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A tale to start a talk
Margaret Mahy
Margaret Mahy (60 jaar) schrijft zowel prentenboeken - Een leeuw in de wei (1986), Ze lopen gewoon met me mee (1977) - als romans voor tieners. Voor De jongen met de gele ogen (1982) en De inwijding (1987) ontving ze de Carnegie Medal. Zij heeft een sterke voorkeur voor de wereld van de verbeelding die soms meer waar is dan de werkelijkheid. Onderstaande lezing sprak zij uit op het IBBY-congres in Groningen.
Telling the tale! Well, a tale is a good way to start a talk like mine so I will tell you a story - a story for little children, and later in my talk I plan to refer back to it, discussing its origin and the way in which it took form.
‘I have made a lovely lunch for you,’ said Mum, popping her baby into the blue highchair. ‘I hope you are hungry, hungry, hungry.’
She did not know that the animals were listening at the window.
‘You have beautiful bread and honey. You have two lettuce leaves. You have a sweet apple, peeled and pipped. You have a piece of cheese and a raw carrot scrubbed clean. What a lovely lunch for a hungry baby! And while you eat it up, I'll just biddy-boom-boom on my diddy-dum-drums. Beating those drums makes me feel at ease with the world.’
She did not know that the animals were listening at the window.
And so Mum began to beat on the drums.
BOOM-BIDDY-BOOM BIDDY-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!
Closing her eyes, she smiled as she listened to the beat.
She did not know that the animals were scrambling for the door.
The baby looked at her lovely lunch. She picked up the piece of cheese. But she did not eat it. Instead, she threw the cheese on the floor.
In crept the yellow cat - and ate it all up.
BOOM-BIDDY-BOOM-BIDDY-MEW-MEW-MEW!
Then the baby picked up the bread and honey. She leaned sideways in her blue highchair and threw the bread and honey on to the floor. In lolloped the brown dog with the ginger eyebrows and ate it all up.
BOOM-BIDDY-BOOM-BIDDY-BOW-WOW-WOW!
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Then the baby threw the slices of sweet apple onto the floor. In scuttled the hens and the red rooster in their yellow stockings - clucking and clucking - and ate it all up.
BOOM-BIDDY-BOOM-BIDDY-COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
Then the baby threw the lettuce onto the floor.
In trotted the black-faced sheep in her high-heeled hooves and ate it all up.
BOOM-BIDDY-BOOM-BIDDY BAA-BAA-BAA!
Then the baby threw the raw carrot onto the floor.
In ambled the brown-and-white cow and ate it all up.
BOOM-BIDDY-BOOM-BIDDY-MOO-MOO-MOO!
Suddenly Mum stopped beating the diddy-dum-drums. There was no more boom-biddy-boom-boom.
Out ran the cat!
Out ran the dog!
Mum sighed with happiness. Beating those drums made her feel at ease with the world.
Out flew the hens and the red rooster!
Out trotted the sheep!
Up stood Mum.
One last beat! One last boom!
BOOM!
Out cantered the brown-and-white cow.
When Mum turned round her baby was sitting alone in the highchair, waving her spoon. Her plate was completely empty.
‘Oh, you good baby,’ cried Mum, ‘you've eaten every bit and bite of your lunch. Listening to my boom-biddy-boom-boom bet must make you hungry, hungry, hungry!’
Then she hugged and kissed the baby and gave her a banana - peeled and ready to eat.
And the baby ate it all up. Boom-biddy-boom-biddy-YUM-YUM-YUM!
Well, there is a simple tale and the theme of this conference is telling the tale. This is Thursday, so the day's theme is Writing, reading, and being read. I have been invited here as a writer, but I can't help speaking as a reader too, for, in the beginning, I was read to, and I learned to read stories before I began writing them. By now I think reading is just as creative, in my life at least, as writing though in a rather more mysterious way... I feel myself making and re-making myself as I sink into stories, somehow disintegrating within them,
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and then reforming at the ending of the tale, knowing myself changed, but not always sure of how and why.
