Hello again, Medina Hill

Once upon a time  when I lived in Brussels, I met and made friends with a young Canadian (and South African, and British – no one you meet in Brussels is ever from just one country) writer called Trilby Kent. We were a couple of pieces of  literary driftwood that had happened to wash up in the same city, we were both writing children’s fiction, and so we naturally read and critiqued each other’s work. One of her stories was called Medina Hill – a wonderfully written tale, set in the 1930s, about a boy who’s tongue-tied with shyness, but manages to speak out, finally, not for himself but on behalf of others. Mixed in with all this is a great period adventure story – think Cornwall, cream teas, a medium called Birdie and a homing pigeon on the moors – that revolves around T.E. Lawrence. What’s not to like?

I was hugely excited to find out that Medina Hill was going to be published in Canada (in an extremely smart hard-cover edition: respect to the designer), and instantly put myself on the list for a review copy and to take part in Trilby’s blog tour. Above all, I was fascinated to see a novel that I’d known as a sheaf of typed A4 with scribbles in the margin transformed into a ‘real’ book: that’s to say, one that will sit on shelves in bookshops, and be browsed, and picked up, and put down, or bought, borrowed from libraries, read in the bath, book-crossed, kept on a shelf, recalled in later life,  on an equal footing with everything from War and Peace to Being Jordan. Simply re-reading it was a special pleasure:  a bit like meeting someone I’d known as a child, years later, as an adult, and thinking ‘Oh, so that’s how you’ve turned out!” I’m glad to report I like Medina Hill just as much now it is grown up.

I’ve reviewed the novel in full for Writeaway, so I won’t post that here. Instead, here’s a

Conversation with Trilby Kent

Moi: I am intrigued to know about the book’s journey since I read that early draft back in Brussels . What changes has it undergone? The only major one that I have noticed, is that in the original draft, Dominic finds a manuscript that Lawrence wanted to suppress, in the biscuit tin. Now it’s something else – an object. Without wanting to give the plot away, can you tell us how this change came about, what the reasoning was behind it and what difference you think it makes to the book? I think it is a change for the better, personally.

TK: You’re right: that was by far the most significant change. There were a few others, designed to strengthen continuity and believability (I don’t want to give too much away here!), but these were relatively minor.

When the book was first signed, Kathy Lowinger told me that one of the things she liked best about Medina Hill was the fact that it asks quite a lot of its readers. It asks kids who have grown up with Wii and Twitter to dwell in another time and place when attitudes to heroes and heroism were in many ways very different to our own. It asks them to empathize with adult characters and with a historical figure who isn’t terribly well known to many young people today. The twist involving the lost manuscript was, however, a step too far – it felt too removed from Dominic’s story. So we decided to do away with the post-war politics and try for a simpler resolution that could also involve Sancha. I think that the revised ending works much better, given this context – and I’m very glad to hear that you think so, too!

That’s fascinating that your editor said she liked the book because it asked a lot of its readers! Here in the UK we are always hearing complaints about children’s literature being dumbed down, that editors only want books that are the same old. Are there similar issues in Canada ?

My guess is that children’s literature in Canada is subject to the same market forces as the UK and the US – so of course, if you walk into a major bookstore, you’ll find plenty of teen vampire novels and brand characters. That said, Canada has a fantastic culture of specialist children’s bookshops (in Toronto, places such as Mabel’s Fables and The Flying Dragon) as well as a number of really excellent children’s publishers keen to develop new voices and foster an awareness of and pride in Canadian children’s literature. I consider myself very lucky indeed to have found a home with one of them!

And your own journey? You’ve made the leap that thousands dream of – from unpublished to published. How have you changed as a writer, or as a person? Is publication how you thought it would be?

I think it’s made me that much more obsessive about getting things right, and perhaps just a little less impatient (although only a bit!). Once a book is out there, with your name on it, there are no second chances. Medina Hill was written four years ago; although I’m very proud of it, there are things I’d do differently now. That’s normal, of course – as a writer, you always want your next project to be better than your last.

I don’t think I’d realised quite how much waiting being published involves – flurries of activity separated by long periods of, well, not much happening (as a writer, you only learn about all the hard work that’s been going on “behind the scenes” later in the process!)

Like they say about war: short periods of excitement punctuated by long periods of boredom.

