Harry Potter and the $tudios of $ecrets: a day out at Leavesden

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So yes, I’m supposed to be writing the thesis, but when a friend calls me to say that she’s going with her boyfriend to the Harry Potter Studios at Leavesden and do I want to come along? then the only thing to do is to stop writing the t. and jump into the car, Leavesden-bound.

For those of you who haven’t heard of that new brave new world of Pottermania (and I was one of them), here’s the elevator pitch: while sipping caviar milkshake on the shore of their artificial lake of liquid gold, the Warner brothers reflected that now that the Potter films were all filmed they had all those props and sets and costumes lying around in their attic gathering dust and that they should really give them all to Oxfam. Or alternatively, stack it all in half a dozen gigantic hangars and ask people for £28 in non-Leprechaun money to come and look at them. They thought about it for about half a second, and settled for the latter option.

Now, Harry Potter is more or less the most important thing to have happened to me in my late childhood and for all of my adolescence, but I’m not a huge fan of the films at all. And  I’m even less of a fan of enormous American money-making corporations such as WB. So I wasn’t expecting to love the visit: I was expecting to have fun superficially while grinding my teeth at what they’d done to Jo’s universe and remembering what it was like when no one but me had read the books in my school and now all those untrue fans of the series who discovered it through the films are pretending that they know it better than me. It’s a hard life, you know, having to constantly prove that you’re a better fan than the people who call Emma Watson ‘Hermione’. (‘Have you heard, Hermione’s going to Brown University!’ ‘No she isn’t, and you’re a troll.’ ) (Childish, me?)

But against all odds, I loved it. I absolutely adored every moment of it. Here’s why.

People who think that this exhibition is just for Harry Potter fans are wrong. It isn’t. As a Potter fan, you will have a lot of fun; but even if you haven’t read the books or seen the films, even if you’re not even that interested in children’s literature, you have to go. Because it’s not just about Harry Potter, far from it: it’s an incredible, exhilarating celebration of cinema.

Even though you’ve been told again and again that making a film takes a lot of time, money and people, even for tiny details that only appear on screen for a few seconds, I don’t think you can actually believe it until you see it. That’s exactly what the Studios exhibition does. In the three to four hours that it takes to visit it, you get to see the unbelievable variety of objects, costumes, sets, special effects which you’d never noticed on screen, but which were necessary for the whole thing to function. The incredibly detailed architects’ drawings which preceded the building of the models. The conception of the clothes, wigs, make-up, accessories down to the merest sleeve button. The thought that went into the design of each wand, each wand box. The oil paintings full of private jokes among members of the crew. The wonderful handmade objects of the Room of Requirement which you barely see before they get destroyed by Fiendfyre. The handwritten books and handbooks, the handprinted newspapers and magazines, the handlettered Marauders’ Map.

So many hands.

Everything is beautifully, neatly presented; the aim is to make the visitors feel that they’re walking not from one set to the next, but from one room of Hogwarts to the next. The organisation of the visit is a bit dictatorial: you have to book a timeslot in advance, and don’t you dare arrive late. The exhibition is packed, even in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day. Barely any children, but hundreds of 20-45-year-olds. Yes, it’s a big Disneylandish from time to time, but by no means all the time. Generally, the quality of the materials used – real stone, real wood, beautifully-textured fabrics – prevents it all from looking like the Haunted House.

By definition, I don’t think you can get a good idea of what it truly feels like just by looking at pictures, since even the films didn’t do that. But here’s a bit of what we saw that day – thanks Zahra for most of the pictures- :

Drink-driving the Ford Anglia.

The wand boxes, all individually handlettered with names of the thousands of people who worked on the films

A Potter named desire

The letters we all wish we’d received on the day of our eleventh.

The Knight Bus, without even needing to call it.

Privet Drive. Or, Any British House.

The amazing interior of the Weasleys’ house, with all the details you never spotted.

An uncommon look at the Gryffindor Common Room

Up and down Diagon Alley

Now what, you also want to know how much I spent that day? Here’s a breakdown:

  • Ticket: £28
  • Audioguide: £4.50 (don’t take it, it’s not worth it; there’s too much to see to bother with it)
  • Sandwich and coffee at the cafeteria conveniently placed halfway through the exhibition: £5
  • Two chocolate wands at the shop conveniently placed at the end of the exhibition: £7

That’s almost £45, and not counting transport, nor the indispensible glass of Butterbeer, which my friend treated us to:

Ka-shing!

So yes, the Warner brothers are doing great, thank you very much. And I’d understand if it bothers you. But really, what a shame it would be to miss this completely disproportionate, extremely well-thought-out, immensely enjoyable look at the secrets of the eight Potter films.