Reading and writing are intimately connected. In fact, the act of writing is the mirror image of the act of reading. Writing begins as a secret act, a private imaginative, and sometimes obsessive stirring, but the story opens out through the writer's life to become public, and, with any luck, commercial. At the end of this flow the story is established in the outside world, bound in a book. The book is for sale, and that is the end of writing. Reading reverses this flow. Someone finds the book, opens it and reads the story, taking it into him or herself, making it private, secret and inner once more.
It was suggested that I discuss the wide range of my own writing and the possible differences between inventing picture book stories as opposed to stories for middle-school children and those for young adults. I was also asked to indicate whether I had a favourite genre, and whether or not it was important to communicate with my readers. I'll answer the last question first because it is the most straight forward and the most predictable.
For obviously it is extremely important to me to communicate with my readers - an intense pleasure when something happens to reassure me that my story has indeed been enjoyed by someone - anyone! - out there! Inevitably one begins by trying to entertain a vital first reader - one's own reading self, but almost at once, various other forces (including vanity, the need to make a living and perhaps, from deep down, the secret nature of story itself) begin to intrude, pushing one towards telling the tale to as many people as possible.
In the beginning I know the story is there, but it is formless. I have to tease a shape out of it, have to invent, design, select, speculate, imagine, tell the truth while simultaneously lying creatively in order to reveal other truths, to compress or maybe to stretch, and to finally produce a story which will work as an entertainment... a series of wild events made controllable by words.
When I choose a book in the library, and take it home to read, all this work has been done for me. I can move into the story without having to consider the junctions between truth and invention in the same way that I have to think about them when I write. When I read a compatible chosen story - while I read - it is all effortlessly true. When I write I have to work towards that truth in ways that are haunted by uncertainty, and the transforming moments are not achievable in the same way because, after a while, I know too much
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about the story for it to take me by surprise. Nevertheless I am the first reader of my own books, before I push them out into the world. And the possible readers I feel out there, belong not so much to a particular age group (though consideration of age is obviously important when writing for children) as to a group of readers who read more or less in the same way that I used to read... the way I still read. They are people who, regardless of age, read eagerly for they hope to find some marvellous story that will transform them... change the world through truth, beauty, jokes and so on. I imagine these readers, accidentally returning to the stories of childhood as they grow older, finding that the stories have somehow changed with them. I imagine them beginning with picture-book stories, going on to Tingleberries, tuckertubs and telephones, say, and then maybe to The changeover or Memory or The other side of silence but never quite leaving the earlier stories behind. After all one measures oneself against the stories of childhood from time to time, discovering not only how much taller one has become oneself, but that some stories are different from what they seemed in the first place. They have become taller, too. Are there still readers like this? I don't know... but if they are out there, I want to touch them as I have been touched myself. I want to pass on the imaginative charge that I have received and stored.
Of course there are a whole cloud of other possible wishes floating around that central intention. I also hope a lot of other, perhaps less fanatical readers will enjoy my stories. And I do hope to make a living as a good writer in a field crowded with good writers, all of us ancient mariners, all of us anxious to grab passing wedding guests and tell our particular tale.
Having said all this, I do want to write stories that will be enjoyed by children. I do take their various ages into consideration. I do think hard about what they will be able to understand as well as what they might understand. I think the memory of myself as a child reader is vivid and alive in me, and that it is important to use that memory, while acknowledging, at the same time, my experience is only one person's experience, and that any reader, no matter how enthusiastic, is only one person. However, publishers cannot afford to publish for one person. They work, of necessity, in a quantum way - with statistical probability. I write as well as I can within my limitations, in the hope of entertaining a sufficiently wide number of readers.