Exactly! The excitement is spread out over a year or two: a cheque will arrive, or an email from publicity, or page proofs. I think the most exciting moment, apart from seeing the finished product, was receiving a .pdf of the cover design. That was when it all started to feel “real”.

It is a particularly brilliant cover!

How do you mean, getting things right? I would have thought it would have made one less perfectionist, because of all the compromising that has to be done in the editing process.

I actually didn’t have to make many compromises with Medina Hill – we had to adopt American spelling and punctuation, and a few plot details were changed here and there (all to the good!), but the book you see today is essentially the book I wrote four years ago. It can be quite difficult, after all that time, to see one’s own work objectively. Although a certain sentence may pass muster with an editor – it’s grammatical; it make sense within a wider context; it has a nice metaphor or a pleasing turn of phrase – there’s a good chance that I’ll still want to change it further down the line. There’s a difference between knowing you can live with something (because you’re used to it being that way and people generally agree that it’s good), and being really proud of something (because you’ve sweated blood over it to make it the very best it can be). I’d love to get to the stage where a book of mine was published and I wouldn’t change a single sentence…although I realise that’s monumentally unlikely!

What, in fact, is your next project? I know you have an adult novel in the pipeline; are you moving in that direction, or do you think you’ll write more children’s novels? And how about short stories?

My very lovely agent is submitting the adult novel as we speak. In the meantime, I’ve finished up a second children’s novel, which is sitting with my editors at Tundra. It’s quite different from Medina Hill, although it’s also historical fiction. I do have an idea for a third children’s book – quite an ambitious project – although it may be a while before I get to write it. Over the next three years I’ll be working on a PhD, for which I’m going to need to produce another (adult) novel. If there’s time, I’m also really keen to try my hand at a children’s opera, and a few more short stories.

I hope I’ll always be able to write for adults and children. I don’t actually think there’s such a huge difference between the two, to be honest. You have to take one or two things into special consideration when you’re writing for younger readers, but the aim is pretty much the same: to tell a good story, and to tell it well.

Why did you choose to write about T.E. Lawrence?  I think he’s a fascinating character, but not someone who is often chosen as a subject for children’s books. What drew you to him?

I think the last children’s book about T.E. Lawrence was probably Lowell Thomas’ The Boy’s Life of Colonel Lawrence, which was written in 1927! So yes, not an obvious choice. Like most people, my introduction to Lawrence was seeing David Lean’s epic 1962 film. That led to an interest that lasted through my last few years in high school; since then, he’s somehow always been “there”. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I used to pass 2 Polstead Road, where Lawrence lived as a boy, on my morning run. Later, I lived in Dorset for two years – just a short drive from Cloud’s Hill and the spot where he was involved in a fatal motorcycle accident.

I’ve read a few of your novels now, and what strikes me in each one is how vividly the places and people come to life. The details of people’s appearances, of places, are wonderfully realized. How do you manage that? I think you said you don’t keep a notebook of details. Do you use ‘props’, for example, photos or postcards to give you ideas? Do you do a lot of preliminary word sketching?

That’s very kind of you! I haven’t thought about this much, to be honest – I think I tend to write about places and landscapes that I love, which makes it a bit easier. I love the “otherness” of Cornwall, for instance, and the stark beauty of the Transvaal, where my next book is set. The one exception – another draft you’ve read, which is currently sitting in a drawer until I can bring myself to face the rewrite – is set in Russia, where I’ve never been. But even then, coming from Canada, I’m no stranger to snow!

I do keep a notebook of details, although these tend to relate much more to character and plot; place somehow slides in to the spaces between these. It doesn’t seem to take as much advance planning because it is so much a part of the characters themselves, if you see what I mean. I also have a wire running along one wall in my study where I attach photos, postcards, etc. with little clothes pegs – a kind of inspiration washing line! At the moment it includes a Helga Kohl photograph of a Namibian ghost town; a sepia nineteenth-century photograph of a street in Calcutta; and a pencil sketch of a Canadian prairie homestead.

Do you already have ideas about what you’ll make of these images?

Yes – but I’m not telling!

How do you approach each new novel? Do you make notes first, or just get stuck into writing? I’ve met a couple of authors who say they spent up to a year planning a novel before writing it. I’ve never done that, but I wonder if it might be good to try. Is it something you do?

