Delicious Dahl

So, you may or may not be aware that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. It got me thinking, and not just about chocolate. I love Roald Dahl, he was a one-of-a-kind writer, the likes of which we'll never enjoy again (David Walliams you can try, but you can't come close). So it's incredible that his books are so timeless. It's incredible to think that even in this day and age of techno-wonder, Dahl can still captivate children and adult readers from half a century away.

I have a problem choosing my favourite Dahl. My earliest Dahl memory is The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me. Oh those sweets! (There were Gumywizzlers and Fizzwinkles from China, Frothblowers and Spitsizzlers from Africa, Tummyticklers and Gobwangles from the Fiji Islands and Liplickers and Plushnuggets from the Land of the Midnight Sun... I can remember quite especially the Giant Wangdoodles from Australia, every one with a huge ripe red strawberry hidden inside its crispy chocolate crust... and the Electric Fizzcocklers that made every hair on your head stand straight up as soon as you popped one into your mouth.. and there were Nishnobblers and Gumglotters and Blue Bubblers and Sherbert Slurpers and Tongue Rakers and as well as all this, there was a whole lot of splendid stuff from the great Wonka factory itself..)

Quentin Blake's illustrations brought the pages to life as much as the words (for me Roald Dahl is synonymous with Quentin Blake. It's not a real Roald Dahl book without Blake's illustrations), and of course the wonderful rhymes, made up words and larger than life characters.

I love Matilda mainly for the descriptions of Matilda discovering another world inside books: She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her room in an English village.

But also for the myriad of characters. Mrs Trunchball - absolutely unforgettable, Miss Honey and of course Matilda's own parents. I love the supernatural aspect of the telekinesis - I used to sit for ages trying to make my pens move with my eyes.

I love The BFG. For snozzcumbers and frobscottle, for dreams in bottles, for the BFG's enormous ears, for the description of the BFG striding across the world:

The Giant ran on and on. But now a curious change took place in his way of running. He seemed suddenly to go into a higher gear. Faster and faster he went and soon he was travelling at such a speed that the landscape blurred. The wind stung Sophie's cheeks. It made her eyes water. It whipped her head back and whistled in her ears. She could no longer feel the Giant's feet touching the ground. She had a weird sensation they were flying. It was impossible to tell whether they were over land or sea. This Giant had some sort of magic in his legs...Was it really possible they were crossing oceans?'

And The Witches is surely a rite of passage - has there ever been a more graphic and terrifying description of Witches in all of literature? Is there any build up more terrifying than the chapter in which the Grand High Witch asks the 'RSPCCC' ladies to 'rrree-moof your gloves...rrree-mmof your shoes...rrree-moof your vigs!' and bit by bit the awful truth becomes apparent that we are trapped in a room full of witches? Has the cigar smoking matter of fact Norwegian grandmother ever been bettered?


That face of hers was the most frightful and frightening thing I have ever seen...It was so crumpled and wizened, so shrunken and shrivelled...There was something terribly wrong with it, something foul and putrid and decayed. It seemed quite literally to be rotting away at the edges, and in the middle of the face, around the mouth and cheeks, I could see the skin all cankered and worm-eaten, as though maggots were working away in there.

But I also love Roald Dah's autobiographies, Boy and Going Solo. Going Solo in particular. Dahl brings to life a world disappeared, the age of Empire or British eccentrics. I remember my teacher reading it to the class in the last year of Primary School and being utterly captivated by it. He read Boy too and I will never forget the description of the canings:

I was frightened of that cane. There was no small boy in the world who wouldn't be. it wasn't simply an instrument for beating you. It was a weapon for wounding. It lacerated the skin. It caused severe black and scarlet bruising that took three weeks to disappear, and all the time during those three weeks, you could feel your heart beating along the wounds.

But it's Going Solo that stuck in my mind. From the Green Mamba in Africa to the plane crash in the Western Desert, it is perfect storytelling.

The snake-man was standing absolutely still just inside the door of the living room...I couldn't see the snake. I didn't think the snake-man had seen it yet either.
A minute went by...two minutes... three... four... five. Nobody moved. There was death in that room. The air was heavy with death and the snake-man stood as motionless as a pillar of stone, with the long rod held out in front of him.
And still he waited. Another minute...and another... and another...
...A moment later I caught sight of the snake. It was lying full-length along the skirting of the right-hand wall, but hidden from the snake-man's view by the back of the sofa. It lay there like a long, beautiful, deadly shaft of green glass...

I've heard since that Roald Dahl wasn't always truthful in his biographies but I've never wanted to know the true stories or find out the falsehoods. I believe in the world he created and the things he told me and that's enough for me.

