Guest Blogger Maureen Lynas: Writerly Incompetence Can Be Cured

Part One of a Series
Read Part Two - If You're Incompetent and You Know It Clap Your Hands

Maureen Lynas is an ex-teacher and literacy consultant who believes that with a bit more work and a load more willpower, resolve, fortitude, doggedness, tenacity, persistence, diligence, grit and determination, she will eventually win a publishing deal for Boggarty Bog’s Tasty Teeth. Or Kissy Wissy. Or Hatty’s Splendiferous Hats. Or one of the many other stories in her ‘finished’ folder.

Maureen is currently feeding her writing obsession by associating with members of SCBWI British Isles and has taken on the role of North East Regional Advisor. You can see Maureen’s reading scheme at the Action Words website 

Incompetent – moi? No!

Tick if you have ever done any of the following:

 Slumped in an emotional heap crying, ‘Do I really have to know the difference between an idiom and an idiolect – what sort of an idiot would think that was reasonable?’

Or

 Thrown the laptop with frustration - or wanted to, but thrown a cushion instead. Laptops don’t bounce.

Or

 Chosen to show your nearest and dearest exactly why they shouldn’t have said, ‘Yes, but what’s his motivation?’ Instead of merely telling him.

Do not despair if you have ticked any boxes.

You are merely suffering from incompetence. It can be cured.

The first step is to identify exactly how incompetent you are and from then on you must be treated with care.

There are four stages of incompetence, no matter what the subject or activity. But as we are all authors I thought I’d focus on writing, if anyone wants to contact me on how to be a brain surgeon then – you need to have your head examined.

Cartoon copyright Mike Luckovich from Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Stage One is Unconscious Incompetence.

Ah, bliss. A wonderful stage to be in. We do not know what it is that we do not know.

You could say we are delusional at this stage because we actually say things like – I have an idea! For a book! Wow, I’m going to write a book! I’ll be rich. I’ve read lots of books therefore I can write a book. I used to write a lot a school and it was good. I’ll be rich. I can use a pen. I have paper. I’ll be rich. I can use Word. I’ll type it. I’ll be rich. And it shall be a great book, and it shall wow the world with its uniqueness. AND I’LL BE RICH! After all, how hard can it be? It’s not brain surgery, is it?



Poor us. We have no idea. No idea of what is involved in the process of writing a book, how to approach a publisher, or what a writer’s life consists of. Ignorance is bliss! But not for long.

At his stage we also do things that demonstrate our ignorance.

We write the book. It may take as long as a couple of months (Phew! That was hard!), or if we write quickly (picture books are short) a night.

We stick a pin in a list of publishers and cry – He’ll do!

We kiss the book, printed off in Gigi (such a pretty font), single-spaced with COPYRIGHT 2010 on every page, and send it off to the publisher recommended by a friend who’s had a book published called History of the Railways 1898-1899 Vol 1.

And we wait.

And we wait.

And we wait.

Then we cry. Literally. Then we cry a different cry of – ‘Why!!!! Why have they rejected me! Why do they not love my book?’

I shudder when I recall myself at this stage. I want to curl up and die when I remember the first submission letter I sent out. Forty pages long. No, that’s an exaggeration for comic effect; it’s just grown that big in my head over the years. But it was about six pages. I even seem to remember, and how I wish this was not true, I even seem to remember calculating (with an actual calculator) how many picture books I’d read over the years as a reception teacher, and quoting this number as evidence that I knew my subject and was an author worth publishing. They were so kind, they did reply. It was a no. But it was a very supportive no. However, I was too busy crying the, ‘Why!!!!’ cry that I didn’t recognise it as supportive for many years.

Maureen cuddling up to the
lovely David Almond,
author of Skellig

This stage is the beginning of the writer’s journey. The idea has been planted. We begin to write a book not realising that we have started on an exploration of what it is to be a writer of many books, not an author of one book.

The next stage is a little bit more complex and will require another article.

Coming to you soon.

Help, I’m Consciously Incompetent!

