a carving knife, ruthlessly eviscerate the cardboard box, and do not rest until every single book has been smelt, stroked and weighed. But I never open them, of course, for fear of finding a typo.

Although this time I did manage to restrain myself enough to take a picture of the box (though the blurriness shows a certain lack of control):

And here it is! my latest baby, a YA novel in French called La pouilleuse (Girl with Lice) which is coming out at the end of August. If you’re interested and well-versed in Gallic, here’s the French webpage for it.

I’m delighted with it – Sarbacane, the publisher, have done an awesome job. The cover and the pages are super thick, the blurb on the back cover is spot-on, and they haven’t forgotten the dedication to my little sis’. Gorgeous colours, too, on the front cover.

So my small family of books is growing, all French-speaking so far, but I can’t wait for Sesame Seade to meet its siblings and speak a bit of English to them.

Clem x

Harry Potter and the Ivory Tower: Conference Report

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Of course any press release with the words ‘Harry’ and ‘Potter’ next to each other in the headline is sure to catch the attention of journalists – and they struck gold last week with the announcement of an international academic conference, organised at the University of St Andrews, on the study of J.K. Rowling’s series ‘as literature’.

The beautiful city of St Andrews… much better weather than when I was there!

Predictably, they found a couple of irate (and probably partly misquoted) academics from another office in the Ivory Tower, who expressed indignation at the squandering of thousands of Sickles and Galleons on such worthless endeavours.

I’d personally tend to think that in these dark days when studying the Arts & Humanities is getting more and more difficult for everyone, we should all stick together and support each other rather than deplore the fact that other academics are thinking about things that we think are not worth thinking about. But maybe that’s a very Potterish sort of altruistic attitude which you don’t cultivate if you spend all your time studying Ulysses. Ok, enough sarcasm.

I was there. The conference was a great success, because it managed to strike the right balance between true, heartfelt, endearing passion for the subject matter, and the respect, academic precision and intellectual rigour which such passion can lead to. I have to say I was a little bit worried about the potential geekiness of it all. As an unashamed potterhead, I’m more than happy to sport round glasses and hand-drawn scars at midnight releases – but that’s not what I want academic conferences to be like. Quantum physicists and Kantian scholars can make geeky jokes all they like and dress up as waves and particles if they want to – everyone takes them seriously anyway. But when your subject actually is a Mickey Mouse subject, you can’t afford to be self-deprecating about it. You have to defend it non-stop. You have to be as Sirius serious about it as it deserves.

And thankfully, despite a few Ravenclaw scarves and Gryffindor backpacks, the St Andrews conference did exactly that. Of all the presentations I went to, none were parochial, anecdotal, expected. Some were truly mind-blowing, and masterfully delivered: a jaw-dropping analysis of paternal atonement with the figure of Snape, a critique of pedagogical strategies in Hogwarts and their potential influence on the perception of learning and teaching by young readers, two sophisticated and subtle analyses of racial stereotyping using the representation of Goblins and House-Elves. In short, it was inspiring, rigorous, and not, as I’d feared, a self-indulgent gathering of fans marveling at Jo Rowling’s incontestable storytelling genius.

If it makes people smile, that’s great – but I hope it also makes them think. It isn’t just careless, or uninformed, to dismiss the Harry Potter series as a serious object of analysis; it is intellectually dishonest. I’m sure – well, I hope – that in forty years’ time, when I nostalgically browse through my past blog posts stored in a chip directly implanted in my brain, I’ll laugh that such a conference was ever laughed at. Meanwhile, I look forward to the proceedings and thank the St Andrews people for organising such a successful event in spite of all the Rita Skeeters in the world.

Clem x

New episode of the podcast

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Lauren and I have been busy recording and editing the next few episodes of our podcast on children’s literature, Kid You Not podcast – and the latest one is now online! it’s Episode 10, and it’s on Sex in Teenage Literature. Steamy. You can find it on our website, by clicking here – or just download it by clicking here – and/or follow us on iTunes!

More updates soon, on Sesame, other projects, and my academic life, once it all starts getting a little bit less hectic!