I’m a planner. In fact (*whispers*) I often enjoy planning a new novel even more than the writing. I love the way that research so often seems to suggest plot twists and possibilities that I never would have considered otherwise. For each project, I keep a notebook. Every time I read something that gives me an idea, or I hit upon a character that I want to explore, or a few lines of dialogue that I’d like to play with, I jot it down. One day, I’ll sit down with my notes and have a good old indulgent read-through – all the time asking, where’s the story? By that point, the story’s already there, waiting to be pieced together, and I’m ready to write.

I’m the total opposite – I just plunge into the writing. I think it would be good for me to try your way, though. It’s good to shake up one’s writing habits now and then.

Oh, I agree. I’m actually really tempted to try to draft the next book in longhand (usually I work on computer). And I do think that your technique of plunging right in has lots to recommend it; such momentum can be a real boon. It really does depend on the project. I only spent about two weeks planning Medina Hill, whereas with my first novel for adults, I spent a good year making notes, on and off, before I felt confident enough to begin writing – although a lot of that planning was structural.

We met online initially, on a writing community called Writewords. We were having an interesting conversation the other day, in the flesh, about second lives, the way people construct – not always knowingly – personas for the net. I wonder if this is like creating a narrator for a novel. You’ve also lived in many different countries. I wonder if when one moves between different countries, different cultures, one takes on a different persona in each one (even if the difference is subtle). Does this feed writing, do you think, because one becomes used to slipping skins, or does it perhaps hamper it, because one never has a stable ground to write from?

It’s nice to be able to defy easy categorization. I’m Canadian born, but I have yet to write a book about Canada ; I hold a British passport, but I make a rubbish cup of tea. Now there’s an enigma!

I think moving around helps, for the most part. I’m a strong believer in the advantages to being an outsider, because it means getting to know yourself. I’ve loved travelling in places like India and Turkey, as well as my time in Belgium – the only place I’ve lived, so far, where English wasn’t the predominant language – because I’d be far more conscious of engaging with the world around me; even the most mundane activities would become part of a sharpened experience. It wasn’t so much a matter of changing persona as doing away with persona altogether, and just observing. I think it’s very easy to take things for granted if you live somewhere that’s so familiar it almost becomes invisible to you.

I agree. Do you think you will ever write about Brussels ?

The novel that’s going through submissions right now is set partly in Mechelen, and there are quite a few details (architectural, culinary, etc.) that are drawn directly from my experiences in Belgium – in the capital and elsewhere.

Brussels doesn’t flaunt its charms in the way that, say, Paris does – it holds a lot back. But I love that sense of mystery, its strange poignancy. Brussels is filled with ghosts: not just the colourful characters from its rich medieval history, but also from the twentieth-century wars that took such a toll on the Belgian psyche. All that aside, I felt a particular affinity with the Flemish towns we got to know – several of my mother’s ancestors hearkened from Ghent – so I certainly wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a book that revisits some of those places!

Fieldwork

When I was doing my MA in Writing, I got a lot out of the exercises that were set, but often they don’t work for children’s writing. They tend to be geared towards short pieces of writing, and experimental, literary prose. So I’ve adapted one exercise from The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing (a book I highly recommend, for any writer). The Fieldwork exercise asks you to go for a walk with your notebook (I got myself one) and ‘collect data’: two real overheard conversations, three species of birds, the wors from six signs, the name of one planet or star, the names of three items in a hardware store, a make of gun, etc. etc. Finally, to take a phrase at random from a newspaper and use it as the title of the new piece of writing. You have to then write a story or poem of no more than 500 words, incorportating all your data.

I’ve done this exercise on the Masters and I know it works: you come out with exciting writing, new ideas and a refreshed writing brain. I don’t think it’s geared towards producing a piece of writing for children, though. Maybe it can work for that, but for now I decided to give it a tweak to make it more children literature friendly. My self-appointed Fieldwork task is therefore to go forth with notebook and find:

One place I’ve never been before (this is to encourage me to be more adventurous and discover new places to write about)

Three names (we are in Belgium, so there is no shortage of interesting names about)

Two numbers

One snippet of overheard conversation

One photograph or image (I’m taking the camera)

One time of day, and/ or date

The names of two objects

Two maps

One newspaper or magazine clipping.

I will then attempt to turn this data into a piece of writng, or a story synopsis.

