THE CHILD IN THE PhD
No one would argue that children’s writing is a genre which brings with it the comfort of a
long tradition but also many weighty responsibilities. For me this is particularly true of my
chosen genre, historical fiction; in my case with the added element of time-fantasy.
Call it cowardice, but I was therefore keen to have the safety net of the PhD as I leapt off
this particular creative cliff. And it has brought me both inspiration and reassurance. I
hope I will show how it does not have to be paradoxical to write creatively within the
discipline of a PhD.
As we know, the PhD consists of both the creative project and a related piece of academic
research. The potential paradox between the idea of creative writing and research has
been much discussed; the latter demanding method, which sometimes appears to sit
uneasily with notions of creativity.
These are notions are held as far back as Socrates, who said a poet could only compose
when ‘reason is no longer in him.’1 The idea was loved by the Romantic poets and later
Yeats seemed to suggest, in his poem Long Legged Fly (1938), that to be an artist was a
kind of religious vocation, calling for a transcendentally meditative state of mind. For me,
this concern was largely dispelled during the research project – particularly in my textual
analysis of the work of Gary Crew. Crew’s novel Strange Objects came about after the
author decided on his preferred themes and then actively sought out the historical facts to
use as the setting for his fiction. I found this reassuring because it displays how
1
E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (eds) (1961), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (New Jersey: Princeton University
Press), 220. Cited in Gabriele Griffin (2005) Research Methods for English Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press), 195
intellectual and methodological decisions need not detract from the creative writing.
Many other writers and illustrators of historical fiction, from Rosemary Sutcliff to Terry
Deary, have also been diligent researchers.
I think many people here will probably agree that the creative impulse which leads to the
early idea for a novel or other project is the easiest part. For me, this arrived when I was
cleaning the dust off the awkwardly-shaped wrought iron staircase in my Victorian house.
Cursing the intricate twists and turns of the metal, I thought about how when the house
was first built, this cleaning will have fallen to a young, probably female, servant. My own
family ancestors – just two generations back – were in service in large houses in
Newcastle and Cumbria. Then the fantasy element crept into play and I wondered what
would happen if the metal began to move and become the snake that its shape suggested.
Where would it take me – or the little girl who was doing the cleaning? My village, Spittal,
is named after the medieval leper hospital which once stood here. So little is known of its
history that this seemed to be the obvious place for my protagonist to go. And in the
strange way that these things often turn out, I found myself writing about the panic and
superstition that surrounds illness – just before swine flu was began to creep across the
world. The idea for a children’s book formed easily and I couldn’t wait to start writing.
But to come back to my point. The creative part is the easy bit. Ideas and themes and
chunks of writing flowed. But how did the PhD affect the process? I see it as rather like
putting a puppy on a very long lead. No one put limits on my creativity, but the combined
wisdom of my two supervisors has trained me, reined in my bad habits and kept me from
barking up several wrong trees.
I’d also like to say something at this point about the literary merit of children’s writing.
It’s sometimes felt that it can be of limited creativity, because of the necessary
conventions and constraints around writing for younger readers. It won’t surprise you to
know that I don’t accept this and here again the PhD helped in drawing me towards key
texts in my chosen genre which are complex, multi-layered and beautifully crafted. These
texts inspire me to be ambitious for my own work.
At the start of the course, I made a decision to do the academic project first. I viewed this
research however as a necessary evil which had to be undertaken in order to get to the
good bit, the creative writing. That was until I started. My supervisor Kim Reynolds
suggested that I start by simply reading the key texts in my chosen genre of children’s
historical time-fantasy. I spent a happy couple of months immersed in Lucy Boston,
Philippa Pearce, Penelope Lively and Linda Buckley Archer. Among others! This genre was
crowded and – many critics suggested – so bound by convention and tradition that it had
become staid and conservative in form. I was so incensed by this widely-accepted
accusation that I found I had the basis of the academic part of my thesis. I set out to
prove just how radical a genre it could be - in terms of its content, form and ideology.
I’m not going to make you suffer the whole of my academic research, but it may be useful
to consider some of its main findings.
A simplistic reading of the more famous texts, such as The Children of Green Knowe,
Tom’s Midnight Garden and The Driftway, suggested the authors were digging in their
middle-class heels against any changes, whether it be post-war demolition of old buildings
or the 1970s Labour Government’s changes to the history curriculum in schools. I was
forced to look harder for my evidence of radicalism. But as I scraped through the dirt of
the obvious, this evidence began to show through like an emerging mosaic on an
archaeological dig. Nesbit and Kipling, for one thing, pioneered a new genre – writing
about history with the added element of fantasy surrounding time. This genre was still
relatively new when Alison Uttley relived memories of her own childhood in A Traveller in
Time.
Uttley later explained how she felt children can become their own psychologists, by
reconstructing their own childhood and that of their imaginary characters. She wrote this
book in 1939 but her comments would not be out of keeping with 21 st Century
psychodynamic theories.
This understanding of child psychology is strongly present in Lucy Boston, Philippa Pearce
and Penelope Lively. It continues during the 1960s and 70s with writers like Penelope
Farmer, Robert Westall and William Mayne.
Their works are about history and time - but also show great insight into the psychology of
the young reader, which may (along with the fact that they’re all great stories!) explain
their lasting appeal. It came as a surprise to me that the innovation clearly present in
many of these works has been so overlooked by critics.
Few would argue that during the 1980s the genre really thrived. This was in part a
response to the fall from favour of traditional historical fiction – for both adults and
children. Writers such as Ruth Park and Janet Lunn sent their protagonists on a clear
psychological progression as well as a historical journey. Their fascination with the past as
a key to problems of the present no longer seemed nostalgic but newly-born.
