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This week we’re
talking about something a little magical – but first, my inky-fingered
friends, there’s something else.
As you know, we run a
Summer Festival of
Writing. The Festival comprises 35+ live events,
covering every topic under the writing sun, and delivered online so you
can participate fully from anywhere at all. The Summer Festival is free
and exclusive to members of Jericho Writers – as are all our 300+ hours
of masterclasses – as are all our video courses – as is AgentMatch –
and as is everything else under the JW membership brolly.
Now, OK, that’s old
news. What’s absolutely shiny-new this week is that we’re making
membership available at just over 30% off the regular price, and you
can now pay for an annual membership in instalments. That means you
can now become a Jericho Writers member for less than £11.00 (or US
$14) a month.
The promo runs
throughout May. Sign up here.
More details in the PSes.
And, from my point of
view, I’m really thrilled about this. It’s taken a lot of work to get
to this point. Jericho Writers was formed from the old Writers’
Workshop with the aim of creating the best writers’ membership service
in the world, on the best tech platform in the world, and delivered at
an utterly affordable price. I think we’ve now achieved the first and
third of those aims and, by the middle of the year, I hope we’ll have
largely checked that gnarly middle box as well. More on that front
soon.
Meanwhile, go fill your
boots with a low-cost membership and get your brain all a-polished up
for a wonderful summer.
Right. Nuff of that.
Up next: how to see a halo.
As you all know, I
have about a million kids. (Don’t ask me for an exact number; I haven’t
counted recently.)
The older boy, Tom,
is bright, imaginative, interesting, kind, wise – and absolutely
hopeless when it comes to anything involving pens, pencils and paper.
He’s coming up to nine years old and his hand-writing is worse than
that of his six-year-old siblings. It’s not just bad, even. It’s
bananas. When writing his name, he’ll write a giant T, a teeny-tiny O,
and then an M placed orthogonally to the other two letters. He’ll then
probably colour in the O, add a bird, drop his pencil, then forget
completely what he was doing.
The process is
joyous, and liberated, and inventive … and unlikely to pass any exams.
In part, we’ve
decided to address that challenge by side-stepping it. OK, he can’t
write. So let him type. He’s learning to touch-type and is about 100
lessons into a 450-lesson course. He already knows the placement of
every key and is reasonably accurate in using them. The process remains
slow, so it’s a labour to produce a sentence – but there’s definitely
progress.
But what about his
experience right now? Just this week, my wife and I realised that Tom’s
inability to write meant that he couldn’t see his thoughts. His
twin sister, for whom writing comes fluently, has the ability to come
up with poems, think great thoughts, write cards, make jokes – and to see
those things on paper. Tom’s never really had that joy.
Nor is it simply that
Tabby can see the product of her mind. It’s that, seeing it, she can
refine it. You can’t easily hold a poem in your head. But if you get
the first line or two down, you can stop thinking about them and move
on to the next one. If all you have is a fragile memory to rely on, the
anxiety around your ability to retain that material essentially
disables the production of further content.
All that’s been
heavily studied, of course. Plenty of purely oral societies don’t have
a word for ‘word’. How could they? And why would they? To a
non-literate culture, the notion of a word feels like a dubious
scientific hypothesis. As soon as you’re literate, the existence of
words (and sentences, and clauses, and verbs, and everything else)
looks like accomplished fact.
Because oral cultures
don’t have a way to pin down the spoken word, they tend towards fierce
conservatism (“No, that’s not how we build a barn”). They value
mnemonics, no matter how dodgy (“Red sky at night, shepherd’s
delight”). They venerate collective and ancient wisdom over anything
else. Preservation of knowledge is way more important than challenging
and, possibly, improving it.
Up till now and in
some respects only, our little Tom (whose reading is absolutely fine)
has been like an oral-only child living in a highly literate world.
We realised we needed
to give him the gift of seeing his thoughts.
So I sat with him
with my laptop at the ready. We created a new document – The Book Of
Tom – and I told him that he could simply dictate anything he wanted:
thoughts, poems, jokes, inventions, ideas, songs, sentences, anything.
For about two minutes
he was shy and uncertain, but then we got going on “An Invention” – and
he lit up. He became fluent. His words became text, and not even the
scrappy text of normal eight-year-old handwriting, but the text of a
beautifully sculpted font (Gill Sans, if you want to know.) His words
didn’t just take on permanence, the perfect typesetting lent them a
kind of beauty too.
The Book of Tom
is now a document that’ll grow a little bit longer every day. A
mostly-oral child has hopped over the fence into full literacy and he
loves it. It’s like there’s a halo around his writing, which means
around his thoughts, which means around him. Tom has seen his own halo,
and it’s wonderful.
Now, OK, that’s a
beautiful story, but what does it have to do with you?
More than you might
think, I suspect. We all share the joy of seeing our words take shape
on the page. Tom, it’s true, experienced the pleasure particularly
sweetly, because this was the first time he’d had that feeling, because
it overcame a deficiency he knew in himself. But still: seeing our
thoughts take physical shape – that’s still a reliably golden
experience. You have it. I have it. We all do.
What’s more, though
you’ve most likely been a confident writer from childhood onwards, the
first time you wrote real long form text – that novel, your memoir,
your whatever – you did have something of a first-born
experience:
I thought up a story
in my head, and here it is, and it’s wonderful.
Because you can’t
hold 100,000 words in your head, or anything close, there’s a
step-change between day-dreaming a novel and actually having my_great_novel.doc
live on your computer. The aroma of that first story is intoxicating.
You’re like Tom, seeing his invention come to life in Gill Sans before
his delighted gaze.
Cherish that joy!
What a gift it is to have such a deep and reliable pleasure on tap –
and where the only cost involved is the tiny effort involved in opening
a laptop. We’re writers; we’re lucky.
But also: beware, oh
beware of that that joy.
The joy can easily
trick you into thinking that what you’ve written is actually good. And
maybe it’s not. The invention that Tom wrote about? It’s rubbish. His
first story? It’s terrible. Of course they’re bad: he’s eight.
For Tom, right now,
that doesn’t matter. What matters now is our giving him a power and him
learning to use it. It’s the learning that matters, not the outcome.
You’re not like that.
You want some actual readers to read your actual book. You want them to
like it. You might even want to get paid.
But because you’re
giddy with the joy of seeing your story unfold in rich and beautiful
detail on the page, you may not see its inadequacies. Agents – those
brutes – don’t feel your joy and they’re keenly attuned to the
inadequacies. Editors are worse. Critics are horrible. Readers are
fickle.
In a strange way, the
process of maturing as a writer is one of retaining the joy while
developing your critical eye. You have to love your work and harshly
critique it, both at the same time, and, ideally, without your head
exploding.
Love your work too
little and you will never finish it. Critique it too little, and what
you have will never pass muster in those cold commercial winds.
Finding the balance
ain't easy - but it's also one of the most crucial tasks you face.
Good luck.
That’s it from me.
And if you want Jericho Writers membership at a totally affordable
price, then check out those PSes. No need to rush though. This promo
runs all month.
Till soon.
Harry
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