Teacher's Bad Rowling Advice

[davem]

http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk/news/s...name_page.html

Embarrassed Steve Eddy revealed how he ticked off the author for her tales about fairies, telling her that they were "too childish".

But the precocious 11-year-old ignored him and went on to amass a £576million fortune through the Harry books....

Speaking for the first time about his famous pupil, he said: "Joanne's work always showed impressive imagination and in class she was always bright and enthusiastic, much in the way of Hermione in the Harry Potter books.

"But when it came to her stories they were always about elves or pixies or fairies. I was constantly telling her that she was at an age where she should be writing about grittier, more real-life things.

"But - thank goodness, as it turned out - she never heeded my advice and kept presenting me with her fantastic stories about made-up creatures.

"Looking back I am a bit embarrassed about it, but I had no idea what she'd go on to achieve."

What's interesting about this is not just that her teacher told an 11 year old girl that she should be writing about 'grittier', more realistic things', but that he considered stories about Elves & Faries' to only be fit for children under 11.

It seems Mr Eddy felt that stories about Elves can't be 'gritty', & that they have no place in the mental space of an 11 year old.

Of course, Tolkien attacked this very attitude in OFS, but its clearly still quite prevalent among the 'literati' (there are numerous reviews of CoH that take the same approach). I find it more shocking that a teacher can think the same way. If it comes to 'gritty' stories, what is grittier than the Icelandic Sagas - or CoH, & Elves & Dragons play a pretty prominent part in those?

But when did this attitude arise? Tolkien talked about fantasy & fairy stories being relegated to the nursery, but why? Haven't adults always loved these tales? Of course, we can find fairies being presented in a 'knowing', mocking, way by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream, & by contemptuously dismissed by Cervantes in Don Quixote, yet around the same time Spenser had produced The Faerie Queene. At the same time Spenser was using Faerie to allegorise the cult of Gloriana.

I wonder if the situation is changing though? Will the popularity of Harry Potter, HDM (for all Pullman's statements about 'using fantasy to undermine fantasy'), & LotR (movies as well as books) finally put a stop to teacher's like Mr Eddy, or is this attitude of 'write about grown-up things', or 'only write about what you know' going to persist?

Shouldn't teachers be encouraging children to use their imagination to the full? Can't help wondering how many other potential JK's have been lost along the way through following teacher's 'advice'. Would we have had the Legendarium if Tolkien had had a teacher like Mr Eddy?

[alatar]

Originally Posted by davem

I wonder if the situation is changing though? Will the popularity of Harry Potter, HDM (for all Pullman's statements about 'using fantasy to undermine fantasy'), & LotR (movies as well as books) finally put a stop to teacher's like Mr Eddy, or is this attitude of 'write about grown-up things', or 'only write about what you know' going to persist?

Doubtful - but I'm a cynic as well as a skeptic. Surely there may be a fad where children are permitted to write fantasy for a time, but methinks that it won't last long and we'll have teachers constraining their pupils to write more of what they (the teachers) think is important. One personal theory is that if a student is writing 'gritty' instead of 'fairy,' this boosts the teacher's ego, as having one's students writing fantasy (and science fiction for that matter) looks...dare I say..childish.

Shouldn't teachers be encouraging children to use their imagination to the full?

Are you serious? Thought that the whole idea of teachers (generally) was to help the students conform. I was just speaking about all of the interesting words that my children use (i.e. thismorrow, bednight) that will be expunged by education. I'm not a teacher, and so I don't know how it all plays out on the job, but have hoped to encourage imagination in my own students. It's messy and time-consuming, and even I fall short , and so think that this is another reason why students are herded into more understandable standardized efficiently-scored writing.

Can't help wondering how many other potential JK's have been lost along the way through following teacher's 'advice'. Would we have had the Legendarium if Tolkien had had a teacher like Mr Eddy?

And yet...Was there a teacher in your (not just davem's) past that you feel encouraged or discouraged you in regards to fantasy?

[Hookbill the Goomba]

I wonder if the situation is changing though?

Erm... I don't think so, really. Fantasy and Fairy tales are still generally seen as lower or less relevant than some of the so called 'higher' genres. I have had many debates with my lecturers on my Creative Writing course about how Fantasy should be recognized as a 'higher' genre because it requires so much more effort in order to do well. History lore and future all play much larger parts in a fantasy tale than most other genres and it takes a real mind to pull together all the elements necessary to create a true fantasy or fairy tale that is, well, not on the same tree as, but in the same forest as Tolkien.

