SPECIAL FEATURE: Q & A with Susan Elkin on her reading retrospective, ALL BOOKED UP

 

"I have done a huge amount of journalism and, contrary to what the cynical public thinks, that means that I'm used to researching and then writing the truth."

Susan Elkin taught English in secondary schools for 36 years, latterly developing a parallel career as a writer. Since 1990 she has written over 5000 articles for newspapers and magazines, English text books, how-to books for teachers, a book about careers in theatre and latterly three volumes of memoir: Please Miss We’re Boys (2019), The Alzheimer’s Diaries (2022) and All Booked Up (2024); she has her own weekly blog, Susan's Bookshelves, where she reviews music and drama as well as books. She lives in South London.

Writers Review: You've written widely about inspiring a love of reading in children. What are the best ways to encourage a love of reading? What is the situation now in schools and how would you like to see it change?

Susan Elkin: Enthusiasm is key. It's vital to communicate a love of books. So share books, talk about books and - vitally - whether you're a teacher or a parent, for goodness sake let children see you reading for pleasure. If you don't, they get the message that reading is a childish thing which you stop doing when you're grown up. I have never forgiven Tony Blair, early in his premiership, for visiting a primary school and, when the children asked him what his favourite book was telling them that he was too busy to read.

In schools. teachers are very good at teaching phonics and so on as they are now required to do. Decoding the squiggles. though, is the easy bit. It's developing and encouraging reading after that which is the challenge and it's where many schools fall down, not least because there are so many banal, dull hoops the curriculum requires them to jump through in terms of, for example, very formulaic comprehension exercises. I think every class at every level should have a block of independent reading time every day - in silence, read anything you like and the teacher reads too. We used to call this USSR (Uninterrupted, sustained silent reading) or ERIC (Everyone reads in class) and I think it should be a key part of the curriculum ... but I'm not holding my breath.

WR: What are your thoughts on the prevalence of celebrities now writing children’s books?

Susan: Well, I suppose it depends who they are and how good they are. David Walliams is, in my view, outstanding. His books are very funny and he has developed a real love of reading in many children - just as Roald Dahl and JK Rowling did. Richard Coles's crime novels are quite fun and well enough written. And of course there are others.

On the other hand an awful lot of it is the literary equivalent of junk food and often turned out by ghost writers with publishers simply grabbing names that will sell books. And often, I suspect, this is instead of excellent writers whose names are not (yet) well known. On the day I'm writing this, it has just been announced that Jeremy Vine has secured a two book deal. Well, he's not a bad radio presenter but that doesn't mean he can write decent fiction. But I'll reserve judgement until I've seen what he (or his ghost writer) produces.

WR: You've had wide experience of reviewing books for young people, eg. for The School Librarian. Were you ever tempted to write children’s fiction yourself?

Susan:  No. I have no talent for fiction although I'm very much a fiction junkie and read vast quantities of it . It's a strange thing. I have done a huge amount of journalism and, contrary to what the cynical public thinks, that means that I'm used to researching and then writing the truth. I'm so conditioned to this that I find it impossible to make things up! It's probably why I can do memoir, though, because I'm describing what actually happened - at least as I remember or percieve it.

WR: I'm impressed by the range of your publications, the hard work that went into establishing yourself and how well it paid off in terms of opportunities coming your way. How would you advise other writers to get into freelance journalism?

Susan: Probably through a good degree in whatever interests you (English, history, politics, maths etc) and then looking for some kind of work experience placement. Very few successful journalists did “media studies” or anything similar so don’t bother with that. Write as much as you can wherever you are – community newsletters, student magazines and so on so that you build experience and a portfolio. My own experience is not typical – I gradually moved into journalism from teaching from about 1990 at a time when all the broadsheet newspapers had a whole page devoted to education every week. I started by sending on-spec opinion pieces to editors. Sadly, that would never work now.

WR: Writing The Alzheimer's Diaries must have felt very different from your other writing. Did you begin writing it for yourself rather than for publication?

Susan:  Not really, although – with hindsight – it probably helped me to deal with, and process, a pretty grim situation. I am programmed to write about almost everything which happens to me so when my husband, Nick, was first diagnosed it seemed the obvious thing to do – once he’d given me his approval, of course. At first I thought I’d do it as a newspaper column but none of my contacts wanted it. I did eventually get a version of the opening blog into Daily Telegraph, though. I wrote it as a weekly blog as we went along over the 28 months between Nick’s diagnosis and death in 2019. By then it was a pretty substantial block of work – and writer that I am – I couldn’t bear the idea of not taking it further. The book came out in 2022. It’s not gloomy – just truthful and, many people have told me, often funny. I regard it as a sort of memorial to Nick and I think he’d be pretty pleased with it.

WR: You’ve written a lot about music and drama and the lack of opportunities for young people. What would you like a new Minister for Culture to do?

Susan:  Fund music education for every child so that there is an entitlement to learn a musical instrument or sing in a choir. At the same time wouldn’t it be great if they learned to read music at the same time as they learned to read words? Of course they aren’t all going to take to it but I’d like every single child to have the chance. Drama is easier because it’s cheaper – train teachers both in initial training and CPD to build drama and drama games into their teaching. And what about grants for school productions to encourage schools to stage them? Perhaps, more radically, the minister could liaise with the new Secretary of State for Education and look for ways of changing the culture in schools so that head teachers are less focused on “results” and better able to see how holistic education benefits every child and raises standards. Abolishing SATS (standard attainment tests) would be a good start.

WR: What will you write next?