I want a routine

I want a notebook. I want routine. Routine is a hard thing to achieve when your life involves, at the least, two ‘home’ countries between which you split your time. Actually, it’s mostly been three countries to date. But one had to go and so we’re moving at the end of the month.

As for a notebook, I’ve rarely been able to keep one. Oh, I do have rough books, writing books. But I can hardly read my own handwriting in them, and there’s nowhere to stick the interesting newspaper cuttings that are sitting in my in-tray. I want a proper scrap-book notebook, where I write observations about the world, and glue things. But that means a hard cover for protection, and quite a big one, and then that’s less portable. It’s not simple!

But I know I need a notebook and I need a routine. I just need the sort of notebook and routine which can transfer between countries at the drop of a hat.

I’ll have to think about it.

Proper work

There’s a strange luxurious pleasure about putting off writing. A bit like leaving the tastiest part of a meal to the end.  Today I have been metaphorically pushing writing around my plate, looking at it, playing with it, tasting it, but always going off to do the dull, necessary things (like the washing) first.

That’s the good side of it, but there’s also the negative flip, the self-demeaning “Writing is just fun. You don’t have to prioritise that.” Funny how nothing, not getting published, not getting paid for it, validates writing entirely. There’s always proper work to be done. And dusted.

An entirely personal response to an important topic

I saw this report – very well worth reading – about Tamarind Books’ founder, Verna Wilkins, who has received the 2008  Diversity Award from the British Book Industry Association. You can read the report to find out the background, but essentially Verna founded Tamarind Books 20 years ago to publish books to remedy the general lack of ethnic minority characters in British children’s literature.  Reading her words made me think again about a fact which is never far from my mind: although I’m half Asian, half British, all my main characters are plain white.

Why is this? I ask myself. Why don’t I write characters who are like me? Why? Why? And there’s no point saying ‘they are like you, they reflect aspects of your character, what does their ethnicity matter?’ It does matter and it’s very important. Being colour-blind is something that only white people think is easy.

I know it’s important for children to read books that feature children who are like them. I know because I remember how as a child I was drawn to The Jungle Book because it featured a child who was Indian. I know how excited I was when I found my first ever book featuring a modern Asian child – My Mate Shofiq – and how disappointed I was when it turned out to be all about the usual things Asian children can expect in books: bullying and racsim. What Verna Wilkins says about books featuring non-white children being all about issues rings so true. (And when she says books featuring non-white children were  ‘painfully few’ she’s right again – it is painful to realise you are invisible in the book world you love).

In the books I read while growing up, being non-white was treated – well-meaningly, of course, and I do appreciate that these books were good and important in their way -  as an issue, just like drug-taking or poverty.  It  led to Problems.  White children could cavort happily in magical lands, through wardrobes and under lamp-posts, down rabbit-holes and across secret islands, without worrying that anyone would call them names based on the colour of their skin, or bar their parents from jobs, or refuse them entry to clubs, or simply let them know, without need even for speech,  that they were, intrinsically, at an atomic level, Wrong.

Asian children in books, meanwhile, had to trudge morosely around council estates, waiting for skin-heads to call them Paki. This was not the stuff my semi-Asian dreams were made of. What I wanted to read about back then was Mohammed runs away to sea, Fahim on Kirrin Island, Halima’s pet dragon.

So now that I have the chance, now that I know I can write children’s books and with any luck get them published, why don’t I write  main characters who are Asian, or British-Asian, or mixed-race, or mixed-culture? Why don’t I write Fatima in Wonderland? It upsets me, this question, because I feel I am failing the children like me who need to see themselves portrayed as normal in books.

Here, with no attempt at order or logic, at priorities, with no attempt at anything except to honestly set down what enters my mind, are some possible answers:

• Because whenever I think of writing about an Asian or part-Asian character, I feel instantly exhausted – beaten down, hopeless somehow – at the thought of all the things I would have to explain to the reader.

• I couldn’t even begin writing a simple story without explaining what it’s like to not feel normal. I would have to explain the things I know – chapatis, saris, aunties, religion and the lack of it, control, culture, taking off your shoes when you go into a house, parties where the women sit in one room and the men in the other – and I’d have to explain the things I don’t know – Bengali, the Koran, cooking – and why I don’t know them, and before you know it, I’d be writing an issue novel, about how Terribly Difficult it is Not Being White But Not Being Particularly Anything Else Either. Which is exactly what I want to avoid.

