Lit Kid: recurring phrases

I began with openings, and now I’m going onto recurring phrases in children’s books.

It’s not my intention to get overly stylistic about it. I have a notebook where I am starting to record ideas for writing about children’s books, and there are (unsurprisingly) many others that could clamour for attention.

But a certain amount of time this week spent with audio books, to calm and occupy the invalid, has made me more aware of the power of such phrases in books – even when we hear them inside our heads, or with our eyes.

Just as we may know what is coming with words such as “Once upon a time”, recurring phrases belong to the atmosphere that is built as a tale starts to take shape before our eyes.

Whether read aloud, or viewed on the page, the phrases are there for us to notice. They tie us to that particular author, or series of books.

Sometimes it is a form of address to the reader that beguiles us – particularly with Kipling’s ‘Best Beloved’, of the Just So Stories. (In fact, try doing a ‘find’ of ‘Best Beloved’ on the Project Gutenberg version, and see just how many there are.)

It may be like a favourite uncle having a pet name for us – a phrase of affection, like ‘Silly old bear!’, which may even make its way into regular language usage.

It may equally be a suggestion that we, as readers, understand more than others, and so will be entrusted with secrets by the author.

Recurring phrases don’t always have to be the same words – but they need to occur in the same kind of place each time, and follow a particular function.

They may be the equivalent of an in-joke – which they often are, in the Harry and the Dinosaurs series.

Book by book, Harry’s older sister Sam makes some kind of comment which gets Harry’s goat, and leads to some form of retaliation:

‘Sam said “You can’t take dinosaurs to school, stupid!”
That’s why her toast fell on the floor.’ (Harry and the Dinosaurs go to School)

We know it is coming – we also know that (usually) Harry’s Gran will take him off and calm things down.

What we don’t know is what format the offence will take – or what Harry’s response will be. So we need to go on to the next book to find out.

Equally, in the Horrid Henry series, there are regular descriptions of the anti-hero Henry attacking his brother Peter, all worked out in character – a bit like Calvin as Spaceman Spiff, dealing with the latest impertinence by his class teacher.

The pay-off, really, is that someone will have to say “Stop being horrid, Henry!”, and reconfirm his nature and character.

For younger children, often the main beneficiaries of reading aloud, regular phrases are markers in a world they are still trying to understand. These phrases or set pieces help set up expectations; they show the way that we are expected to react.

On occasions, the phrases also help build a world for the characters: one that, we feel, we could step into, and know how to interact with others.

Sometimes, it’s done through recurring minor characters. The Harry Potter series, for example, has Moaning Myrtle, a ghost first encountered in the girls’ toilets.

Myrtle moves through water, it seems, so it’s not so surprising when she turns up in a later book when Harry is forced to take a longer bath for reasons of solving a mystery.

The expectation is that we will recognise Myrtle, that we will know why she is here, but also why she is well-placed to give Harry a clue.

It’s a useful short-cut for us – and for Harry – and it helps confirm that sense of the wider Potter universe that J.K. Rowling carefully built up.

Recurring phrases, or characters, are probably one of the ways we are drawn into continuing reading through series of books – the promise of a series of comic turns, that improve in impact the more you read.

But illustrators can use them too, when drawing a new book but including recognisable details from another one.

One example of this would be the recurring cat characters in Satoshi Kitamura‘s picture books. (See how many cats you can spot in the link article’s pictures.)

Equally, scroll through the link article’s Sendak illustrations to the one for The Nutcracker (third one down), and see who else you recognise (on the left hand side).

There are equally visual protocols that illustrators enjoy – like Herge drawing himself into Tintin stories (a bit like Hitchcock’s brief walk-on parts in his own films).

For those (like me) who are fond of a catchphrase, and the opportunities to repeat it, recurrence in books is the best kind of deja vu.

It is an invitation to guess the punchline – and to take a step closer to the author (or illustrator) setting up the joke.

And with your liking for them and their books building through each recurrence, who would refuse?

Something else

I started writing another Lit Kid yesterday. In between holding the retching small frame, and the sick bowl, and the towel that got caught before the bowl was found.

I started writing about kids’ books, partly to keep my head when all I could think about was that everything we offered was being thrown back up again.

Writing can do that for you. Bring you onto thinking about something else. Which comes in handy when you have tried bottled water and boiled water and filtered water, and at least one of those with honey stirred in.

And still nothing is staying down.

I can write about it differently tonight. A dash off to the kids’ hospital last night, a new trick for giving rehydration drinks, and suddenly, we turn a corner.

Today, we’re onto stopwatches, keeping up the ‘small amounts very regularly’, and dotting about in between times. Hanging up washing, putting on yet more washing from the previous day’s experiences.

