This morning, I got up and simply knew it was going to be a great day for writing. The sun streamed into my office and the day felt full of promise. Inside my head, I could see my day full of focussed and clear thought. Here's the two versions of my writer's day:
In the parallel universe, which is where my writing brain lives, I sit at the desk and suddenly see the solution to all the problems in Chapter 21. I can hear exactly what the characters need to say to each other and, miraculously, I can see how they will escape from the prison where they are held captive. The words leap from my fingertips. As I scroll down through the pages I polish every paragraph until it gleams. By the end of the morning, I've reviewed five chapters of work. I skip into the house for a well deserved coffee.
In this universe, I open Chapter 21 and stare at the page. I write a paragraph, re-read it and think 'ewwww'. I check my emails and quickly answer two short ones before I start to feel guilty and go back to staring at Chapter 21. After re-reading what I wrote earlier, I remove it and skip ahead to see if I can discover how to solve the fact the action is sluggish. I read to the end of the chapter and decide my brain is as sluggish as the action. I need a coffee. I try to think up a reason to walk up the street so I can have an espresso. I discover a pile of unpaid bills and spend 20 minutes sorting them so that I have something to take to the post office (cleverly giving myself an excuse for a cappuccino). At the post office, I check my post box and discover an invitation, another bill and a magazine from a subscription I keep meaning to cancel. I linger over my coffee reading the magazine and rediscover why I need to cancel the subscription. Guilt sets in again. Back at the desk I open Chapter 21. Hmmmm... maybe I need another coffee.
Writing in two worlds
Plausibility
Perhaps the attention that a book gets when it is 'challenged' is a good thing. It opens up avenues for debate about why books work and why they fail, what we want to share with our children and why, sometimes, we want to withhold things from them. This in no way means I advocate banning or even 'challenging' books (ie requesting their removal from shevles) but it did make me think a lot about how we subtly support wowserism if we don't stand up to it and how important it is to engage in lively discussion about books. It also made me think of how loathe most children's book reviewers (and authors) are to say anything negative.
Recently in Australia there's been a lot of fuss about the work of the artist Bill Henson who created some contentious images of teenagers. A lot of ill-informed assertions were made about his work, the nature of art and teenagers in general. The debate has blown over now and a lot of people are feeling either embarrassed, vindicated or are continuing to seethe with outrage. But for all the grief it caused, the debate it aroused possibly led to a few good things in that many Australians had to think more deeply about both art and life.
Julie Hearn's novel Ivy perpetuates a lot of tired ideas about the relationship between an artist and their model. I loved Hearn's earlier novel The Merrybegot (entitled The Minister's Daughter in the USA). The Merrybegot was a romp of a story with great characters and plenty of interesting historical detail even if there was a bit of fantasy mixed in with the fact. But I found Ivy a huge disappointment. Worse, I felt incredibly cross about the book and when I was just over half-way, I threw it across the room. Which is why I decided not to review it when I read it a few months back. I've never felt there's much point in reviewing books that I seriously dislike. Yet thinking about why books are 'challenged' made me rethink the notion of writing negative reviews.
For me, there are two types of 'bad books'. The ones that are badly written, which are mostly not worth paying attention to, and the ones that perpetuate falsehoods or 'bad' ideas. Do we want to draw attention to books that fall into either of these categories? I suppose this is where the debate gets interesting. The real dilemma arises when a book is well-reviewed and widely read, yet full of lies (or misleading information). It's a scary phenomenon.
I don't think Ivy particularly falls into either of those categories. Or perhaps it nudges at the edge of them both. It's not very bad writing, though Hearn can do better. What prompted me to write about it was reading a very positive review of the book and realising that some readers imagined the book to be credible. Apart from the fact that the 'Dickensian' characters are pretty tired and cliched (if you want Dickensian characters, read Dickens - no one can best him) I found the young protagonist, Ivy, completely implausible. She is meant to be an artists' model. From my childhood up until I was in my mid-thirties I modeled for literally hundreds of artists and yet there was nothing familiar in Ivy's circumstance, historical perspectives aside. For me, much of Ivy's story lacked credibility. I know from experience (on both sides of the easel) that dreamy, limp characters, like Ivy, aren't particularly nice to draw or paint no matter how pretty they are, mostly because they have a lot of trouble sitting still and often aren't sharp enough to follow instruction. The truth is that life-modeling is very hard, demanding, physical work. Good life-models and true 'muses' need to have their wits about them. Try sitting still for 20 minutes without flinching and you'll quickly get a sense of how demanding hours of life-modeling can feel. The pre-Raphaelite models that Hearn based her story upon were actually much tougher, smarter and more complex characters than Ivy. After reading the positive review of Ivy I realised that a lot of readers will pick up a book like this in good faith and not realise they are being sold short. Truth may be stranger than fiction but good fiction has to have, at the very least, the ring of truth.
Banned Books
It's not 'Banned Bookweek' but writing about The Five Chinese Brothers in my last post sent me off to check up on the number of 'challenged' books that I've read. So many of them are written by some of my favourite authors and are the sort of books that open up the world to their readers. The list of the 100 most challenged books of the 1990s even includes Mem Fox's Guess What? Of course, the list is an American one and so features mostly American and British authors . I wonder if anyone in Australia bothered to keep track of 'challenged' books what the Australian list might look like.