Clem x

A Work Day

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Today, I worked hard with my editor, Ellen Holgate, and the illustrator of the Sesame Seade series, Sarah Horne.

And by working hard I mean that they both came to Cambridge on a mission to take pictures of all the places in town that Sesame goes to so that they could be adequately rendered in Sarah’s illustrations.

It was hard work.

We had to visit Christ’s, Sidney Sussex, Gonville & Caius, Trinity, Auntie’s Teashop, Michaelhouse Café, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Anchor pub, and walk up and down the streets of Cambridge, all that while taking lots of pictures (well, Sarah did) and talking about work (and food. And holidays. And boyfriends. And books.).

Sometimes being an author is all about sacrifices. When I think I could have been at home writing the thesis! But duty was calling.

On the way, Ellen and Sarah met my good friend Charlie Darwin:

And after a long day of research, here’s the three of us near the river… and yes, I know, it looks like the girls are trying to conceal an intimate part of my anatomy with the rough cover of Sleuth on Skates.

Sarah, me, and Ellen

Anyway, all this research will allow Sarah to produce perfect pictures for Sleuth on Skates and the other Sesame books, such as this fabulous one of Sess roller-derbying around the First Court of Christ’s!:

Right. Back to work. The other kind.

Clem x

Pseudonymous: The secrets of writing under a pseudonym

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French writer Romain Gary wrote under a pseudonym in order to win a second Goncourt prize, the French equivalent of the Booker, which in theory cannot be awarded more than once to the same author. He managed it, and his pseudonymously-published Life Before Us became an unputdownable timeless classic, as they say.

Meanwhile, there are other people who wouldn’t mind the Goncourt, but who choose to write under a pseudonym for different reasons. Here is the tale of my short experience of pseudonymous writing (and no, you won’t know what I wrote or what my pen name was): why I did it, what I learned, and how I feel about it now. Wow, said like that it sounds like I’m going to start telling you it was a journey of self-discovery. Don’t worry, I’m not.

Once upon a time, about two years ago, thanks to an illustrator friend, I was asked to write a couple thousand words as a test for a series of children’s novels to be published alongside a magazine. I did it not really thinking I’d get it, but I did, and suddenly there I was signing a (very good) contract and agreeing to follow an absolutely unbending set of rules specifying a set number of words per chapter and a set number of chapters per book and the age of the protagonists and no sex or violence let alone a swearword.

Without getting too much into detail, it was a shamelessly, intensely, voluptuously commercial series of novels. The main issue was the theme. It’s the kind of theme that, in my area of study at least, everyone would label trashy without a second look at it. Ballerina stories, football stories, that sort of thing. So in order not to compromise my future applications for Junior Research Fellowships and postdoc positions (*cough* if you have one of those that needs filling contact me I make very good chocolate cakes *cough*), I decided to take a pen name. I didn’t want the Google Gods to bring up that kind of sulphurous secret on page 1 of ‘clementine beauvais’ just under my Academia.edu profile when I’d become Professor Dame Empress of Intergalactic Children’s Literature at Harvard.

Now, as everyone who knows me knows, I’m a feminist and an active member of the League Against Bunnies and Unicorns in Children’s Literature and it was out of the question for me to stop having convictions just because the cover of the book didn’t mention my real name anywhere. It was genre fiction ‘for girls’, but nothing that was intrinsically sexist – I would have refused immediately. And in fact, following my mum’s advice (what would one do without one’s mum’s advice?), while writing those books I had a lot of fun with the conventions of the genre, respecting some and transgressing a lot. Sometimes the publisher said no, but most of the time they said yes. I ended up writing something I’d never thought I’d write: super-commercial but semi-subversive children’s fiction.

I learned a lot writing these novels. You have to write fast. You have to make your descriptions short, compact and evocative. You have to find new things for the protagonists to do, all the time. And above all, you have to plan ahead. Plan, structure, scaffold. Find ways of solving three problems while creating a new one in just one chapter.

I also learned to get rid of many of my prejudices on this type of literature (damn, that’s definitely starting to sound like I’m saying it was a journey). When I started writing them, I found the whole experience stressful and even weirdly humiliating. But then I started to enjoy it. And now I can see that it was an incredibly helpful and enriching experience, and I even wonder if I could have written Sesame without it. Sesame isn’t really genre fiction, but it’s action-packed and borrows a lot from different genres. Without the practice of making up adventures and misadventures that fit into 14 chapters of however many words each, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to write it.

And above all I’m quite happy with these little books, which is all the more surprising as I’m generally übercritical of what I write. It is, I think, good genre fiction. Doesn’t mean I’m going to reintegrate them into my bibliography, once again for university-related reasons.

