Posts Tagged happy
How to Grow a Writer
Posted by mirandainnes in Writing on January 19, 2011
If you want your child to become a writer it is imperative that you treat it to a confounding variety of solitary and strange experiences. It is a good precaution to make sure that the child never gets a chance to form alliances. Also an excess of happiness is very deleterious to the creative juices, so it is wise to subject it to emotional jolts at regular intervals, without ever explaining what happened, what is about to happen or why. Any sense of autonomy might give the child the notion that it can have some influence in the real world, and you may end up with a politician on your hands. Or someone who can fit in, earn money, marry, have well-balanced children and a happy life. Apparently there are people who want that for their offspring.
I was the last, very likely unexpected, child. My sisters Jocasta and Judy are 10 and 7 years older than me respectively, confident, loud, glamorous and best treated with caution. My brother Christopher is just four years my senior.
My parents and I lived in China, Xiamen and then Hongkong. We stayed in Hongkong for 18 months, where my mother taught in the Kennedy Road School. For some reason she refused to allow me to graduate to her class when the time came, with the happy result for me that I briefly became a very clever seven-year-old and scooped all the school prizes. I hardly ever saw my siblings. They were shipped off to boarding school when Christopher was seven, and stayed with Mrs Dabbs in Fowey during most of the holidays. How perverse. Why have children at all?
In the UK I was sent to a convent school, which cured me definitively of religion, not that I was ever deeply afflicted. Experience of nuns left me with an abiding horror of religious hypocrisy, a frisky flight or fight vis-à-vis the gloating self-righteous finger-wag, and the certainty that redemption lay in not getting caught. How could you attach yourself seriously to a religion whose most passionately upheld tenet concerned wearing a hideous brown, yellow and blue striped blazer, and white gloves in public?
Jocasta used to come home on brief raiding sprees during the University holidays. She would borrow my things – clothes, jewellery, a cute little cardboard suitcase given to me by my father – and I might get them back eventually, usually minus some vital part.
When, as a rounded nine-year-old I asked her to write in my autograph book, her response:
‘Miranda may be a fat
Girl, but she’s none the worse for that’ cured me completely of autograph books.
Judy was kinder, but had a conscientious head-prefect’s sense of duty. She was always telling me to do the things that I had hitherto miraculously managed to avoid – washing up, hanging out washing, lay tables. And she would always put you right on dates and what people said. I developed a Fear of Facts so severe that when I was interviewed for a place at Brighton University, I could not remember my name.
When I was a rotund and credulous creature, Christopher fed me chillies telling me they were sweeties. Apparently, when I was still a small but chunky human blob he took me out for a swim heading across the South china Sea in the general direction of Jalisco in Mexico, and it is only due to my mother’s long-sightedness and sprint power that I am still around. I have a suspicion that he also systematically broke every stick of furniture in my doll’s house. His conversational gambit was to say ‘prove it’, to whatever innocent opinion was voiced by anyone younger than himself. Me. So I steered clear of boys, became wary of showing people my treasured possessions and gave up expressing audible opinions. However, a constant witter in the head is a crucial tool for a prospective writer. My highly respected ex-editor at country Living, Deirdre MacSharry, used to describe Ireland as being full of writers talking out their novels. I suspect that most writers keep their words locked within, building up pressure, until they are forced to commit the stuff to paper.
Being part of my parents’ baggage meant that I did not have much optimism where friendship was concerned. There was Carol Aylen and Fiona Macnab, but no sooner had we bonded over centipede dramas and eating condensed milk from the tin than I was snatched away to some new rainy country where I couldn’t speak the language of my fellow-pupils. Out there — Formosa (now Taiwan) — was a lonely and dangerous place. It was far far safer to spend those lonely hours sitting beneath my father’s desk waiting to go home – wherever that was – with my imaginary friend.
I’m sharing this misery memoirette because it was somewhere here in that misfit, solitary childhood that the seeds of writing were sown. Plainly life was nasty and brutish, and the safest place was within my own head. I became a lolly stick nerd. I used to invent stories, and make tiny gardens where miniscule dramas were enacted – which is where the lolly sticks were handy. Diminutive picket fences for a bonsai paradiso.
One good reason to write – no one could take my imagination away from me. I issued no passports for entry into the mad miniature world where I was top despot. My thoughts were my treasure, precious, secret, and very often vindictive. Revenge and anger are high-octane fuel for a would-be writer.
Another fabulous aspect of writing, is that no matter how weird is the thing you absolutely have to get off your chest, you can do it. You can closet yourself with your computer and spew it all out, and no one will interrupt. My history of occasional loud siblings has left me with a conviction that there is no point in trying to tell anyone anything. So many times I would launch into some anecdote only to observe that everyone had left the room, or turned on the tv, or felt a violent need to hoover. It gave me a wispy feeling of unreality – so often I would wonder if I had actually said those fabulously witty things aloud, or had they just remained in a thought bubble floating above my head.
Martin Amis claimed that most writers have at least this in common with Nabokov: ‘I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.’ The obsession to write must so often grow from a small unattended child jumping up and down, pulling parental coat-tails, and shouting ‘me, me, me, listen to me.’
To be listened to, to be heard, to elicit echoes of recognition, to find an interested audience – this is for me the most thrilling aspect of writing. I love getting emails from readers.