One of my books was 'challenged' a few years ago by a very outraged mother who wrote to my publisher and accused them of being purveyors of 'filth'. In Walking Home with Marie-Claire, 12-year-old Marie-Claire and her best friend PJ decide to practice kissing so they'll know how to go about should they find boyfriends. The angry mother found this particularly pornographic which struck me as tragic. I imagined her explaining to her 11-year-old daughter why she thought the book was immoral and felt terribly sad that the ordinary adventures and misadventures of growing up could be twisted into something dark and disturbing.
It's hard not to be swayed by censorship, especially when you know it can reduce the number of kids who will have access to your stories, but it's so important for writers to maintain the integrity of a story. 
Just before The Secret Life of Maeve Lee Kwong was to be printed, my publisher phoned me to discuss Scholastic Book Club's reaction to the advance copy. Apparently they wanted to place a large order (which would increase the size of the print run) but only on the condition that I rewrote a scene near the end of the book. It was the closing moment where 14-year-old Maeve, who is staying with a host family in Ireland, is offered a glass of Guinness. Scholastic believed this was advocating under-age drinking. My publisher left the decision to me and I decided to leave the scene as I wrote it. I'd originally included the Guinness detail based on the experience of a 15-year-old girl who shared her memories and photo-album of her Irish adventure with me. From my point of view, the Guinness was simply an additional cultural detail that added to the veracity of the scene. But when I thought about Scholastic's reaction, I realised that some of the gate-keepers of children's fiction would like writers to portray the world as they believe it should be, not as it really is or as young people actually experience it. For me, if you can't tell the truth, if you can't portray the world as you know and understand it to be, there isn't much point in writing at all.
"It’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.” — Judy Blume
The Five Chinese Brothers
When I was in Canberra last month, I finally had the chance to visit the Asia Bookroom.
They are a fantastic resource for anyone interested in Asia and I've bought a number of books from them online. Even if I'm not in the mood (or cashed up enough) to buy something, I love browsing their collection online so it was great to actually check out the real, rather than the virtual, bookshop.
I gave my credit card a good thrashing while I was there and bought a stack of adult books. I also couldn't resist buying a book for my great-nephew, Miles. I was surprised to find The Five Chinese Brothers on the shelf at Asia Bookroom. Published in 1938, it's had its detractors over the years and, as an adult, I felt a little ambivalent about it for a number of reasons. Is it racist? Apparently it has often featured as one of the most frequently challenged books in American school libraries. But I absolutely loved it when I was a kid. It was one of those books from early childhood that actually made me feel excited that the world was so big and interesting. There were so few children's books set in China that The Five Chinese Brothers seemed particularly special. So when I found it at Asia Bookroom I decided to swallow my misgivings and buy it for Miles.
Even though I'd re-read it in the bookshop, reading it to Miles made me see the book differently. The racial question felt like a non-issue but the whole drama of how the five brothers escape execution by using their magical abilities was very disturbing. I felt really uncomfortable having to discuss capital punishment with a four-year-old and was amazed that I had somehow managed to overlook that aspect of the book. A week or so after giving Miles the book, I had dinner at his house and we talked books, as we often do. I read him a new book about a kid who meets a group of funky fairies but I don't think he was very interested in it. I asked him what his favourite story was at the moment. He immediately ran to find The Five Chinese Brothers and suggested we read it again. His mum had read it to him a couple of times that week. I could see the book had made a serious impact. It's so easy to underestimate both a child and a story. Miles' mother said he was also asking for the story of 'Auntie Tigress' more often so obviously Chinese folktales are working their magic on Miles in the same way they once had for me. Perhaps it's the disturbing elements in The Five Chinese Brothers - the 'escape from death' theme and the powerful connection between the brothers - that makes this book a classic.
Mad Nursery Rhymes
The Mad Man
There was a man, he went mad,
He jumped into a paper bag;
The paper bag was too narrow,
He jumped into a wheelbarrow;
The wheelbarrow took on fire,
He jumped into a cow byre;
The cow byre was too nasty,
He jumped into an apple pasty;
The apple pasty was too sweet,
He jumped into Chester-le-Street;
Chester-le-Street was full of stones,
He fell down and broke his bones.
Raymond Brigg's Mother Goose Treasury won the Kate Greenaway Award in 1966. Despite its classic status, it has been out of print for ages which is incredibly annoying as it meant I had to search for it on-line through second-hand bookshops to buy a slightly foxed copy of it for my new step-grandson, Louis. (Two weeks old and he's grown into a name at last).
My kids owned a dozen or more nursery rhyme collections when they were growing up but Raymond Brigg's version was loved-to-death. Our copy is too battered to hand on to the next generation, with its cover sticky-taped back in place and the pages completely dog-eared. It contains over 400 rhymes, all of the traditional favourites as well as a solid collection of strange and obscure ones. When I asked my 20-year old son, Elwyn, about his favourite nursery rhyme, he immediately recited 'The Mad Man' from memory. It's strange how the rhythms and crazy imagery of nursery rhymes stay with us for a lifetime. I suspect they are the best fuel for imaginative play and language development as well as a magical pathway into books.