In The Devil’s Arithmetic, Jane Yolen shocked traditionalists by using time-distort fantasy
to send a girl back to the Holocaust, at a time when almost nothing had been written for
children on that subject.
Australian writer Gary Crew experimented with form, mixing horror fantasy with historical
documents, to create the ground-breaking Strange Objects. Hugely talented writers such
as Robert Swindells and Linda Buckley-Archer carried the innovations through to the
1990s and into the 21st Century by looking at little-known areas of history and playing
with the latest scientific thinking on time travel. But the last five years have also seen a
renaissance in traditional historical fiction for children. Perhaps it was time-fantasy which
kept the historical torch alight in children’s literature.
So now I not only knew my genre and could plot it on a clear progressive time-line, I also
knew what’s been done and what is possible.
I emerged from the research project with a much clearer awareness of my own aims,
which were:
1. To write historical fiction which explores some aspects of history which have been
relatively over-looked;
2. To achieve the highest possible degree of accuracy, using historical research and
also oral history passed down from members of my own family, bearing in mind
that all historical accounts are subjective;
3. To use a number of voices, not all of which belong to sympathetic characters, which
I hope will add complexity and ambiguity to the story;
4. To use diary form as a way of creating an engaging first-person voice for the child
protagonist;
5. To explore psychological issues around disfigurement and isolation.
6. Along with other writers, to add to and refresh the genre.
Armed with this knowledge I felt both unnerved and paradoxically more confident that
my creative project was worth doing.
How has the PhD helped?
Of course it helps to know what has gone before. How could it not? When I think that I
could have waded into writing a children’s time-distort book without this background
knowledge, it fills me with horror. It’s a bit like charting the New World without a map.
Creative writers don’t need to be told where to go or even how to get there – but it’s still
helpful to know where the dragons may be lurking.
I could have followed conventions without realising they were such. I could have
unwittingly pinched devices and episodes from other stories. I now feel there’s little
danger of that happening; I know this area too well.
In fact, thanks to two prongs of the research, I mournfully discarded a planned key
episode from my own book. This was a scary description of the legendary leper mass,
when a patient with the condition was present at their own requiem as part of the
process of declaring them dead to the rest of society. I was very taken with this idea until I
found a similar scene in a historical novel by Geoffrey Trease. Trease, by the way, is a
writer I would never have picked up out of personal choice, nor would I have been guided
towards him since he’s fallen out of fashion, but his contribution to children’s historical
fiction is an important one which I only learned about during the course of my PhD
research.
I was, I admit, – very miffed at having to lose the opportunity to put my protagonist
through this gruesome ordeal. This turned out, however, to be the right thing to do, and
not just because it had been done by another writer. The very latest research on medieval
leprosy suggests the leper mass was one of many myths surrounding the condition which
grew up and spread during the Victorian era when the illness was enormously
sentimentalised.
My book uses the latest available knowledge on its subject. I believe the research and
critiquing skills I gleaned during the academic part of the project have helped enormously
with the factual and historical research for the novel itself. But thanks to my research, I’m
also aware of the latest thinking on history itself – that it is all a form of fiction and all
accounts are both biased and subjective. This was new to me as a non-historian and I
found it extremely liberating as a writer.
Before I started writing the novel proper, I read widely on what’s considered to be radical
in children’s literature. Some of the elements I planned to include in the story fit into this
category. Whilst I was keen to be original, this wide knowledge of which paths have been
explored meant I could also be inspired by what worked well and how some elements
could be adapted for my own use.
From a very practical point of view, it was also useful to discover more about publishing
trends. As I suggested, the time-distort genre has proved popular but for many years
traditional historical fiction has failed to engage readers or publishers (it’s not clear which
is the chicken and which is the egg here!). It was comforting to discover from the research
that the past is very trendy at the moment and so my novel, set in two periods of history,
is not entirely out of step with current publishing fashion. That has to be important to any
writer.
How has it hindered?
Well – it must have done so, because there have been times when I’ve ground my teeth
and felt hugely frustrated with the process. But when I reflect on this, it’s actually rather
hard to find an instance where I’ve been curtailed from doing what I wanted to do at the
outset.
And when your supervisor is the acclaimed writer Jackie Kay, then you know that
mentoring is well worth having and her advice is like gold.
I have made changes as the research has developed. I believe these are for the better.
They include:
1. Raising the intended age of the novel’s readership – this was so that I could make the
themes and characters more complex and subtle;
2. Changing the narrative voice to include more than one storyteller;
3. And as outlined earlier, dropping scenes which I could no longer justify when the
research did not bear them out.
I genuinely believe the novel will be a better one for these changes. I am also regularly
running passages past the highly critical eye of two young readers I know – my son and
daughter, aged 9 and 11 – to ensure the story continues to engage.
To conclude, the PhD may mean the novel takes longer as it is constantly honed – then
again, it will be done to a deadline and not allowed to drift. It may mean the finished work
is more multi-layered than it may otherwise have been. This does not make it a worse
novel – in fact in my opinion the effect is the opposite. Young readers are increasingly
sophisticated. It has boosted my personal belief in my work and the frustrations have
been those probably experienced by most writers:
– re-writing and re-writing again,
admitting that a character or passage doesn’t really work,
having to do something to a deadline.
What writer does not go through these processes anyway?
So in spite of its ivory-tower image, I would argue, the PhD has turned out to be rather
like the real world.
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