As you all know, I have about a million kids. (Don\u2019t ask me for an exact number; I haven\u2019t counted recently.)<\/p>\n
The older boy, Tom, is bright, imaginative, interesting, kind, wise \u2013 and absolutely hopeless when it comes to anything involving pens, pencils and paper. He\u2019s coming up to nine years old and his hand-writing is worse than that of his six-year-old siblings. It\u2019s not just bad, even. It\u2019s bananas. When writing his name, he\u2019ll write a giant T, a teeny-tiny O, and then an M placed orthogonally to the other two letters. He\u2019ll then probably colour in the O, add a bird, drop his pencil, then forget completely what he was doing.<\/p>\n
The process is joyous, and liberated, and inventive \u2026 and unlikely to pass any exams.<\/p>\n
In part, we\u2019ve decided to address that challenge by side-stepping it. OK, he can\u2019t write. So help him type. He\u2019s 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. \u00a0The process remains slow, so it\u2019s a labour to produce a sentence \u2013 but there\u2019s definitely progress.<\/p>\n
But what about his experience right now? Just this week, my wife and I realised that Tom\u2019s inability to write meant that he couldn\u2019t 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 \u2013 and to see those things on paper. Tom\u2019s never really had that joy.<\/p>\n
Nor is it simply that Tabby can see the product of her mind. It\u2019s that, seeing it, she can refine it. You can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
All that\u2019s been heavily studied, of course. Plenty of purely oral societies don\u2019t have a word for \u2018word\u2019. 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\u2019re literate, the existence of words (and sentences, and clauses, and verbs, and everything else) looks like accomplished fact.<\/p>\n
Because oral cultures don\u2019t have a way to pin down the spoken word, they tend towards fierce conservatism (\u201cNo, that\u2019s not how we build a barn\u201d). They value mnemonics, no matter how dodgy (\u201cRed sky at night, shepherd\u2019s delight\u201d). They venerate collective and ancient wisdom over anything else. Preservation of knowledge is way more important than challenging and, possibly, improving it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
We realised we needed to give him the gift of seeing his thoughts.<\/strong><\/p>\n So I sat with him with my laptop at the ready. We created a new document \u2013 The Book Of Tom<\/em> \u2013 and I told him that he could simply dictate anything he wanted: thoughts, poems, jokes, inventions, ideas, songs, sentences, anything.<\/p>\n For about two minutes he was shy and uncertain, but then we got going on \u201cAn Invention<\/em>\u201d \u2013 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\u2019t just take on permanence, the perfect typesetting lent them a kind of beauty too.<\/p>\n The Book of Tom<\/em> is now a document that\u2019ll grow a little bit longer every day. A mostly-oral child has hopped over the fence into full literacy and he loves it. It\u2019s like there\u2019s a halo around his writing, which means around his thoughts, which means around him. Tom has seen his own halo, and it\u2019s wonderful.<\/p>\n Now, OK, that\u2019s a beautiful story, but what does it have to do with you? (I\u2019m taking a wild guess here and am assuming that you don\u2019t yourself labour to generate text.)<\/p>\n More than you might think, I suspect. We all share the joy of seeing our words take shape on the page. Tom, it\u2019s true, experienced the pleasure particularly sweetly, because this was the first time he\u2019d had that feeling, because it overcame a deficiency he knew in himself. But still: seeing our thoughts take physical shape \u2013 that\u2019s still a reliably golden experience. You have it. I have it. We all do.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, though you\u2019ve most likely been a confident writer from childhood onwards, the first time you wrote real long form text \u2013 that novel, your memoir, your whatever \u2013 you did have something of a first-born experience:<\/p>\n I thought up a story in my head, and here it is, and it\u2019s wonderful.<\/em><\/p>\n Because you can\u2019t hold 100,000 words in your head, or anything close, there\u2019s a step-change between day-dreaming a novel and actually having my_great_novel.doc<\/em> live on your computer. The aroma of that first story is intoxicating. You\u2019re like Tom, seeing his invention come to life in Gill Sans before his delighted gaze.<\/p>\n Cherish that joy! What a gift it is to have such a deep and reliable pleasure on tap \u2013 and where the only cost involved is the tiny effort involved in opening a laptop. We\u2019re writers; we\u2019re lucky.<\/p>\n But also: beware, oh beware of that that joy.<\/strong><\/p>\n The joy can easily trick you into thinking that what you\u2019ve written is actually good. And maybe it\u2019s not. The invention that Tom wrote about? It\u2019s rubbish. His first story? It\u2019s terrible. Of course they\u2019re bad: he\u2019s eight.<\/p>\n For Tom, right now, that doesn\u2019t matter. What matters now is our giving him a power and him learning to use it. It\u2019s the learning that matters, not the outcome.<\/p>\n You\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n But because you\u2019re giddy with the joy of seeing your story unfold in rich and beautiful detail on the page, you may not see its inadequacies. Agents \u2013 those brutes \u2013 don\u2019t feel your joy and they\u2019re keenly attuned to the inadequacies. Editors are worse. Critics are horrible. Readers are fickle.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Finding the balance ain’t easy – but it’s also one of the most crucial tasks you face.<\/p>\n Good luck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As you all know, I have about a million kids. (Don\u2019t ask me for an exact number; I haven\u2019t counted recently.) The older boy, Tom, is bright, imaginative, interesting, kind, wise \u2013 and absolutely hopeless when it comes to anything involving pens, pencils and paper. He\u2019s coming up to nine years old and his hand-writing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":6789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n