When Marnie Was There is a book that makes me cry every time I read it. Not that it's sad just exactly as Anita describes and it pulls at my heartstrings & makes me weep. My daughter was very amused!
I am reading The Thorny Paradise - Writers on Writing for Children (while I remember as a bit of an aside) but the mention of Rosemary Sutcliff made me think of it: Geoffrey Trease, Catherine Storr, John Gordon, Joan Aiken, C.Walter Hodges, Jill Paton Walsh, Jane Gardam, Ursula Le Guin, Penelope Farmer, Barbara Willard, Phillipa Pearce and Barbara Willard to name only some on why they write. I did pick it up years back when I was studying but revisiting it definitely worth getting your hands on a copy I think. Some is fascinating and I am struck by how well these authors could write, it's quite humbling. It's dated and of its time but I quite like looking at children's writing from a 1970s perspective.
Joan Aiken is interesting, she writes with some displeasure about children reading 'Filboid Studge': "that, you may recall, was the title of a short story by Saki, about a breakfast food so dull and tasteless that it sold extremely well because everyone believed it MUST be good for them. Children, at an age when their minds are as soft and impressionable as a newly tarred road, pick up such a mass of unnourishing stuff - and what happens to it? It soaks down into the subconscious and does no good there, or it lies around taking up room that could be used to better purpose.)"
Joan goes on to say that the average child reads 600 books before they are 14 - nearly two books a week or so (she means children's classics or similar). She suggests this isn't very many really but does concede 'even television has its points' but 'it is a wicked shame if they waste any time at all on Filboid Studge'. What would she make of children today?
How the world has changed. Mind you she's quite progressive about education thinking 'the trouble is we have taken away the role of children in the adult world. Instead of being with their parents, learning how: helping on the farm, blowing the forge fire, making flint arrowheads with the grown-ups, as would be natural, they are all shoved together in a corner..we have to find something to do to keep them out of mischief'."
She adds: 'And now I remember too, with frightful guilt, how pleased I was when my children learned to read; apart from my real happiness at the thought of the pleasure that lay ahead of them, I looked forward to hours of peace and quiet'. My children would likely disappoint in this aspect and I imagine are not the only ones
Rosemary Sutcliff's essay 'Lost Summer' is very moving. Turns out she had an illness which meant she was confined to a wheelchair for life (think this was her and I've not confused her with someone else) - she does not talk about it here. To me that makes her achievements and life all the more remarkable. She talks about the lost manuscript of a book she wrote at 20 and never forgot. She also says 'writing is much too much like gruelingly hard work, even though it is work one loves' have to agree with that. Of the lost book she says 'there was absolutely everything I wanted to put into that story. I knew nothing about the self-discipline required in a writer. I scattered delights on every page, and found, in doing so, the same kind of escape, refuge, what you will, from a very lonely girlhood'.
Self discipline...hmm. I am still writing for my characters to spring to independent life & start trying to change things as happens to so many who write. Not yet. Perhaps this is because I lack self discipline and the requisite talent. What's interesting as Enid's 'cinema screen' technique seems to work for all the writers listed above given what they say.