I do not have a favourite genre, but all the same there are inevi- | |
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table differences between writing for young children, say, as opposed to writing for middle school children or for young adults. I myself mainly choose funny events or mildly scary ones as the subject of possible picture-book stories. I save more stressful or frightening themes for older readers, because, generalising, I think they are better able to understand what is going on, more able to enjoy being scared, to enjoy testing themselves against a dangerous world, and more able to distinguish between the mythical and the real. My stories for young children are extended jokes, mostly based on observed happenings in real life, and, goodness knows, there are plenty of them, for, after all, it is a very funny world... funny and threatening, sometimes simultaneously - and, in telling jokes, one can sometimes tell opposing truths, too.
The shortest stories, often used as texts for picture books, take form quite quickly (though I also know of picture books which have taken their writers months to write). I write and rewrite the story, working it into some desirable shape. The whole story can flow through my head in about ten minutes, so it does not take long to survey the story's map - the beginning, the middle and the ending - and, as I play round with the emphasis of the tale, I find it easy to understand the shape the story is developing.
However, in the case of novels I am much more hesitant. The longer the text the more full of doubt my writing becomes. I usually begin writing the story when I have a reasonably clear idea of the beginning and the end, expecting the actual act of writing will clarify (for me) just what events, what sort of flow, is going to connect them. Watching words appear, either on the screen or running from the end of a good pen, makes a reader of me. As first reader, I come to understand, to improve and intensify many happenings in my story. Others remain difficult. I remember writing Chapter twelve in the book Memory over and over again. There seemed to be so much that needed explanation at this point in the story, that the chapter was always too long... too ponderous. I can go through weeks of confusion as I draft and redraft such chapters, some of which are ultimately discarded altogether.
The characters in my picture-book stories are generally simple, and discharge fundamentally traditional roles - hero, heroine, villain, predator. Some characters may be a little ambivalent. Norvin, the hero of The great white man-eating shark, is an anti hero, really, and the reader's hopes and expectations are fulfilled by his ultimate
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humiliation. He deserves what he gets... He has tried to frighten the rest of us away from the beach so that he can have it all to himself. Not only this, he has lightly usurped the persona of one of the dark forces of the sea... the shark... and not just any shark. Norvin has tried to steal the power of the great white man-eating shark, so he is guilty of a sort of impiety. All the same he is still a simple character.
In creating characters for young adult novels, however, I find myself in a more demanding territory. For one thing, I live with those characters and the underlying ideas they express for months and months, possibly even for years, as the story moves from a state of latency in which it feels capable of going in a thousand possible directions, to the point when form has taken over and the story becomes set and certain. During this time one abandons as far as possible one's own life so that the life of the story can take over. This phase, this sort of possession is also present in writing a picture-book text, but may take only an hour or two of my day. With a novel the time of possession is much more extended and distracting, I feel like a ghost thin and unsubstantial, as I feed the dog and the cats. Driving from place to place, I am sometimes astonished to find myself at my destination, my memories of actually travelling clouded by parts of the story I have been trying out in my head. I talk aloud in order to hear pieces of possible conversation in the outside world, and smile or wince according to events in the imaginary lives I am living, while living on my own.
I think that there is more literary respect given to the production of a novel, simply because it is more intricate, but I am no fonder of the longer, more hesitant process than I am of the opportunity to tell a simple joke... and I have as much respect for a good joke as I have for an epic. Both operations can be rich in different ways, and both use the stuff of direct experience. And I think my particular short stories connect very directly into folk tale, to the tall story, the playground yarn, the fable, the cautionary tale, and to games with romantic archetypical characters... the pirate, the witch, the shark... all probably jungian aspects of self. After all a good joke can not only offer relief, but has its own sort of mystery, too.
In the end, regardless of whether the story has dominated my attention for a week or for a couple of years, the time finally arrives when the story and I have done everything we can do with one another, and must go our separate ways.
I am now going to read a very short story. It is called The cake. It
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is simple but not profound, and is one of a series of stories used to teach reading in schools... stories traditionally disregarded in every literary way, although they are the first books that some children encounter. I have chosen it because it illustrates secret possibilities in what is a very simple story.
