Words

There’s a song I used to love, twelve years ago when my husband and I started going out. It’s Words, originally I believe by the BeeGees but in ’99 when Andrew and I met it had just been covered by *shameful whisper* Boyzone. It has lovely lyrics, but it’s the refrain that’s the killer:

It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away. 

As any writer or reader, aspiring or established, knows, it’s not “only” words and that line perfectly sums up the power of words – they can take someone’s heart away. Hold that thought.

Last week Daniel learned to read. He’s been desperate to for a while, sitting poring over his picture books and deciphering letter by letter but not quite managing to turn individual letters into words. This week something clicked, the missing magical ingredient I guess. I’m still trying to catch it so I can bottle it, sell it, and retire. Anyway, It clicked and we sat together and he read me a whole story by himself. What happened was he wanted to sit near me while I was making tea so I gave him an early reader I’d got out from the library in case he could manage the odd word. I thought I’d have to help him out frequently but at least he could have a go and then I was on hand to do so. Instead, I stopped what I was doing and listened in growing wonder as he read word after word without my help. Some of them he stopped and decoded sound by sound, others he read aloud fluently as if he’d been reading for weeks instead of minutes.

He then read the same book to his daddy three times and searched out the Oxford Reading Tree At Home books I had ready for after Christmas. That night, our house was all about Words.

The thing is, I had a bit of an epiphany reflecting on the episode. While he was reading I kept asking him what was happening to make sure he was understanding what he was reading rather than just speaking aloud without taking anything in (he was, the little star). That’s when something I’d suspected was really borne in on me.

It’s “only” words.

It’s the Power of Words. The letters didn’t matter. He could recognise individual letters but they were powerless without being turned into words. Being able to read means being able to turn black squiggles on a page into a story and characters and conflict. He has that power now.

He had power over me with the words he was using. He had me asking what was happening, wondering what was going to happen next, and he LOVED it. Instead of being spellbound by a story, he was the one casting the spell because he could read the words. 

Writers have that power over someone else every time a reader picks up their work and is caught by it. We love having that power over people and making them think “wait, but what happens next…?” I think it’s actually a little bit addictive. Of course, with great power comes great responsibility etc, not to mention great guilt, great big whopping holes in self-confidence, but those things are part of the deal and really, it seems like a fair price to pay for the power of one day dreaming that a child or a teenager somewhere is reading my words, and my words are taking their heart away.

I’m off to add some more words, perfectly packaged in books, to Daniel’s Christmas gift list. Have a wonderful Christmas everyone!

SCBWI Do

By the way, a quick apology for doing a post about how I’m going to post regularly then nothing for over a week. Life interfering again! 😉

A couple of weeks ago I joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. That’s quite a mouthful so it’s SCBWI [Scooby, as in the cartoon dog. You see what I did with the post title now?] for short.

It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while, but since I admitted to myself that I really wanted to write for children more than anything else, it became a much higher priority. And already I think it could be one of the best things I’ve ever done, career-wise.  Continue reading “SCBWI Do”

Lightning Bolts and Dragons

Well, it’s time to come clean. I have been holding off telling my family that I am writing until I had something that I could be proud of. The last couple of days have finally delivered that something in a dragon-shaped lightning bolt.

I have a finished book! No, really. Ok, maybe I should have warned you to sit down first…Recovered? I’ll carry on then.

The thing is, the book is not a major, groundbreaking work that I’ve been meticulously researching for months, nor an outstanding literary feat. It’s not even the kind of thing I envisaged myself writing a year ago when I decided to start taking this writing malarkey seriously. I always thought the first book I wrote would be a novel, almost certainly a Regency romance, which is what I’ve been brought up on. It turns out, my very first book is a children’s picture book featuring dragons. And it may never be accepted by a publisher, I don’t know. The thing is, I have an achievement – I have written a story and I am very proud of that fact alone. It’s a real story, with characters and a beginning, middle and end. There are a couple of minor tweaks I need to do but on the whole I am very happy.

And the biggest lesson for me in this is to take hold of lightning bolts that appear to strike from nowhere, however unlikely.

I didn’t set out to write a children’s book. It was probably the furthest thing from my mind to be honest. But this character has been sitting, twiddling his thumbs, in my head for a few months. Then he acquired a setting, but still no story, and busied himself until I could decide what to do with him. Then bam, in a lightning bolt out of nowhere, he starts talking to me. I guess he got fed up of waiting. And now I have 24 pages of picture book, waiting for me to finish editing and fiddling and send them away with everything crossed for luck.

It took some nerves to confess to my family that I was writing – it feels to me like a huge step, I don’t know why. Maybe because up until now I haven’t had anything I’ve been really proud of. But their reaction when they read it was the moment I have been waiting for for ages, maybe even years.

Oh, and by the way, I was wrong. Taking hold of lightning bolts is the second biggest lesson for me in this. The first is to remember how much fun it was. It was hard, getting the language the way I wanted it, asking my friends to test drive it on their children and waiting to hear their reaction. It was probably the hardest 500 words I’ve ever written. Trying to make sure that every word delivers the picture I see in my head, and that every line is entertaining. I think I’ve managed it, although I will probably always have some doubts. But, I can’t say it enough, it was fun. Entering the world of my characters, playing around with words to find ones that are musical and rhythmical, thinking of what my son would like to hear and how I could deliver it – that was magical, and has opened up whole, hereto-unconsidered world of possibilities for me. I’ve already got another little character whispering that she wants a turn at being a story.

I shall be updating regularly with progress, and when I’m a multi-millionaire just remember – you saw it here first.