I personally have come into conflict with those (even teachers and lecturers) who have discouraged me from writing anything fantastical or faerie in orientation or style. This is probably down to literary snobbery. Fairies and myths are seen as the thing that the primitives and children and those of lower intelligence go into, where as things like Jane Austine* are seen as the higher areas because it is 'cultural' and 'normal'. Since fantasy delves into the abnormal and the things that the eyes do not (often) see, touching on the inexplicable and down right unbelievable, some people are scared off. It is one thing, I suppose, to imagine a dragon, but to meet one, even in a book, can be an unnerving thing. Faeries also have their perils. As Tolkien so rightly said, of the realm of Faerie:

[There is] Both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords

This sort of thing is not generally seen in some of the other genres one finds. There is something of the essence of life in Fantasy and mythology, the desire of epic quests and long forgotten treasure. The strangeness and wonder one finds on the path into Faerie is a powerful thing. When one meets it face to face, some will be inspired, some will run away and some will go mad.

But one cannot blame those who fear to treat those paths. For the realm of Faërie is a perilous one; a man may count himself fortunate to have wandered there, but it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates be shut and the keys be lost. This realm is also wide and high and filled with many things; shore-less seas, stars uncounted, beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever present peril. Both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords, and all manner of birds and beasts, and especially, the Dragon.

* *Stabs it with fork*

[davem]

I hope you'll forgive a long quote from OFS:

For a trifling instance: not to mention (indeed not to parade) electric street-lamps of massproduced pattern in your tale is Escape (in that sense). But it may, almost certainly does, proceed from a considered disgust for so typical a product of the Robot Age, that combines elaboration and ingenuity of means with ugliness, and (often) with inferiority of result. These lamps may be excluded from the tale simply because they are bad lamps; and it is possible that one of the lessons to be learnt from the story is the realization of this fact. But out comes the big stick: “Electric lamps have come to stay,” they say. Long ago Chesterton truly remarked that, as soon as he heard that anything “had come to stay,” he knew that it would be very soon replaced—indeed regarded as pitiably obsolete and shabby. “The march of Science, its tempo quickened by the needs of war, goes inexorably on ... making some things obsolete, and foreshadowing new developments in the utilization of electricity”: an advertisement. This says the same thing only more menacingly. The electric street-lamp may indeed be ignored, simply because it is so insignificant and transient. Fairy-stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about. Lightning, for example. The escapist is not so subservient to the whims of evanescent fashion as these opponents. He does not make things (which it may be quite rational to regard as bad) his masters or his gods by worshipping them as inevitable, even “inexorable.” And his opponents, so easily contemptuous, have no guarantee that he will stop there: he might rouse men to pull down the street-lamps. Escapism has another and even wickeder face: Reaction. Not long ago—incredible though it may seem—I heard a clerk of Oxenford declare that he “welcomed” the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into “contact with real life.” He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression “real life” in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor-cars are more “alive” than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more “real” than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm-tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist! For my part, I cannot convince myself that the roof of Bletchley station is more “real” than the clouds. And as an artefact I find it less inspiring than the legendary dome of heaven. The bridge to platform 4 is to me less interesting than Bifrost guarded by Heimdall with the Gjallarhorn. From the wildness of my heart I cannot exclude the question whether railwayengineers, if they had been brought up on more fantasy, might not have done better with all their abundant means than they commonly do. Fairy-stories might be, I guess, better Masters of Arts than the academic person I have referred to. Much that he (I must suppose) and others (certainly) would call “serious” literature is no more than play under a glass roof by the side of a municipal swimming-bath. Fairy-stories may invent monsters that fly the air or dwell in the deep, but at least they do not try to escape from heaven or the sea. And if we leave aside for a moment “fantasy,” I do not think that the reader or the maker of fairy-stories need even be ashamed of the “escape” of archaism: of preferring not dragons but horses, castles, sailing-ships, bows and arrows; not only elves, but knights and kings and priests. For it is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of “escapist” literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say “inexorable,” products.

