Author Feature

Maeve Binchy is thrilled that she has a book on the syllabus

Now I know George Bernard Shaw didn't allow his books be used in the BBC Schools Department as he didn't want his stories to become instruments of torture for children. But I don't feel the same way at all. But then I've always been very easy going about my writing, and preferred to call it story telling.

I don't think anyone will teach my book in a torturous way making the children hate it, instead I feel sure they might use it to show a young generation how easy it is to write simple prose and keep a narrative going if they just keep to one simple rule which is to write as they speak.

Now I know that as English teachers we were meant in many ways to try to change the way they spoke and make them speak better! But I always thought that this meant we should try to iron the clichés and dead metaphors out of their work rather than to take away the life and the spontaneity. When I wrote school essays they were filled with words to show off how much I knew rather than anything that actually helped to communicate what I was trying to say.

I thought that talking and English Lessons were two totally separate things. We used to write in those days as if we were filling in that column in the Readers Digest "Increase your Word Power." The more complicated the word the better the sentence. What did it matter that the meaning was totally obscured? Nowadays nobody teaches English in that indigestible way but in the Olden Times that's how it was done.

I think we do them a better service if we tell them that writing can be just us talking as we would to friends, and the clearer and more simple we are the greater chance of our being understood. Good talk doesn't mean using the same in buzz words over and over again, in fact that makes for tedious conversation. So writing is often better without the current slang, it dates a story too much for one thing, and it's too repetitive for another. I suppose if you are trying to tell a story you want the person listening to say "Go on, go on, tell me more" so I suppose you should tell the story with enthusiasm implying all the time "Wait until you hear what happens next".

It's the same in writing, or it is for me anyway.
I pretend I'm writing to a friend telling all the details of some event that happened locally.

The friend will not know all the characters so you have to give some background of who they are. I often do that by talking about them when they were children. We meet Bernie on her tenth birthday party, we meet Eve as an orphan being raised by nuns, we meet Jack as a privileged son of a rugby playing family with hopes for a starry medical career for their eldest son. We know that Nan comes from poverty and passivity in a vulgar home which her beauty, in her own mind, makes her totally unsuited for.

So by the time their drama finally happens we know a good bit about them already, and hopefully we are sufficiently interested in them to care about it all.

One of the great things about being born Irish is that we are not short of a word. We have seen no virtue in waiting until you had something to say before speaking. We don't value Good Listeners highly.

We come from a race that prized the Seanachai as they moved from village to hillside to valley with no other purpose except to tell stories. So if our heads are buzzing with stories then why shouldn't we write them down? No one ever told me I was a natural story teller when I was young, but because I had a kind tolerant family who listened to us all they didn't tell me that I was rambling on endlessly either. So I grew up with the idea that telling long tales was normal.

My father used to tell us about the cases in the law courts, my Mother about the people she met shopping and my sisters and brother and I about what happened in school. It was a world where the outside was brought home every time anyone left the house. It was only much later I realised that the stories we told could be written down. You don't HAVE to study all the great writers to see how they wrote before you begin to write your own book. Instead you should read the other writers because they are good and will entertain you and fill your mind and open up doors in your mind. Not because you feel you should write like any of them.

Why should we dare to steal their voice, their style their method? Instead we must find our own.

I know all kinds of things now that I didn't know when I stood in front of a class of children. I know that if they write as they speak they will be believable. If they write about what they know they will be authoritative. If they pretend their ears are tape recorders they'll get dialogue right. If they think of their eyes as a camera they'll describe things well. If we give them confidence and encouragement they'll realise they are as good as anyone else and grow to love us and thank us for believing in them.

The greatest compliment I can have is when people say about my books: "Ah sure I could have written that myself." Because it's true, anyone can tell a story, the hard bit is keeping at it until it's finished and getting anyone to support you through all the period of self doubt.

You might like to tell them that it wasn't my own story. I was fat like Benny, and I did love UCD but I didn't love a playboy like Jack and I didn't have a friend like Nan who betrayed me. The thing about story telling is that you invent a plot and then lay it down on top of a scene you know and can describe.

It's as simple as that. Just ask them to dedicate their first book to you.

Maeve Binchy