Susan: Well in addition to all the routine work – reviewing shows and concerts, writing arts features for magazines and my weekly Susan’s Bookshelves blog - I’ve just started work on a new book. Memoir style again, this time it’s about writing. I’ve met some extraordinary people and been in some pretty unlikely situations during the last 30 years (visiting a primary school in Orkney, interviewing June Whitfield, writing about hedge trimming, attending vespers at Ampleforth, crying with a mother in a children’s hospice and an awful lot more) and I think there’s a story to tell. At present I’m going though old diaries and files and making a lot of preparatory notes.

WR: Thanks, Susan - hope you enjoy this preparatory stage and we'll look forward to seeing what it leads to!

All Booked Up is published by The Book Guild.

See also Susan's review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE NOVEL by Adele Geras

"I only want to say this: a novel needs a plot."

Adele Geras has written many books for children and young adults and six novels for adults, the latest of which is Love or Nearest Offer, published by Quercus in paperback. She’s working on a historical novel for adults. She lives in Cambridge.

The novel is in rude good health. Millions of people all over the world buy novels, read them, discuss them, take them out of libraries, pounce on them in charity shops, borrow them from friends and discover them on Kindles. Money is being made by lots of publishers and even a few writers. There are novels to suit every taste out there and even the Literary Novel, (by which I mean a book that isn’t immediately classifiable as crime, romance, sf, horror, spy or whatever) is being read avidly. I give you, off the top of my head, Atkinson, Tyler, Strout, Mantel, Perry, Toibin, Hollinghurst, St Aubyn, Amis, Ishiguro, Roth, McLaverty, and on and on. You can add others, I’m certain. Please note: I know there are many, many people who do not read novels at all. If they want stories, they have tv and movies and games and other ways of accessing narrative. This piece however is about novels.

I’m prompted to write not so much by Will Self's pronouncement in an interview with Alex Clarke from the Guardian that the novel was doomed as a culturally significant thing, as by a discussion on Twitter started by Eva Dolan (a very good writer of thrillers) about people tending to shy away from the difficult, the challenging, the experimental etc.

I suspect that this reluctance to engage with such works has something to do with this kind of book being as Eva puts it, very light on plot. She says: I can't think of many novels with no plot at all. plenty light on plot but think the reader collaborates in finding one, almost like seeing faces in clouds.

I'm afraid that doesn't cut the mustard for me. Print that has to be scrutinized and gone over and puzzled about must yield a story at the end or it ceases to qualify as a novel. I contend that anything that tries to do away with PLOT can be very many things but a novel isn't one of them. It might be a prose poem or an essay or meditations about this or that subject but it's emphatically NOT a novel.

PLOT is to a novel what a foundation is to a building: necessary. A sine qua non. All the rest: roof beams, walls, plaster, décor: every single other thing slobbers away into mud if you haven’t laid down a foundation. Where novels are concerned, that foundation is a plot.

Some believe that there are 7 templates for Available Plots (see Christopher Brooker's The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories. He contends that all stories fall within 7 categories, which may or may not be true, but I'm not discussing that now. I only want to say this: a novel needs a plot.

This can be extraordinarily simple. Very many books of greater or lesser literary worth can be boiled down to: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Many more can be summed up as: man in danger, man fights danger, man overcomes danger. Plots can also, of course, be terribly complicated, like Bleak House, for instance. They can be full of satisfying twists and breathtaking surprises. They can be every sort of thing to every sort of writer but they have this in common. They are WHAT MAKES A READER TURN THE PAGE. They are the “what’s going to happen next?“ engine that drives the whole machine.

I’ve been a reader for almost 70 years. I read a great deal, though less so these days with the advent of the Box Set. Many long form narratives on television are better than lots of novels. I’ve never been a dutiful reader and have always given up a book if I was bored, except when I had to study it. I can’t tell you the number of readers I’ve spoken to who tell me, sighing: "Well, I feel I do have to get to the end but I’m not enjoying it...”
What they probably mean is: they are not engaged with this book because the plot is non-existent and there’s only so much fine writing a person can take before needing someone to root for, someone to hate, someone to fear and with any luck all of the above. They want talk and interaction between characters. They want conflict. They want passion. They may want quantities of sex and violence if sales figures are anything to go by. They want A THREAD OF SUSPENSE to pull them through the timeline of the novel. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. Will the curate turn up for tea tomorrow? can be as exciting in good hands as who killed the body in the library?

And that surely is the point: in good hands. Another variation of one of my favourite mottos: it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it. Let me take Marcel Proust as an example. Here is someone who’s generally thought of as being on the plotless side of the literary fence. We do, after all, spend many, many pages right at the beginning of the novel waiting for Marcel’s mother to come and kiss him goodnight... but as the story develops, we are caught up with the plot lines of very many characters who interact with one another and whose stories intertwine most satisfyingly. The same thing can be said of the 12 volumes in Anthony Powell's sequence of novels, known as A Dance to the Music of Time. Each one is a story on its own and when you've read all twelve, they form a dizzying perspective of plots, like a intricate jigsaw of society perfectly slotted together; a kaleidoscope of many lives, moving through time together.

You may like reading the domestic, the historical, the futuristic, the dystopian, the soppy, the thrilling, the mind- crunchingly intellectual, the short, the long, the funny (please don’t forget the funny) the sentimental, the zany, the socially committed, the preachy, the off the wall... you name it. You might like any of these kinds of novels, but if what you're reading has no plot, then it can't be called a novel. Which, of course, is absolutely fine.