So what makes Dahl so timeless? It's hard to say. Perhaps it is the sheer absence of technology that make them so adaptable. They describe a life and time that are almost fantastical to children now, and they accept it without question because of the surety and confidence of his writing. Who doesn't envy Danny and his dad living in the caravan, even if they are poor and live off toast and hot chocolate? It's a world full of love and so, always appealing. The Magic Finger, The Witches, George's Marvellous Medicine also exist in a separate world, not quite fantasy, not quite here and now but also not the distant past. The bright bubbling characters make the stories relevant and contemporary. Perhaps it is the lack of detail in the settings that allow the stories to continue to thrive. The stories live and breath through the characters and the plot and so it does not matter when or where it is really set.

And of course, no matter what happens in the story the thread that binds it all together is the enduring and overwhelming love that exists in the worlds Dahl creates. Whether it be between Sophie and the BFG, a boy and his Granny, Matilda and Miss Honey, A fox and his family, a man and his inventions, Charlie Bucket and his poor but loving family, the Giraffe, the Pelly and the Monkey, the burgeoning love between two tortoise owners;  Dahl's books are full of characters caring for each other or for their world. In The Twits, Mr and Mrs Twit may not have a lot of love to exist on, but it can be found in the delight Dahl describes their bitter relationship with, and of course in the way the birds band together to ensure the Twits get their comeuppance and rescue the poor monkeys. There is always love  to be found for lost and lonely children, or safe havens for children to experiment and explore in (The Magic Finger, Georges Marvellous Medicine), there is always humour, there is always danger and endless invention, but there is always always a sense of home and of belonging.

I really loved it in that gipsy caravan. I loved it especially in the evenings when I was tucked up in my bunk and my father was telling me stories. The paraffin lamp was turned low, and I could see lumps of wood glowing red-hot in the old stove and wonderful it was to be lying there snug and warm in my bunk in that little room. Most wonderful of all was the feeling that when I went to sleep, my father would still be there, very close to me, sitting in his chair by the fire, or lying in the bunk above my own.

'We have tears in our eyes

As we wave our goodbyes,

We so loved being with you, we three.

So do please now and then

Come and see us again

The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

 

All you do is look

At a page in this book

Because that's where we always will be.

No book ever ends

When its full of your friends

The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.'

  

Writers Process Blog Tour

Thanks to Ellis Kerkhoven for tagging me into the chain for the writer's process blog tour. It's been fascinating reading writers' processes and seeing how people manage to articulate why they write and how they write.

For anyone who hasn't heard of it, the Writers Process Blog Tour is 'simply a weekly insight into and sharing of people's writing process.' So here goes...

What am I working on?

I have a lot of different stories at different stages of development, but the one that I'm concentrating on at the moment is called The Burning. 

I've been writing this novel for children aged 10+ for about seven years now. I've written draft after draft and seen my writing evolve and develop with each one. I've restarted about four times and the current reincarnation is vastly different from the others (working titles include Master Juggler, WordWeaver, The Storyseeker). It's a story about storytelling and the importance of having the freedom to create and to imagine. Culture and society is founded on our ability to communicate ideas through writing, art and song and I am intrigued by what happens when you take this freedom away or try to annihilate culture. 

I travelled to Cambodia around the time I started writing this story and learnt a lot about the Khmer Rouge, about how Pol Pot wanted to take the country back to year zero and start again,obliterating its past and history. When the regime began taking over the people they went after were the intellectuals, the masters of their arts. Now a new generation is growing up with gaps in their history. People are relearning their traditions and its hard work because there are so few people left that remember or have the skills to teach what is lost.

My three (well, ok, it's actually four) line breakdown is: 

Romy is a storymaker in a world where storymaking is forbidden and the only tales you can hear are Emperor approved propaganda. When Romy’s identity is discovered her home is burned, her mother taken and she is left alone with only a raggedy juggler boy to help her. Determined to save her mother and with the help of Mister and the travellers who can tell Romy more about her past, Romy does her best to survive and find her mother without being caught. As she travels through the country towards the City of Lies, her stories begin to ripple about her, perhaps paving the way for a new way of life for everyone.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

My genre is usually fantasy or magical realism and I like to try and turn usual expectations inside out. During University I wrote a story about a world that existed behind this world and it was run by fairies and elves and goblins. However, the fairies were huge, like giants, the elves were strange creatures with four legs, they were green all over and grew moss like fur and they were very down to earth and practical, also the goblins were not the bad guys - I like to have a different slant on things if I can.

Aside from that though, I don't know if my work is that vastly different from others, I'm just trying to engage readers in a world that feels real and in the lives of empathetic, believable characters with strong story lines to follow. I think that what makes it different is that it is written by me. My way of seeing things, of writing things down onto the page is my way and that will always make it different from someone else's.