Mary's mother put some sugar into a bowl.
‘What's happening?’ thought the sugar.
‘A moment ago I was sitting around with the rest of the sugar in the sugar-pot. Now I have been chosen for something.
I must be special and this must be a special day.
Then Mary's mother put some butter in with the sugar.
‘Hello!’ cried the sugar. ‘I can tell we're going to be friends.’
‘How sweet of you,’ the butter said admiringly.
Mary's mother turned on the electric mixer.
Whirrrrrr! went the mixer.
‘Listen,’ cried the butter, ‘they're playing our tune.’
‘Shall we dance?’ asked the sugar.
The butter and the sugar danced together until they were so mixed up you couldn't tell where the butter left off and the sugar began.
Mary's mother beat up some eggs and put them into the bowl.
‘The more the merrier!’ cried the butter and the sugar.
‘Another friend to dance with.’
The butter and the eggs and the sugar danced together.
Down came a soft rain.
‘Hello everyone! Here I am,’ said the flour.
‘I'm here too!’ cried a funny little voice. It was the baking powder.
The mixer sang its whirring song and everyone danced together.
‘Why are we here?’ the butter asked the flour.
‘Who invited us?’ asked the baking powder.
‘Something very exciting is going to happen and we have been specially chosen,’ said the flour.
Down came the currants, the raisins and the cherries.
‘Don't forget us,’ they cried.
‘What are we doing here?’ asked a cheery cherry.
‘There must be a reason,’ declared a raisin.
Whizzzz! went the electric mixer. Then they were all turned upside down.
‘Let me help you out?’ offered the kindly wooden spoon.
‘Let me take you in,’ cried the round baking tin.
‘I'll give you a warm welcome,’ said the oven.
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They were all put into the oven together.
‘It's dark in here,’ said the eggs.
‘Warm too!’ yawned the melting butter.
‘Which of us is which?’ asked the flour.
‘I think I'll puff myself up,’ said the baking powder. ‘This is such a cosy oven.’
They were all quiet then, enjoying the cosy oven.
No-one spoke for a long time.
Then, all of a sudden, a new voice spoke.
It was an eggish, buttery floury voice - sweet as sugar, and as cheery as a cherry.
‘I know what I am!’ it said. ‘I am... I am...’
But it couldn't quite think of the right word.
Someone opened the oven.
‘Oh Mum!’ cried Mary. ‘What a lovely cake!’
‘So that's what I am now,’ said the voice. ‘I'm a cake.’
Mary's mother iced the cake.
‘So now I'm wearing my best coat,’ said the cake.
Mary sprinkled the cake with hundreds and thousands.
‘Now I am wearing my jewels,’ said the cake.
Mary's mother put four candles in the cake.
‘Now I'm wearing my crown!’ the cake cried.
Mary's mother wrote on the cake. She wrote
Happy Birthday Mary.
‘I knew I was special!’ cried the cake. ‘I am a birthday cake. Hooray!
Hooray for the birthday cake.’
And that's just what Mary said too.