Read Part Two of this series - If You're Incompetent and You Know It Clap Your Hands



Maureen Lynas also blogs on her own blog which she creatively named - Maureen Lynas

Fight for Our Libraries

Tweet to Save Libraries on this Hashtag #CFTB

My school library rescued me. It gave me companionship at a lonely time in my life. And it transformed my future.

Reading the dismissive comments left by readers on Catherine Bennett's piece about library closures in the Guardian made me sick to my stomach.

There is another discussion to be had about how libraries should change because times certainly are a-changing. But close them down? "They might as well start book burning," writes Bryony Pearce, author of Incarnation.

If you care about libraries, join The Campaign for the Book founded and led by author Alan Gibbons.

If you blog, blog about libraries. Make a fuss. Name names. Here are a few:

Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP - Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport
John Penrose MP - Minister for Tourism and Heritage
Hugh Robertson MP - Minister for Sport and the Olympics
Ed Vaizey MP - Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries (joint Minister with Department of Business, Innovation and Skills)

Highlight these names, mention them in your blog posts. These people have the power to change things and they should know it. Their Google Alerts on their names will be crammed with our anger.

Already, the blogosphere is buzzing:

Lucy Coats decries culture minister Ed Vaizey's fair weather support for libraries. "Where is his passion for libraries now?" she asks on her blog Scribble City Central. (I have enlarged Mr. Vaizey's name so that he knows we are laying a lot of this at his feet)

Thanks to Tracy Baines who reposted my piece on the Tall Tales and Short Stories blog.

And Philip Ardagh, author of the Grubtown Tales, who started out being funny and ended with an impassioned plea.:

LIBRARIES MATTER. HELPING TO STOP LIBRARY CLOSURES MATTERS. As for Mr Spock with a goatee beard? That has something to do with ANTIMATTER, but there's no room for that here. We all have to act NOW before it's too late, so what are you waiting for? He also posted this on Facebook and got amazing comments

Here's Nick Cross from Who Ate My Brain, who despite admitting that he doesn't get to his library much, says:

I don't know what the answer is to saving our libraries. But I do know that they are a vital public service and we need to make a hell of a lot of noise about their potential demise. Read the whole essay

And Jon Mayhew, author of Mortlock:

... if it weren't for this humble building, its contents and staff, I wouldn't be a writer now. Next year 250 libraries are set to close.

Don't let them close your library down. Read Jon's piece

And Nicky Schmidt, who lives in South Africa, contributed this on the Absolute Vanilla blog:

...  It strikes me as the most short-sighted move imaginable. It strikes me doubly, living in a place where libraries are in short supply and books are not a priority for children because they're too expensive. The UK has something we do not. It has a cultural love of books and it has produced some of the most remarkable storytellers and fiction writers in the world. It has something which has shaped the both the British and Commonwealth cultural landscape and continues to do so. The UK has, through its library system, something so precious to give its young people, something we do not have. It has a culture of reading, where we do not. UK libraries serve the entire populace, we have considerably fewer libraries and ours serve only a minority. So when I read that the UK is planning on cutting its libraries, I want to smack my forehead, bang several heads together and ask if the UK government has taken leave of its senses. Read Nicky's post (I so get where Nicky is coming from - In my native Philippines where libraries are an unaffordable luxury, people would be shocked at how casually the UK government can throw away something the rest of the world can only dream of) 

And Philippa Francis on the KM Lockwood Blog, wrote an open letter to people like Ed Vaizey who can actually influence policy - warning them that NOT doing anything about library closures shows that  ...

• you don’t care about children who have no books at home, in fact, you don’t care about anyone who has no other access to books
• you think the excitement and specialness of entering a physical world of ideas isn’t important for lots of children or adults
• you want children to see reading as only something you do to fill in worksheets at school Read Philippa's letter

Keren David, YA author, blogged this brilliant piece (which is almost a poem) about Who Uses Libraries

And Kathryn Evans wrote about Why You Should Care About Libraries

And Nina Killham was enraged when someone told her libraries were old fashioned.

