Reading, writing and originality...

May 15, 2023

This one will be a ramble of thought… 

Writing demands reading and oddly one of the limitations I used to have as an English teacher was finding time to read after all the preparation, delivery, marking etc. That’s not a teacher whinge – simply a fact that I struggled to want to read after spending so much time ‘reading’ the same texts over and over for teaching ideas and personal knowledge, and ‘drafting and assessing’ hundreds of student responses.  

​I remember a colleague’s comment at a SSABSA assessment session using an exemplar student paper reviewing Courtney’s The Power of One to determine our marking standards. ‘(Expletive deleted), I am sick of kids using this text and not finding something fresh to use. How many times do we have to read this one?’ Someone reminded the colleague that it might be her thousandth time marking student papers using The Power of One, but it was almost certainly the student’s first time engaging with it, and so for the student it was extremely fresh. For us, it was droll, but for the student it was eye-opening. The same is true with so many ‘repeatedly popular’ pieces of literature used in classrooms. 

Another fascinating moment was at a conference several years ago, when a university student remarked to me that he loved the Paolini dragon novels and had just discovered another writer named Feist. He was enjoying Feist’s writing but felt it was not fresh because Paolini and others had written similar work. What the student failed to realise that Raymond Feist was the original (in this case), not his preferred writers. Context and experience when reading is extremely important. 
 
Last year I re-read a book that had a huge impact on me at 13: Dumas’ The Three Musketeers. It was a hard slog and, frankly, I have no idea how I read that book back then – the language and style is so foreign, because of time and context. And yet that book and memory dictated – still influences – my story and character construction, so 13-year-old me had an experience 67-year-old me didn’t have. 
 
My current fantasy project will be the fifth fantasy series I’ve written, representing 17 novels in the genre. Tackling the project is challenging in a very different way than earlier projects because the person and writer now has experiences and perspective that are significantly different to those of the person who started writing Guardians way back in 1988. The challenges now are to bring freshness to a familiar genre much like I had to create freshness to specific English lessons that I had taught twenty of thirty times before.  
 
While the frequent stereotypical fantasy overview remains the struggle of good to overcome evil against seemingly impossible odds, the freshness can come from the characters and their idiosyncrasies, the parameters of their ‘world’, and greyness around what constitutes good and what is perceived as evil. Andra in the Andrakis series is fundamentally a clearly a good character, and Mareg the dragonlord clearly not nice, but A Ahmud Ki set the tone for blurring good and evil – sure, he pursued self-power to become what Mareg was, but he had a degree of ‘humanity’ that could have redeemed him, much like Shakespeare’s Macbeth on whom A Ahmud Ki was partly modelled.  
 
And so it will be with several characters in the current project – flawed individuals with the capacity to be good or not so good, according to circumstance and need. Food for thought...