Birthday cakes suggest pleasure to children... not only children of course. Someone once said that food was the sex of children's books. I wish I had said it. I think it is true. Certainly cake is traditionally popular in New Zealand. It loomed large in the lives of women of my mother's generation for they were often judged according to the quality of cake they produced. And emigration from Holland after the Second World War transformed New Zealand's cake scene. I can remember this enrichment - the increasing appearance of bakeries run by people with Dutch names, along with sudden awareness of new cake possibilities, of strange exotic cakes, more exciting than I had ever imagined cakes could be. So I take this opportunity to thank the Netherlands for the enrichment it offered us. Birthday cakes,
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moreover, suggest not only pleasure, but a moment of glory for a particular child. This story is simply about making a cake (I had a recipe book by my side as I wrote) and the intention of this story - a text from which children will learn to read - means it ha a particular kind of slightly stilted simplicity... short words... unvaryingly short sentences. It is not what it would have been if I hadn't been required to work in a necessarily simple fashion. All the same a teacher, picking it out of a pile to use with a class, might think, privately, that it is concerned with identity crisis and emerging self-definition. And a line like Listen - they are playing our tune means something simple to the child but carries for the adult behind the child a lot of compressed associations - which a child may grow into. It doesn't matter if this does not happen, but the possibility is there. And there is the situation of the various characters - the individual ingredients - the butter, sugar, eggs and dried fruit, their initial bewilderment, their existential speculation and their final melting together to form the one inclusive character the cake. Arthur Koestler in his book Janus suggests that polarity between self-assertive and integrative tendencies is characteristic of life... indeed of existence... and I think my story powerfully restates his arguments. So even a text in a school reading book can contain ideas for the reader to grow into, and even though it is unlikely to be used in that way, it is part of my pleasure as writer to hide a few possibilities in the story, and because of such games this story was satisfying to write. But let me tell two more stories... both true. The first returns me to the story I read at the very beginning of this talk.
One day I saw my daughter put her baby in a highchair, then setting a bowl of porridge in front of her. The child sat there waving her spoon enthusiastically. The cat on one side of the room, the dog on the other, observed her narrowly. Then both stood up slowly, moving unobtrusively to sit beside the highchair, and they both looked up hopefully.
Here is the second story.
One night I was driving home through Christchurch, the city nearest to my home, in the early hours of the morning... a strange time in the life of the city. It was well lit, but the light had a strange and eerie quality... almost threatening, and I passed a supermarket car park. Of course during the day this car park was a busy place, filled with cars and with people pushing trolleys full of cat food and soap powder and trying to remember where they had parked their
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cars. But at two o'clock in the morning the car park was totally empty... or at first I thought it was empty. As I shot by, contained in the warm wheeling bubble of my own car, I saw an old man coming out of the car park pushing an empty supermarket trolley in front of him. As you can imagine it was a ghostly thing to see at that unnatural time and in that unnatural light set around with the strange emptiness of the early morning city. I was well past him before I suddenly thought that perhaps the old man was rather like my aunt and had lost his memory and his grip on time and place.
My aunt was living with me at that time. She was quite old, over eighty, and had completely lost her memory. She had forgotten how to dress herself, had even forgotten what sort of things to eat. She would eat cat food if there was any in the fridge and give the cats banana and chocolate. I had looked after my aunt for two or three years. However, I had not thought about writing about our shared life until I saw the old man leaving the car park with his empty supermarket trolley.
Both these real events suggested stories, but stories appropriate to readers of different ages... a very young reader in one case and a much older one in the second. One story would be very simple - would be about food and just who got to eat it. The other would be much more demanding - would deal with the impact of memory in at least two different lives. Yet in essence there is no great difference in perceiving the simple story from perceiving the more complicated one. Both stories require form and invention to develop the initial hint casually given by the real world; both stories involve games with words.
The picture book-text you already know. I wrote about the animals waiting for the baby to throw a lovingly prepared lunch over the side of her highchair. I added hens, a sheep and a cow to the original cat and dog, and I made the mother anxious to practice on her drums (something with which mothers reading this story to little children might sympathise). The drums gave the story a boom-biddy-boom-biddy boom boom boom beat, along with a one-line chorus which I subsequently found little children readily mastered for themselves and enjoyed chanting. The chorus was an automatic rather than a conscious intention on my part, but when I heard it working I certainly felt pleasure and exhilaration.
And, after it had been written, I detected without surprise a traditional form to my story. There are a series of approximately similar
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encounters. This repetition of event is underlined by a language repetition and moves to a concluding twist - a slight twist in this case - in both event and words.