Keep blogging, keep shouting. 

Sometimes it's the only way to make people listen.

Bye Bye Libraries. Bye Bye Civilization.

That's the gist of Catherine Bennett's piece for the Guardian, listing all the closures expected in the coming government cost-cutting exercise.

THINK! Kill a library and live with the consequences.

Anyone who loves reading (or writing) will want to bang their heads on the wall if they read the comments below the piece, such as this one from someone calling themselves Taxpayer555:

Close all public libraries ASAP . University and schools already have library. With the internet and ebook readers, ipads, cheap second hand books online and in charity shops, their is no need for libraries. Libraries are nothing more than glorified internet cafes and DVD rental shops. You have to move with the times, Whether librarians like it or not. Shut them all down and use the money for something more useful.

Somewhere down below all the trolls was a comment from Michael Rosen, our Children's Laureate for 2007 to 2009. And I thought it would be a public service to highlight it here.


Readers, if you care and if you blog, or have an online profile, please repost this!

I hope Margaret Hodge, Ed Vaizey, Ed Balls, and Vernon Cloaker have google alerts on their names so that they can read this and blush (I enlarge your names in case you're as short-sighted as your policies). Shame on you.

Here is Michael Rosen's comment:

Michael Rosen

Books have become optional extras in schools. They've been sidelined by ITC and worksheets. There is now a generation of young teachers who have been through teacher training with no more than a few minutes of training in children's literature and little or no work on why it's important for all children to read widely and often and for pleasure.

So, what we have is the notion that there isn't time to read whole books, there isn't time to help all children browse and read and keep reading - but there is time to do worksheets on different aspects of 'literacy'. And yet, the people running education know full well that children who read widely and often and for pleasure find it much easier to grasp the curriculum as a whole. There is an international study showing this.

What does this have to do with libraries? If the government (or the last one) had felt willing, all they needed to do was formalise the link between schools and libraries. They could have required every school and every library to lay down some fixed, timetabled sharing of time and resources, which would involve turning the present voluntary arrangements into certain ones. In one fell swoop it would guarantee library-use and massively enhance the children's progress.

I put all this in a document in Margaret Hodge's library review where it was immediately ignored. I sent it to Ed Vaizey (because he asked me to), and he too has promptly ignored it.

Ed Balls and Vernon Coaker both refused to ask schools to develop their own policies on the provision and reading of books. Neither Ofsted nor schools' 'Self Assessment forms' require schools to make the provision and reading of whole books something that they monitor.

In short, education and library ministers aren't really very interested in the idea of everyone reading whole books, and they're certainly not very interested in the idea of every child reading whole books. I even gave them a 20-point blueprint or outline on how to turn every school into what I called a 'book-loving school' (based largely on the TV programme I did 'Just Read'. And that' blueprint is now available on various websites. The ministers I met weren't interested in sending it out, either as it is, or in any adapted form.

It's clear that they think 'reading' is about 'doing literacy' ie learning how to 'decode' print. What they don't seem to understand is that literature is one of the main ways in which we can engage with difficult and important ideas in an accessible way. It offers children a ladder between their own personal experience, the apparently 'personal' experience of the protagonists in any given text, and the ideas that are thrown up during the adventures, scenes and feelings that the protagonists go through. So, the reader encounters the protagonists' feelings of, say, pity, anger, fear, guilt, envy and the like but in a school context (or indeed many social contexts) those feelings become talk about those feelings as ideas...eg what is 'pity'? what is 'guilt'? ie through reading, the young reader starts to generalise the particular or put another way, discover abstract thought.

Children who read widely, often and for pleasure are the ones who can make the transition between particular experience to abstract thought that all education asks of children between the ages of 8 and 13. The more you read, the easier that transition is. The kids who fall behind don't fall behind because they haven't done enough worksheets. It's because the education curricula haven't helped them discover a wide range of texts through being regular readers.

Michael Rosen's message:
It's about READING, stupid (not 'doing literacy).

Thanks to Teri for the heads up