Today, I’m reading in the gaps too, partly to escape from Transformers on DVD, that Daddy found to cheer up the invalid. That stays on longer than regular TV time would suggest, because being in bed for the third day in a row gets tedious.

Finding a hundred ways to restart the topic of “time for the next dose of…”.

Tonight, a few bowls of chicken soup staying down, I’m breathing easier.

I’m hiding in the next room, still jumping up when I hear something that might be a call, and turns out to be a small person’s grunt while turning over, fully engaged with sleep.

Now I can come back to yesterday’s words. I began to write a new post about themes of illness in children’s books; discovered that rising panic meant I needed to stop writing and act.

Tonight, I need a breather from all that. To write about something else. Except, of course, that the writing tonight is also an opportunity to recover, from last night and the day or so before.

Sometimes, the writing is imparting something. Sometimes, it is sharing a point of view.

It could be a stiff drink, or a further attack on the chocolate supply. In one’s armoury of defences against fear, sometimes writing is just something else to put on.

And in doing so, I can feel safe to drop my guard again.

(Something Else is also a rather lovely children’s book, that will get its own attention, at some future point. There was also a picture book connection, you see.)

Retirement starts here

A thought struck me today: and I’m going to have a go here at thinking it through.

I’m thinking about that later life phase: those (hopefully) special times when we are free of responsibilities (or freer, at least); when availability of time is not an issue.

What do people think about doing in retirement? Travel is high up the list. But so is doing whatever we want – having quiet days, having stay-up-all-night days, however the fancy takes us.

We might want to take up new hobbies – or reengage with old favourites. We might long to enjoy beauty more, whether through going to galleries, painting our own pictures, or looking up at the sky more.

It might be about music, it might be about reading, it might be about other creative pursuits.

It might be about the people we spend time with: whether special friends, family members, people who live further away from us, whom we might normally not get to see.

We’re supposedly hoping for more time, more spare cash to do these things – but they may equally be the free or low-cost delights. The park bench in the sunshine. The cafe and the good book, as long as our fancy takes us.

So here’s the question. Why do we wait until retirement to embrace these things?

—

When we’re in our childhood or teens, we’re encouraged to try new things. To develop interests, deepen them.

Why is it that we stop doing that as we get older? Why does productivity have to take over?

I’m not assuming that I can get by purely on big ideas and shafts of sunshine. I know that there’s some earning of money that goes on, and I’ve done my fair share of that.

Then I took on the job without pay, for all the hours God sends (otherwise known as parenthood). If I’d forgotten how to have time for myself when I was working full time, it took on a whole new dimension as a mum.

For those who are reading who are parents, I don’t need to elaborate. Sometimes, it takes extremes to help you identify what you need for yourself.

You choose time for yourself – any spare minutes – because you see the difference it makes to everything you do.

—

Little by little, I got better about having time for me. I even started last year with a set of ‘wants’ for my birthday list which were all to do with hobbies and interests: tune the piano, use opportunities to speak German again, and so on.

Not all of that happened, by any means. But by the end of last year, I had to come to agree to writing being an essential for me, rather than an option for when I had done enough on my-to do list to be allowed some free time.

(I’ve never done enough on my to-do list. That’s partly realism, and that’s partly being a recovering perfectionist. So it had to stop being about ‘enough’.)

A few years back, some friends of ours had a tagline to their emails that went like this (quotation by Mark Twain):

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

I liked it, I even tore it off one email and kept it in the back of my diary. I would look at it now and then and hope.

—

A new decade is round the corner for me. And twenty years on from that, I can start to think about retirement. So do I want to keep those joys of life until then?

We may save for retirement, but do we save our opportunities for then too? Or do we start spending them now?

I don’t think I can wait until retirement to listen to great music, read great books, maybe write some of my own. I may have to wait a bit for some of the travel I’d love to do, but I don’t want to give up on it.

I may find that the art I still want to see means more to me because I have to negotiate that time to do so, more than in my twenties and early thirties.

So. The only way I can see to do this is to begin now. As much of it as I can squeeze in, between food shops and school runs, work commitments and family responsibilities.

Call it a late New Year’s Resolution, perhaps. Retirement starts here.

 

Archiving

Call it spring cleaning. Call it that desire that sets in, with the arrival of the new year, to sweep clean. (Or perhaps just to find homes for the new items that Christmas has brought.)

Last year was all about moving items from room to room, as our building project was in full swing. A few months on, I’m starting up again.

It’s an interesting thing, creating a room in a new way. You plan for it and then – you live in it. You find out what works, what doesn’t.

So you move things round a bit more. Somehow hoping for the perfect alignment of items and accessibility.

It never completely happens.

This time, though, I am being brave. I am reducing my study notes. We are back to having an archive section where we’ll keep things we don’t need to get to so often – and the study notes are going in there.