Why do I write what I do?
Looking over things that I have written, I suppose it would  be fair to say that I write what interests me, what captures my imagination, I write to explore ideas and possibilities. But I don't ever sit down and think today I am going to write about such and such. Something triggers a scene, or a line of dialogue in my mind and I go on from there.

 Sometimes it feels like an addiction. I don't know why I have the compulsion to write, I don't know why certain characters or scenarios or ideas take shape and become stories or poems. They just do. It's all part of the mysterious make-up of the Universe. It's a kind of magic. 

How does my writing process work?
I very much admired Candy Gourlay's and Vashti Hardy's descriptions of their writing processes and would like to be able to be as eloquent as them. For me writing is a process that happens in fits and starts, that means bouncing off the walls one minute and then slinking off to hibernate the next. I'll try to break it down.

Most story ideas I have tend to be triggered by me being somewhere and seeing something. In my book The Burning my main character, the storymaker, has to be surrounded by people, by experience and by life in order to be able to tell stories. Life seeps into her, ideas recharge her, she learns and thinks and words take shape within her that she releases into stories. I feel writing is much the same - you need to fill yourself with experiences and ideas gleaned from being around people, or walking through a city, or sitting in the sun, or browsing an art gallery, or reading books, or listening to music, or watching films, or travelling to a land you've never been to before and breathing it all in. I collect postcards and objects that have the tingle of story about them and I use them as story starts. See my earlier blog post about this here or my feature for Words and Pics here).

The current story that I'm writing was triggered many years ago when I was in Belgium eating waffles in one of the main squares - all of a sudden there was a juggler there. He was wearing stilts and he began juggling and then there were hundreds of people all juggling. Here my memory gets a little hazy because I have written that as a scene in my story so many times that I can no longer remember how much of it is real and how much I have made up. But in my note book that day I wrote: 'Juggling Master at the Grand Palace dressed in red, girl apprenticed, the drumming of the clubs, cries and shouts, heat of the sun, sticky chocolate, stripey socks, red wagon.' This somehow combined with a memory of a trip to St Ives in Cornwall and sitting on the beach eating chips in the dark listening to the sound of the waves rolling in and seeing the humps of the fishing boats left stranded on the sand when the tide came out.  An image arose in my head of a girl seeking shelter in an upturned boat and meeting an extraordinary boy, a juggler, who tells stories. And the story in its first carnation was born. 

   

A couple of scenes I drew out for BackWorld

I write feverishly when I have story to write -  I can spend hours and hours in front of the keyboard not even noticing when it's time to eat or drink. My waking hours are spent thinking about my characters, about the story. I wake up with lines of dialogue in my head and plot problems solved. I'm not an artist but I try to draw out scenes and characters, I write back stories for the world I'm creating and all the characters. 

I search out pictures of my characters.

I map out the country, the terrain I'm writing about, I search out pictures of characters or places and I display them all around me.

 Then there's a lull. Everything goes quiet and I begin consuming books. I read, read, read. Preferably books that I've never read before, a mix of genres, and age range. Recently I've switched between reading Longbourn by Jo Baker, Alice in Wonderland and Generation Kill by Evan Wright. 

 I watch films and I think and I don't write a single word. Then I'll make myself write something, anything. I have a trashy romance story that I keep going as a way to get me writing again. This story allows me to write anything without self editing. I write without self-consciousness like I did when I was a teenager. I write without inhibition or rules. Then that dries up too and that's generally when I'm ready to continue with the story that went into hibernation.

 Once the first draft is done I send it out to those people I trust to give critical, useful feedback and then I start working on something else until I feel ready to start editing. I try not to edit as I write, which is hard because I love editing as much as I love writing. But as Fletcher Moss tweeted recently in his series of 52 things he's learnt since The Poison Boy was published: 'A slightly crappy finished novel is ten-times better than a brilliant first five chapters. Whatever you do - finish it! #pb52s'

 

So as you can see it's a muddle. I don't have word limits, writing days or any real structure to my writing and sometimes I wish I did but every time I've tried it's just felt forced and difficult. 

 I was asked recently what would I do if I never got published, would I still write? For me the answer is that there isn't really a choice. Yes, I would still write. I write because I have the compulsion to do so and I love it. It would be a dream come true to have my stories read and loved, treasured by readers for generations and yes, that's what I hope for. But it's not why I write. I write because the stories form inside me and so I write them out as best that I can. Besides, never is a long time and by the time you get to the end of it... well I don't expect you'll worry about things too much then!


For the next link in the chain I pass you on, appropriately enough, to a storyteller - Charlotte Comley. 

Charlotte Comley is a creative writing group organiser and now self-employed writer of educational resources, blog content and articles. She is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing for Children at Winchester University. She is a member of SCWBI and regularly blogs at  aimingforapublishingdeal.blogspot.co.uk/

 Enjoy!