“The rawness and ugliness of modern European life”—that real life whose contact we should welcome —“is the sign of a biological inferiority, of an insufficient or false reaction to environment.” The maddest castle that ever came out of a giant's bag in a wild Gaelic story is not only much less ugly than a robot-factory, it is also (to use a very modern phrase) “in a very real sense” a great deal more real. Why should we not escape from or condemn the “grim Assyrian” absurdity of top-hats, or the Morlockian horror of factories? They are condemned even by the writers of that most escapist form of all literature, stories of Science fiction. These prophets often foretell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway-station. But from them it is as a rule very hard to gather what men in such a world-town will do. They may abandon the “full Victorian panoply” for loose garments (with zip-fasteners), but will use this freedom mainly, it would appear, in order to play with mechanical toys in the soon-cloying game of moving at high speed. To judge by some of these tales they will still be as lustful, vengeful, and greedy as ever; and the ideals of their idealists hardly reach farther than the splendid notion of building more towns of the same sort on other planets. It is indeed an age of “improved means to deteriorated ends.” It is part of the essential malady of such days— producing the desire to escape, not indeed from life, but from our present time and self-made misery— that we are acutely conscious both of the ugliness of our works, and of their evil. So that to us evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied. We find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together. The fear of the beautiful fay that ran through the elder ages almost eludes our grasp. Even more alarming: goodness is itself bereft of its proper beauty. In Faerie one can indeed conceive of an ogre who possesses a castle hideous as a nightmare (for the evil of the ogre wills it so), but one cannot conceive of a house built with a good purpose—an inn, a hostel for travellers, the hall of a virtuous and noble king—that is yet sickeningly ugly. At the present day it would be rash to hope to see one that was not—unless it was built before our time.

I was going to embolden parts of that, but I think its all important & relevant. In fact I think Mr Eddy would benefit from being forced to sit down & read the whole of OFS. I think Tolkien is right - fantasy is what saves humanity from sinking into the pit of utilitarianism & uglyness. Excising Dragons & Fairies from a child's imagination is pretty close to the horrors of Bolvangar in HDM where the children have their daemon's surgically removed - & just like Mr Eddy, its for the child's own good.

[alatar]

Originally Posted by davem

I think Tolkien is right - fantasy is what saves humanity from sinking into the pit of utilitarianism & uglyness.

To consider just 'survival,' we should mimic the bugs (interestingly proposed in Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive) and do away with all of these non-essentials. Unless dragons or hobbits are about to enter our niche, what's the point about reading about them?

But we're not yet termites in one big mound. We're humans, and one of the things that we do is explore the universe, and imagination plays a big part in that. What is imagination other than another tool that we use to survive? Can I eat that bug? Maybe a story or song would help me remember. Can I ford that river? Maybe there's a better way, and wasn't I just thinking about spiders? Anyway, an offshoot of this is to look at the world and see otherwise.

Another thing about fantasy is that, to me, it's even harder to write...well. Anyone, as davem may have noted elsewhere about the Dragonlance (?) novels, can churn out text that includes elves and dragons and giants, but to do it well, you have to make this new world seem so right and natural that it's almost transparent. When reading LotR I wasn't brought up short by the existence of a Balrog - it seemed to fit, make sense and so I never skipped a beat.

Writing about life today is also challenging, but you have cultural references with which to work, and can 'see' what you want to use. In fantasy writing, even the simplest of things must be considered. Do elves even have feet? If not, how do they walk?

The fact that many of the peoples of ME are humanoid-type just shows how hard it can be even for a master.

And lastly, as I've rambled on long enough, sometimes it's easier to write/read about something very important when it's removed to the fantasy world. Telling the world that the new city is ugly may not be as safe (when heard by the creators) or effective as creating a novel helping them (falsely) remember how wonderful the old city was, even if the old city never existed.

[Lalwendë]

Half the struggle is in getting kids to write anything creative at all. I did a project looking at different ways to prompt and develop storytelling with 14 year olds, and some of them were as watertight as granite when it came to getting them to exercise the rainbow (as opposed to grey) matter. However, given enough encouragement it was surprising how the most uptight, grade-grubbing nerdy kids would let fly with some mad storytelling (one very scary one about zombies springs to mind). Alas, so much of school now seems to be utilitarian, and its surprising just how many kids are quite happy about that! If only they knew that all that learning how to write business letters will have been useless when they get jobs and have to conform to the corporate house style...

What I don't like is that children are being encouraged not to write on certain subjects, as you will write about whatever turns you on, frankly! Yes, learn different styles and formats of writing, but as for whether you write about pixies, ponies, politicians or pugilists, it's your voice. Where i can see that this comes up as an issue is when you get that kid who sits there wailing "But I dunno what to write about!" The easy way out then is to say "Write about what you know!" However, the kid who knows what they are going to write about is a treasure! And that makes me think of my old writing tutor - I'd spend hours gassing away to him because I had a ton of ideas, but he used to get exasperated at the number of students who'd opted to take a degree where writing was compulsory and could come up with nothing more unique than rhetorical and repetitive verse about why people die in Africa. Also he liked to see what wacky outfits I'd turn up in - the vintage velvet bellbottoms were a fave I recall, but I digress...