When you like studying (as I do), it’s easy to amass a lot of notes. To see them all as very important. You’ve worked hard; the notes are a proof of that.

But this time round, somehow or other, twenty years have gone by since the university notes began. More, for school notes (and yes, I have exercise books from secondary school, and a couple of projects from primary school and…yes, I know I need to stop keeping quite so much).

It is becoming easier to decide what to think about these pieces of paper. They are partly who I came to be and they are partly who I used to be, and am not necessarily any longer.

When you like studying (as I do), it becomes part of your identity. You see how your life moved into through new phases, partly through the flicking through of another folder of notes.

Of course you changed. You took a different course. You learned a different language.
You had to use systems on particular computers to help you carry out particular tasks.

Now I look at them, and try to work out what is reasonable to keep. Some people throw away all their university notes if they haven’t looked at them in [ X ] years. I haven’t quite got to that point.

A couple of years back, I did part with some notes. A course where I knew that things were bound to have moved on a lot. (Bye bye, computational linguistics.)

Another couple, where I struggled to understand the material. Reasonable to assume I might well struggle a bit more now – or, perhaps, that I had learned to live without it, and was doing just fine.

This time round, I have more of an idea of what to keep.
The final essays, yes. The culmination of work, rather than all the build up.

It also brings me to see how much information keeping has changed, in what is a relatively short time. In my first year at university, science students were allowed email – arts students were not. (Shocking!)

In the second year, we were all onto email. Soon after, all work submitted had to be typed. And so on.

Now I can look over some paper and think: I could probably find that online now. And then some. (Bye bye, series of newspaper articles on the fall of the Berlin Wall.)

The newly created pile of scrap paper is probably going to keep us until Junior Reader is in university – or whatever comes at that point.

But meanwhile, as I sift, turn pages, reject some, keep others – I am archiving my awareness of my own recent past. One that has used and learned from notes on paper, one that wrote and wrote and wrote by hand.

In the dim recesses of only twenty years ago, where so few people had their own computers for study: could I have anticipated even a fraction of what would come?

My words, from twenty years ago or more, they can be corralled. They can be parted with, too, if I want.

But these words in type, on screen – how many of those have there been?

How would I ever begin to draw them all together, decide which to keep, which to send out to pasture?

Inching my way

No, it’s not an advert for weigh loss at the start of the year. Nor is it stepping, gingerly, through ice and snow (my thoughts are with those in the US during freezing conditions).

I’ve been a jogger (of sorts) for the last year and a bit. It’s to do with writing. Setting out for my daily route, following a path for a month, seeing what I notice along the way.

Every now and then, I’d grind to a halt. Then, after a bit, the urge to run (in print) would come over me again, and I’d start once more.

This year, I’m stepping off the regular route of monthly themes. I know some of where I’m going – and I’m looking forward to some mental stretching with writing more seriously about children’s literature.

But for the rest? So far, less sure what it looks like.

—

My route to school pick up is often my thinking time for writing. Some months, I’ve walked and snaffled a moment or two along the way, where the circumstances presented themselves.

Right now, I set out and walk. I hope for some inspiration. I know I have chosen to give myself more space – by which I mean less pressure to write everyday.

But I still want to write fairly regularly. It’s just identifying what, that is putting me through my paces for now.

Setting a monthly theme has been fun (at least for me, and hopefully for a few of you too). You’ve got your route, you know where to go.

Every now and then you change route – and see things a bit differently. But you are still on the writing treadmill, as it were. More churn than burn.

—

Writing every day is not a bad thing. It can be really good. But I’m unsure how to run, how to breathe, in this new season of writing.

It’s not jogging, it’s definitely not sprinting. I have more time to think about what to write – but also less certainty about will make it in.

(I should add that this uncertainty is about the other two posts per week. Lit Kid ideas are flowing – but it also feels right to keep them to once a week.)

You see, part of the point of writing on the blog less frequently is to make me focus on some more creative writing for myself. And for that, I’m not quite sure where I’m going either.

What feels right, for now, is very small steps. A great deal of going with gut instinct. A desire to increase the number of chunks of creative writing (whether they are ‘stories’ or just notes).

At the same time, there’s a real avoidance of ‘shoulds’. I think this is a good thing, but for a reformed perfectionist, it is quite challenging to keep at it.

—

So I am sticking to an ‘inchworm‘ approach for now:

“Inchworm, inchworm,

Measuring the marigolds,

You and your arithmetic will probably go far…”

Inchworms don’t run round the block. They don’t plan half-marathons (as far as I know).

But they are able to move – and they do. And little by little, they get to where they are going to – even if they can’t see it when they start.

That feels as apt as anything for this year’s writing journey, right now.