• I don’t naturally come up with ideas featuring Asian children. When I think of characters, they tend to be white.  Guess why? Because more than 99.9 % of the books I read as a child featured white main characters.  When Europeans colonised the world, they colonised the world’s imagination too. Just like Verna’s little boy painting his picture pink, I can’t help imagining the heroes in books to be white. Let’s have a look at those titles again: Mohammed runs away to sea, Fahim on Kirrin Island, Halima’s pet dragon. Just  writing these ideas down, there’s something about them that I can’t take seriously. It’s the names. They read as if they’re taken from some worthy reading scheme that  dutifully inserts multi-cultural names into every fifth book, with the aim of meeting a government target on equality . We all know no real children’s book would have a main character called Mohammed – oh, unless he was due to be forced into an arranged marriage, or possibly set up as a suicide bomber.

• After all, I’m 50 % white and 50% not. Can I write a believable 100% Asian character? I’m not sure at all that I can. But I don’t doubt my ability to write a 100% white character. Well, naturally, all my life I’ve lived in a context where white was normal, where it was the white sector that you defered to and tried to fit in with. So of course I’m better at pretending to be white than I am at pretending to be Asian. And I presumably write a more believable white character as a result.

• Who wants to be the stroppy Asian when no-one wants to rock the boat? Publishing in general obviously doesn’t see the problem in the lack of non-white main characters, or if it does, doesn’t care enough to make a fuss. 20 years ago Verna Wilkins started Tamarind Books, and we’re still in the process of ‘redressing the balance in children’s books’.

Go to a large, multi-ethnic British city like Birmingham. Look around you: how many non-white faces do you see? Now go to a big bookshop in the same city. Look along the bookshelves. How many non-Anglo-Saxon names do you find? How many books do you find that feature non-white children? (Consider chapter books too, not just picture books).  While the adult fiction section is ablaze with writing from all around the world,  the children’s section is sort of like Devon. You may even find that books with non-white characters – everything from Noughts and Crosses to books about celebrating Divali -  are shelved together in a well-meaning little ghetto in the corner, under  ‘Multicultural’ or some such. Why aren’t they shelved in with the other, normal books? Is it because not being white is still, in children’s book world, considered a sectionable offence? Do people imagine that children cannot possibly be interested in reading about children of any other skin colour or culture ?  Children are brighter and better than that – or they can be, if we give them the chance to be.

I may or may not achieve anything of worth during my time on this planet, but at the very least, I’m glad of this: that my non-Anglo-Saxon name is on the spine of a few books in the children’s section, doing its tiny, passive bit to redress the imbalance.  I’m glad that if a child with a name like mine wanders into the bookshop and glances along the books , they will find at least one name that will allow them the possibilty of thinking ‘Hey, maybe someone like me could write books like this too’.  Maybe that child will grow up to write books for children. And maybe – let’s hope – he or she won’t feel the complexity and confusion that I feel about putting my face into my books.

a wonderful thing

Even if I’d had a camera, I wouldn’t have caught it. It was one of those things that happen too fast. Parakeets. I’ve posted about them before. They are one of the reasons I love Brussels. They are simple, surreal, beautiful things. I’ve seen them singly, perched lime green on a bare tree in my back yard. I’ve heard them turning a bush to a noisy bird canteen. But today we were walking home from Ixelles through the EU district along Rue de la Science towards Rue Montoyer,  which is a rat run between grey blocky office buildings and parkings. I looked up to see a flash of green pass the end of the road, and disappear along rue Montoyer. It was an arrow-head flock of parakeets, swift as traffic.  They flew silently, at the aproxmate height of a double decker bus.  They were gone long before the time we reached the end of the road. I like to think they were off to deliver a surrealist salute to the Magritte museum, which opens in a few days time.  They’re just the kind of thing he would have painted.

The Triangle of Story Power

I taught some 8 year olds creative writing today. I’m never quite sure how these things have gone. I can see they’re enjoying themselves, they’re definitely writing a story, they’re fired up and eager to go, but did I succeed in helping them to learn anything? Does it matter?

Part of me feels that children don’t need teaching how to write better stories – they should just do it for fun.   But it can’t hurt, can it, to tell them something about the theory of story structure? One thing I was told on the teaching course I followed was, “Don’t be afraid to actually teach them something”.  I think this is wise. Iknow that Iknow so little, I know I can’t write a perfect story,  and I shrink from the idea of saying  ‘This is how you do it’.  Not just in creative writing, but in any aspect of life. Really, who am I to tell anyone what to do? Only that sort of attitude doesn’t get a child educated. It’s one reason why I never became a teacher.

