Implied reader

The Children's Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2013 has great articles in it. I am working my way through them, in no particular order, but they are all useful and insightful; a must for any aspiring writer.

Page 87 - Who do children's authors write for by Michael Rosen  has made a block fall fully into place at just the right time.

We all write with a reader in mind but maybe not fully in mind as it were and this maybe one thing more I have to cultivate and learn in a more conscious way. With this course I am writing for a specific "section" in mind and they are distinct from other areas of society - despite the fact that they come with all sorts of ideas, dreams and interests all affected by age group etc. This is something that I have come to terms with and I am enjoying; the cut and thrust of tailoring a piece for boys or girls of a certain age group etc.

With my latest assignment I found myself writing a story about a girl. She is an adventurous, fearless type who takes the opportunity to explore the forbidden and finds herself embroiled in a magical and dangerous experience; which she suspects her Grandmother, if not fully, is aware of. This story came organically but with the insight of the article above I realize that I am writing this specific story for a particular type of girl.

Add to this, after raising my fears about the word count restrictions of this assignment, Nina Milton offered the advice to treat each story as "as 1500 words of a chapter of a book" and a huge weight seemed to come off my shoulders.

I knew whom the first story, the first part of the assignment, was written for or at least the character identifies closely with her, how she was when we were children.

My "implied reader" is my Sister, Barbara. 

She was a tomboy. Fearless in outlook, strong of character, a bender of the rules and she broke a few, but always adventurous. She took life and still takes it on with gusto; there are no areas she considers off limits to her and if there are she questions why and usually breaks down barriers - and yes she does get rewarded with magical events happening to her and her family. 

Quite a revelation to me that I have an implied reader of this kind, so close to home. I kidded myself that I was writing for an imagined child in this instance, someone generic and remote. It again shows me that not only the fictional writing examples are of use but also this helpful collection of articles.

Not sure...flagging or lazy or bubbling?

Each course always has that point where doubts arise and motivation is tested and it's always that point at which you feel the most rewarding happenings happen.

I have been trying to dictate to myself a timetable of effort and this is not working at all. I have slipped. Now, this is not new and if I look through my past posts and courses I could find and examples in each one where the wind has died and I am be-calmed. This time feels like I have imposed it on myself.

The challenge of the Fifth Assignment is it's brevity. Two 1,500 word stories about fantasy and adventure and a little menace resolved by magic. A flood of ideas, flurry of notes (post-its and whole scenes) and a storm of images all predicated from the exercises from the manual. The first story came because of a strange conflagration of events - a television programme about renovating a strange cottage with a tower attached to it (built for a missing grand house for it's Head Gardner's use), a memory of a childhood passion - Sycamore seeds - and a strange little chair seen in a junk-shop. Then I stalled....

I recognized the feeling and after a week of drifting, as I call it, in other words reading a little else, I asked Nina Milton (my Tutor). She was supportive and full of reassuring advice which is always calming. The only thing I began worrying about was whether I was becoming lazy and losing focus on my degree path.

Then a memory came about my seeing a Vicar when I was a child. He scared the hell out of me. I cannot remember the occasion, or what age I was BUT I remember his stillness, the darkness of his robes/attire and the turn of his head around to room to seemingly peer into every corner. It may have been my christening - I was christened late, by most standards, as a Methodist with my Sisters, the youngest of which was a babe in arms; I must have been around four years of age - I had my protagonist. This ran on to a local story about an area called Bincombe Bumps - some burial mounds that local children in the fifties used to say were the realm of a devilish party that could only be heard at midnight on a full moon night. The dichotomy being what child would find themselves on that hill, at that time, away from their parents safe, warm and protective house/home?

Then I remembered the rolling humpy, hillocky field next to our local church, St Anne's. A perfect, scaled down version of the larger Ridgeway Bincombe Bumps......then the bubbling began.

Two days later, I sat down and in the midst of this drifting phase and after plotting out the story, I then moved straight on to write the first third of the second story.Breakthrough! - and more importantly, a lesson in trusting my process.

So, right now I am on a second bubbling phase - because essentially this is not a single assignment, after all it has two parts - while trying to unwind on leave from work for two weeks; trying NOT to get wound up or worrying and above all trusting my process and writing when the bubbling phase has finished.