Luckily I had good teachers more or less, laying aside the alcoholic who told me I'd fail my O Levels (riiiight, brain addled by vodka....) so nobody told me what to write about, just how to do it. And they had trouble stopping me at times. I think that's why I like Lyra in HDM so much - she's full of stories.

But there is one lesson that's a good one to learn, and that's not to stick within genre cliches - in fact forget all about genre and whether what you write is realistic or fantasy or not - just write what's swirling round in your head if you want to be really original

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by davem

What's interesting about this is not just that her teacher told an 11 year old girl that she should be writing about 'grittier', more realistic things', but that he considered stories about Elves & Faries' to only be fit for children under 11.

It seems Mr Eddy felt that stories about Elves can't be 'gritty', & that they have no place in the mental space of an 11 year old.

Methinks you doth protest too much. Surely that teaching strategy is completely transparent. Had Mr. Eddy encouraged the young JK to remain writing fantasy surely she would rapidly have tired of the activity. We all know that adolescents must in fact test and challenge their authority figures in the process of becoming their own persons. What fun is there in writing What The Teacher Wants You To, or, What The Teacher Recommends?

Frankly, I think we should applaud Mr. Eddy heartily for his sterling negative encouragement. Had it not been for him, Ms JK might not have had the gumption or motivation to go on and create Hermione, Ron and that Heddy Cropper fellow.

[Rumil]

If you look at the first page of each author's first book, you'll find these two quotes-

The Bagginses have lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and most people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him.

and

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

though I do like Bethberry's elegant theory too!

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Rumil

though I do like Bethberry's elegant theory too!

Well, Rumil, Eddy does say in the Mirror article that he gave his students fantasy books to read.

Originally Posted by Teacher Eddy

Mr Eddy says that he feels partly responsible for unleashing her magical imagination by having his pupils read fantasy books.

He said: "I feel proud if I was in some way responsible for influencing her to write the Potter stories."

Why get 'em to read what you don't want 'em to write?

[davem]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Well, Rumil, Eddy does say in the Mirror article that he gave his students fantasy books to read.

I wonder what age the pupils were when they were put onto fantasy books by Mr E? Its possible that he would have taught her up to age 11 or 12, & that he handed out the fantasy books to his pupils when they were 8 or 9, & expected them to have outgrown them by age 11. And what kind of fantasy books was he encouraging them to read? If he felt that by age 11 they should have outgrown such things its possible that the fantasy books he's talking about were 'nursery' level things.

Of course, this is by the by. Its the attitude that's the problem, the idea that fantasy is fine for kids, but as they get older & move towards being adults they should 'put away such childish things' & start on the 'gritty realism'. And this pro-'gritty realism' approach is quite pernicious - because its nothing to do with getting children to include 'adult' things like sex, violence & swearing - anyone familiar with unbowdlerised fairystories, myths & Sagas, knows that they're full of that kind of thing - its about getting them to exclude the Elves, Trolls & Dragons which can elevate even the grossest aspects of that kind of tale by introducing Magic & the sense that even in the darkest, ugliest places there is the possibility of something 'more' lurking just over the next hill.

So, this is not so much an attack on Mr E. Its an 'attack' on the attitude that 11 year olds have to be encouraged to 'outgrow' Elves & Dragons. Clearly there is a desire, a need, among the general populace for those things, while at the same time there seems to be a conviction among certain members of the 'literati' & the educational establishment that it shouldn't be there, that such desires are 'wrong', immature & need to be gotten rid of. Their anger about, & contempt in response to, the popularity among adults of LotR, Harry Potter & the like actually sets them apart from the majority of us who love such things - & I think we are in the majority (even though many people feel embarrassed to admit out love - look at the way the HP books are issued in 'Adult' covers ).

Now, I don't know if Mr E is on the extreme wing of that movement, but he seems at least to be on the fringes of it. However, I'm happy to leave him on one side & focus more on the general attitude as pointed up by Tolkien in OFS.

[Lalaith]

I get thoroughly depressed when I hear people moaning that Harry Potter is not "real" enough.. I read some article about how he should get a few ASBOs etc to make the whole story more "down with the kids."
Yeah right.
On the other hand, the literary genre that kids these days all seem to be obsessed with is horror. Which in many ways I find even more depressing than the "gritty reality" stuff. Particularly with all this nasty torture-porn Eli Roth stuff around right now....