Clem x

What’s the word? – Writing fiction in your second language

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Editing my first manuscript in English is an amazingly different experience to editing my books in French. English isn’t my mother tongue: I started learning it, like most French kids, at school, when I was 10 years old. That means I’ll never be truly bilingual. I’m lucky enough zat I don’t have zis kind of Frrench âccent, but native English-speakers can easily tell that I’m ‘from somewhere else’.

When I first arrived in Cambridge at 17 years old, I already wrote fiction in French, but I never thought I’d ever write in English. Those were days when I merrily got ‘pass out’ and ‘pass away’ mixed up (try it: great way to freak out all your friends). But then I started writing essays, reading more widely in English, and eventually felt like trying out writing fiction in English for a change. That’s when I realised that writing in a different language makes you a different person.

English and French couldn’t be more different. French is structured, rigorous, elegant, poised, inflexible – you can build endless sentences, attaching words together with cohorts of that and which and whose and whom. The subtleties of the syntax and conjugation can turn sentences into grandiose, intricately patterned works of linguistic architecture. Many words retain the length, fibrousness and complexity of their Latin ancestors. Writing in French forces you to be a rational, logical, methodical person. All the fun, the beauty and the craziness have to be grafted onto that grid of grammatical rigour.

English is the complete opposite. It’s a language of noises, lights, colours, smells, full of wacky alliterations and tiny words, completely anarchic, almost free from conjugation, blissfully unaware of its own grammar. You turn nouns into verbs and adjectives into first names, you let them trip over themselves, you throw commas and hyphens in to help them hold on to each other. It’s a flying trapeze act – unpredictable, colourful, and just choreographed enough that things don’t go crashing into the audience too much. Writing in English forces you to be a zany juggler with an ear for music.

So I’m not just writing different stories, I’m also writing different versions of myself into those stories. And of course I’m more in control when I write in French – but then I find out more when I write in English. For example, I discovered, thanks to my editor, that my English is riddled with Americanisms – but because I probably owe them mostly to one of my best friends who’s American, it makes them a special part of my developing identity as an English speaker. The mistakes and clumsiness of my English all have a story to tell beyond the story I’m trying to tell.

And just as I know there will never be a satisfactory French equivalent for ‘glistening’, and that there will never be a satisfactory English equivalent for ‘démesure’, I know that my ‘I’ will never be quite the same as my ‘je’.

Clem

Just a Sprinkling of Sesame

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Et voilà! first post on my new English author blog. I’ve never had an author blog in English before, because I’ve never been an author in English before – so my only author blog until now was in French, like my published children’s books. And like myself (it happens to the best of us).

But sacrebleu, last year to keep myself busy I knitted a little novel-looking sort of story with the finest English wool, with characters in it and a bit of blue and green background to make it look all geek chic on windy winter days, and lo and behold, the curiousest thing has happened that has made it absolutely completely necessary and tremendously compulsory for me to start an author blog in English: a book deal. I know, I wasn’t sure they existed either. But there you go, here it is, it’s with Hodder Children’s Books, and it’s a fairly good excuse for a first blog post, I think.

And this fairly good excuse is called Sesame Seade! (though bizarrely her parents are convinced that she’s really called Sophie). Sesame is an eleven-year-old roller-skating self-made superheroine with as many connections in her brain as there are stars in the universe. She’d quite like a pet duck. Her parents aren’t keen (they won’t even consider a duckling). Professor Seade (Mum) is a Pharmacologist and Reverend Seade (Dad) is a Chaplain, and both of them are ever so slightly baffled by their wunderkind. Especially when she turns super-sleuth to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Jenna Jenkins…

And all this happens in quite a nice little corner of the world called Cambridge (which I vaguely know, I looked it up on Wikipedia once), and it’s a series of humour, mystery and adventure (all at the same time) featuring happy ducks, a yellow boat, a flock of ballet dancers, a notable absence of tangy tangerine strings, strange professors, sleepy students, and above all a hyperactive heroine with two best friends and a sometimes dangerous cat.

The first book in the series will be published in April 2013! It’s mainly for fun-loving kids who blew out eight, nine, ten or eleven candles at their last birthday party – but I’m fairly sure that reading it won’t kill anyone with better- or less-well-lit celebratory cakes.

More soon! but I promise this won’t be a blog about solely Myself and Sesame Seade. Just like my French blog, there will be A Lot More about Children’s Literature In General. Because that’s what I love.