Anyway, this is what I tried to teach them about. The Triangle of Story Power. (Big woo!)

It’s surely irrefutable that all stories need a protagonist (hero), an antagonist (enemy) and a goal (prize), but I like this way of representing the seemingly obvious. A triangle is a strong, balanced shape, and if you keep these three points in mind while writing your story, your story stands a good chance of being strong and balanced too. It also reminds one that these three points are always connected. Lines of story force flow between the hero, the enemy and the prize.

I got the children to think about their favourite books and identify the hero, the enemy and the prize. I pointed out that  the enemy needn’t be an evil person, or a person at all – it can just be someone who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. And that the prize isn’t necessarily an object, but it can be an emotion, a way of feeling about oneself or about the world. And that sometimes the hero and the enemy can be one and the same person – sometimes what stands in the hero’s way is a weaker or darker aspect of himself. That last point seemed to get eyes lighting up and nods. I think I did manage, right then if at no other point, to show them something that they hadn’t considered before, to draw their attention to some hidden truth of story.  That’s enough, I suppose, for one lesson.

Why should children read for pleasure?

I was just thinking the other day, or was it this morning, that Beast Quest ought to get some kind of an award. Last year when I worked in a bookshop I’d see a whole shelf full of Rainbow Fairies books under 5 – 8, and little girls rushing up with their mums to get the latest ones. (It generally is mums). This year working in a bookshop I see another whole shelf packed full of Beast Quest, and little boys rushing in, with their mums, to buy the latest one. Making boys aged 7 to 10 read avidly is no small feat.

But then of course there is the point of view that Beast Quest are ‘trash’, and boys would be better off reading ‘proper books’. I’m not saying this is my point of view, just that there does seem to be that point of view around. ‘Beast Quest,’ adults say with a roll of their eyes, as in ‘gosh, they’re rubbish but hey, he’s reading’. I can see why they might think that. Beast Quest are written by a group of authors under a single name, Adam Blade, something which does tend to lower a book in people’s estimation, as if it’s ‘not a proper book’ if it doesn’t have a ‘proper author’. They have shiny covers. They have collectable cards. The focus is on action and not on emotion.

But it looks as if that’s just what boys want to read. They do tend to be more into action and adventure than thoughtful, family-based, emotional stories. And why should their way of reading be considered ‘rubbish’?

It all seems to come down to the question: why do we want children to read for pleasure, anyway? Literacy is crucial, but why do we prefer them to read for fun rather than play a video game? Both are sedentary activities. Arguably a video game is more creative than reading a book - you actually affect the  imaginary world, you don’t just consume it. Of course it can be argued that you do affect the imaginary world of a book, by playing about it, and thinking about it, during and after the act of reading. But children play and think about computer games too. And the ‘game’ element of some books – like the collectors’ cards in Beast Quest – offers the possiblity of developing that imaginative play even more, arguably making books like Beast Quest more creative and valuable experiences than a book that you ’just’ read.

What adults seem to value in books for children – what they talk about when they talk about ‘trash’ versus  ‘proper books’ is the aspect of reading for pleasure which lets children experience new ways of feeling emotion and relating socially.  We like the idea that they are developing their personalities as they involve themselves in an imaginary world. Books are great at doing this. With a book you can look right into a person’s head. You can find out what it feels like to be them. What could be better for a society than that its children should develop their ability to empathise with others?

There’s no particular conclusion to this post. So I’ll end by repeating the question: Why do we think it so important that children should read for pleasure?

Critiques and categories

The hardest thing about writing a critique is categorisation.

You can see what is wrong with the manuscript. You can tell – to an extent – what needs to be done to fix it. But what kind of thing is it that is wrong? Is it voice, plot or character? This is a lot harder to pin down than you might think.

It makes me realise how much we need theory. No-one writes by theory. But people do analyse by it, and its vocabulary is like a map we can use to show others where we’ve been, where we’d like to go, where we are.

Compare, contrast, conclude?

Ecritures et dessins des fous (Writing and drawings by mad people)

Mes ecritures et dessins. (Writing and drawings by me)