However, in a rather different way, the young adult book Memory also made use of a traditional structure... one that belongs to fairy tales. A year and a half after I had finished the story I read it through and suddenly thought (this time with surprise) that there are a lot of fairy tales in which a hero or heroine setting out into the world on his or her own, without a parent's blessing, meets a wise animal or an old man or woman who needs help. If the hero or heroine offers assistance freely, good fortune results. The golden goose is one such story... one among many. I now think Jonny, the hero of Memory, is very much the hero in a fairy tale who does the right thing, and, for all its realism (after all, many of the peripheral events in this story, and a lot of the conversations, too, are biographical in origin), there are fairy tale elements as well. And this is also true of books like Catalogue of the universe (yet another account of a Frog Prince), or, more recently, The other side of silence in which the heroine, wrapped in a self-imposed silence, weaves herself a net of stories. It is easy to recall fairy tales in which the heroine is under a spell of silence until some crucial event sets her free.
A longer and more complex story like Memory is filled with all sorts of ideas and images emerging from the exchanges between the reader and the writer, both initially resident in the same head, along with facts of every day life which other readers will probably recognise. Part of the fun is the fantasy teased out of this recognisable fact. but I could not say I enjoyed writing Memory more than the story of the baby and the animals or than the story of The cake, or preferred writing in one category above another.
When I was a child I confused the act of telling the tale with the act of writing the tale down. I thought that telling the tale meant the ability to write a story so that it would not need a single correction - getting it right first time. By now I have found out that writers able to write in this way are extremely rare... that most writers use their first versions to lever themselves further into the tale which they know is waiting beyond the veil of first faulty words. I write and rewrite, moving between the word processor and the page, because I find the story on the screen is, mysteriously, a different story from the story on the pages. My handwritten corrections climb like spiders from line to line, spin webs of alteration in the margins. As I write, the story
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changes, and sometimes turns out to be some tale other than the one I first intended. Apart from the print on the page there is the sound of the story - the sound of words set free.
In the beginning I read my own stories in silence but, within that silence I also have some idea of how they are going to sound. Then I tell the tale aloud to myself and what comes out of my mouth goes out into the world then rushes back in through my own ears, so the story is now coming from outside as well as inside. Of course I already know what is going to happen, and yet now the tale sounds different, and I often change it according to the way it sounds, coming in from out there. Later still, I may read it aloud to some other listener, my daughter - my granddaughter - anyone who happens to be around and who is willing to listen. And now, at some level I am listening inside that other person's head, too, picking up roughness in the flow that I missed when I was the only listener, or places where I have written too much, or used words wrongly. I don't recognise all the faults, but I recognise some of them. Long novels are tales, too - stories being told - and I want them to sound a certain way. I try to imagine this story existing before I began to write it down, imagine it ringing with the same authority that other stories have for me when I am a reader and some other writer or storyteller has done all the correcting and reading aloud on my behalf.
In the end I must abandon the story first to my editor and then to its readers, all of whom make something different from it according to what they have in their heads already. And then, relieved of the story I ask to be paid... paid for doing something that no one asked me to do in the first place. I can be as self-righteous about this as any writer, now the story is out in the world in its own.
I am going to conclude by reading a few connected statements from the end of The other side of silence.
If things were fair, all stories would be anonymous. I don't mean that the story teller wouldn't get paid for telling. But there would be no names on the covers of books or interviews on television... just the story itself, climbing walls, sliding from tree to tree and stealing secretly through the forest of the world, real but more than real. Set free from the faults that go with its author's name. Made true. But of course things aren't fair. They never have been.
Once I used to pick up Old Fairy Tales, shut my eyes, put my blind
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finger blindly on a line, then open my eyes suddenly so that I could read whatever it was fate had to say to me. TELL YOUR SORROWS TO THE OLD STOVE IN THE CORNER I read, because true life is timeless and the story already knew what lay ahead of me. And when the story gives you good advice there's no way out. You just have to act upon it.
As a reader who has possessed other people's tales and found myself in them, I must allow other readers to possess mine, and make of them what they can. Stories split off other stories, or perhaps consume them... but there is no end to telling the tale. |
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