Unfortunately or fortunately, the series didn’t last very long. The novels were sold in plastic wrapping with a magazine, and the cover art and the magazine design were frankly hideous and the magazine completely uninteresting. Can’t say I was too bothered about it – it meant that I was able to stop writing them discreetly at the faculty library and start working more on my thesis and on more ‘intellectual’, ‘gratifying’ fiction-writing. Not to mention it was extremely good money which paid for a completely lovely holiday touring the Loire castles with my boyfriend of the time.

Azay-le-Rideau. Thank you, commercial fiction.

Yet I still have a lot of tenderness for these little books and I’m really happy to have had the chance, pseudonymously, to try new techniques of characterisation, description, structure, and dialogue.

Clem x

NB This is a translation/ adaptation of a post previously published on my French blog.

When Sarah Meets Sesame

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I’m super thrilled to be able to reveal that the Sesame Seade series will be illustrated by the amazing Sarah Horne! Her artwork is perfect – bubbly, energetic and zany and the sketches she’s done so far have triggered many an exclamation of ‘that’s EXACTLY Sesame!’ at Beauvais Towers.

And this is what Sesame looks like now thanks to Sarah:

Fabulous, I know. Sarah’s worked on lots of chapter books and picturebooks with Hodder, Walker and Random, among others. Her blog is here, her website is there and her Facebook page is yonder. She also tweets ici.

I can’t wait to see the first book, Sleuth on Skates, all illustrated. The sketches for the cover and chapter 1 I’ve seen look phenomenal and it’s going to be full of quirky details and funny faces. And ducks.

Meanwhile, the first draft of Book 2, Gargoyles Gone AWOL, is all done and I’m going to start working on the edits soon. Book 3, Scam on the Cam, is slowly getting started. And the PhD thesis is also getting some attention, Maria, I promise (this is for my supervisor).

Sesame’s leaving soon for the US with the Hodder rights team, so please cross your fingers everyone that she doesn’t hit an iceberg on her way across the Atlantic… and optionally-hopefully that they’ll like her enough to want her to stay!

Clem x

Summer Summary

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I’ve just come back from three weeks of epic family adventures and misadventures on the Transsiberian, from Moscow to Irkoutsk to the Baikal Lake to Ulan-Bator to the steppes of Mongolia. Eating clotted goat’s milk in a Mongolian yurt and pork liver dumplings in the deepest depths of the Russian countryside? Check. Sleeping on a tiny little train bed five nights in a row having not had a shower? Check. Still managing to talk to the rest of your family in a relatively peaceful manner? Check. Working on your Phd thesis? Hmm…

Here’s a little picture just to give you an idea…

While I was busy doing all that, my latest novel in French came out, La pouilleuse (The girl with lice). It’s a YA novel set in Paris, the short, dark story of a day in the lives of five über-privileged teenagers who out of boredom, idleness and other motives they don’t quite understand, kidnap a little girl outside a swimming-pool and decide to get rid of the lice in her hair. It’s published by the very cool Editions Sarbacane, who are famous in France for their award-winning contemporary urban fiction for teens.

Having a new book out is always half-exciting and half-underwhelming. It’s nothing like the thrill you get when the editor tells you that yes, they’ll publish it – that’s the big high. But the day the book actually comes out, and even if you’re not trekking through the Mongolian steppes, it’s not that incredible. Your local bookshop might not even have it yet. People you care about have already read it, because you’ve given them advance copies; other people are reading it but you don’t know about it. There might be a few reviews already on the internet, but that’s all. At least that’s my experience in France – I’ll let you know if it’s different in the UK.

But La pouilleuse has already got a few good reviews here and there and I’ve just learnt it’s been nominated for an award. Now it’s out, there’s nothing I can do about it apart from looking forward to seeing what happens to it.

On the Sesame side, things are getting very exciting and I’ll soon post a few updates. Meanwhile, back to the thesis…

Clem x

Sirius, Albus, Fortius: Children’s Literature in Olympic Shape

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So I watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, and though I didn’t cry blue, red and white tears like, seemingly, absolutely everyone else on Twitter and Facebook, I was delightfully surprised by the central place occupied by children’s literature in Danny Boyle’s very short introduction to British history and culture.

If it had taken place in France (no hard feelings), I don’t think they’d have read an extract from the Little Prince, flown a giant inflatable Babar, or restaged the original Beauty and the Beast. They may have played around a little bit with Astérix, but most of the show would probably have been devoted to ‘higher’ forms of Gaulitude. Belgium would have had Tintin, of course, but they’ve got less to choose from.

In Boyle’s wacky pyrotechnical spectacle, Jo Rowling’s lovely reading from Peter Pan leads to an army of Mary Poppinses avadakedavring a gigantic Voldemort. No cameo by Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Jane Eyre must have declined on grounds of her slight dislike of fire, Mr and Mrs Darcy were enjoying a quiet evening at Pemberley, Oscar Wilde was probably tweeting away wry witticisms about his lost invite. But their little colleagues on the kiddie lit’ shelf got more than their fifteen minutes of fame.

Her Majesty JKR

There were also kids everywhere. Kids reading – kids reading real books. With a torch. Under the bed sheets. Disgusting idealisation, Romanticisation and objectification of childhood notwithstanding (concession necessary for the children’s literature critics who may be reading this), it isn’t a point of detail. I don’t know how many millions of children were watching this ceremony, but the image of childness it sold them was one which legitimated, spectacularised, sublimated storytelling in books. The message was that children’s literature here is so important that it deserves to be featured, at length and at least half-seriously, in a huge, international show mostly watched by adults.

And sponsored by Coca-Cola, of course. But I’ll leave the dark undersides of this ideology of childhood to another blog post, another day. Having just watched Jo, I’m in too much of a good mood for that.

After we learnt, recently, that no children’s literature bookshop has closed this year, this was just another indication that children’s literature in the UK is in Olympic shape, thank you very much.

Clem x

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

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Doing ‘research’ to write fiction, especially whimsical fiction for 9-year-olds, means you end up with a very strange browsing history. According to mine, this is what I’ve been asking Google recently (and yes, I treat Google like a real person when it comes to asking questions):

  • taking fingerprints on glass
  • when is hornet season
  • what’s the name of white fluff falling off trees
  • difference between cider and perry [for a French book]
  • do gargoyles often need to be repaired
  • horses falling off the rock of Solutré [French book again]
  • dormouse sleeping patterns
  • medicine to calm children down
  • weight of normal 9 year old girl
  • what time is evensong

and last but not least (though I should probably have chosen Bing for that one):

  • is google allowed to spy on you

Added to these are, of course, endless searches on these two Ali-Baba’s caves of infinite knowledge which I could not live without, Thesaurus.com and Urban Dictionary.

I quite like the idea that Google is getting a completely bizarre and incoherent idea of me due to my inexplicable browsing decisions, but unfortunately I’m sure it’s cleverer than that and has clocked that I’m a writer.

Anyway, once in a while you type in a seemingly innocuous little question and end up navigating a whole underground world the existence of which you’d never suspected. One such fine discovery happened to me when I started researching people who climb up buildings, specifically Cambridge and Oxford buildings. These people, my friends, are not only the hidden modern superheroes of our quiet little university towns, they also have a whole community on and offline, with its codes, handbooks and specific discourse.

I ended up buying this incredible little book which is always in the ‘Cambridge’ section of Waterstones in Cambridge and which I’d never thought would be of any interest to me: The Night Climbers of Cambridge. It has its own Wikipedia page, and so it should. Written in the 1930s by Noel Symington, who is now dead, it is no less than a handbook on roof-climbing in Cambridge.

You will learn how to climb up a pipe (with photographic examples) – don’t bother with square pipes, they’re no good. You will learn how to reach the top of King’s College Chapel (once again, fabulous pics); if you fall, you still have three seconds of life, so enjoy them. You will learn how to do ‘the leap’ between Gonville & Caius College and the Senate House. It really is quite simple, but some chaps get cold feet when they could easily jump such a distance if there wasn’t an abyss underneath!

The best thing about this delightful book is the jolly P.G. Wodehousey tone of it all, which takes you back in time almost a century ago in a Cambridge where all Porters still wore bowler hats, where the girls were confined to just a few colleges and where roof-climbing was a necessity in the middle of the night if you’d missed the time when the college closed down.

Anyway, not sure how much of this exquisite read is going to end up in Sesame Seade, but here are a few passages just to give you an idea of it:

‘On the other hand, consider those pipes in the New Court of St John’s, over the river. We know of no-one who has climbed any of the pipes on the outer north wall of the same court. They are the most forbidding pipes in Cambridge.’

‘On the north side a buttress leaves a recess into which a man’s body fits nicely. The chimney is too broad for comfort, and a very short man might find it impossible to reach the opposite wall, with his feet flapping disconsolately in space like an elephant’s uvula.’

‘Much more could be written about Pembroke if we had the information. Its stone is good, its climbs legion, and we can thoroughly recommend any night climber to pay a few visits to it. Its hospitality is lavish and sincere, and it breeds those strong, silent Englishmen who suck pipes in the Malayan jungle but do not pass exams.’

‘And so, with a good night’s work behind us, we go home to college or lodgings, telling ourselves that perhaps after all we will not attend that nine o’clock lecture to-morrow morning.’

That last one, of course, could have been written yesterday.

Clem x

 

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