Not all commas are ‘stylistic’ or ‘optional’ or dependent upon author’s voice, and I’m a bit sick of hearing it.
The funeral [of my auntie] is a featureless crematorium in Lytham St Annes. Afterwards we go for lunch… I sit next to my grandmother’s niece, Cousin Florence, who keeps a boarding house in Blackpool… Grief is not much in evidence, though with Cousin Florence it is hardly to be expected. Her husband’s name was Frank, and six months before we had had a two-page letter filling us in on all her news. Halfway down the second page came the sentence: ‘Frank died last week, haven’t we been having some weather?’ Seldom can a comma have borne such a burden.
- Alan Bennett, Untold Stories
That is a comma splice.
A run-on sentence is when not even a comma appears between two separate sentences. I suppose the trick is in knowing the end of a sentence when you come to one.
(Be GOOD or be EVIL, but don’t just be A LITTLE BIT OF A WEASEL.)
- @maureenjohnson
I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.
- Stephen King
What puzzled me about villains was why, when they were masquerading as respectable citizens, their essential no-goodness wasn’t as obvious to people on the screen as it was to me in the stalls. How could Pinnochio be so stupid as to be led astray by the patently wicked Fox, or Snow White not know the Queen was up to no good? Had the Queen been flesh and blood and not a cartoon she might well have been played by Joan Crawford, who was always something of an enigma to me. I never liked her, and with her gaunt face, protruding eyes and instinct for melodrama she seemed the embodiment of evil, yet she was often cast in the role of heroine… Claude Rains was another puzzle. He was determinedly silky and seldom unsmiling, sure signs that he was a baddy, though not always.
…
Banal though the general fun of films was, I learned, as one learned in fairy stories, about good and evil and how to spot them: the good where one would expect only degradation and squalor, and treachery and cowardice to be traced in the haunts of respectability. I learned about the occasional kindness of villains an the regular intransigence of saints but the abiding lesson had to do with the perils of prominence… Films taught you to be happy that you were ordinary.
- Alan Bennett, from Untold Stories
People have a need to believe that bad things are done by bad people. And what is bad? Isn’t this defined as anything outside the common good, which is further defined as whatever the majority see as good? Why must the villain wear a black hat? Because if he didn’t, how would we know he was the villain?
To know that one is being taught a lesson or at any rate given a message leaves one free to reject it if only by dismissing plot or characters as cliches. But I had not realised how far the moral assumptions of film story-telling had sunk in, and how long they had stayed with me, until in 1974 I saw Louis Malle’s filme about the French Occupation, Lacombe Lucien.
Lucien is a loutish, unappealing boy, recruited almost by accident into the French Fascist Milice. He falls in with and exploits a Jewish family, becoming involved with – it would be wrong to say falls in love with – the daughter, whom he helps to escape and with whom he lives. Then, as the Liberation draws near, he becomes himself a fugitive and is eventually, almost casually, shot.
The stock way to tell such a story would be to see the boy’s experiences – witnessing torture and ill-treatment, falling for the Jewish girl – as a moral education in the same way, for example, that the Marlon Brando character is educated in On the Waterfront.
That would be the convention and one I’d so much taken for granted that I kept looking in the Malle film for signs of this instruction of the school of life beginning to happen. But it doesn’t. Largely untouched by the dramas he has passed through, Lucien is much the same at the end of the film as he is at the beginning, seemingly having learned nothing. To have quite unobtrusively resisted the tug of conventional tale-telling and the lure of resolution seemed to me honest in a way few films even attempt.
- Alan Bennett, from Untold Stories
Perhaps this is why I felt uneasy after watching The History Boys, despite ‘enjoying’ the film. Bennett preaches nothing in this story. His characters do change, a little. They become more aware of the people around them, but there are no real lessons learnt.
If lessons are learnt by the viewer, those lessons come from within the viewers themselves, not from any didacticism within the film.
Have you seen The History Boys (film or play), written by Alan Bennett?
Bennett went to school a long time before the 1980s, which is when this play is set. He writes in his 2004 diaries of some issues faced when depicting a modern(ish) school.
First he had to take out a gymnasium scene, because by the 1980s sixth formers wouldn’t have been enrolled in physical education.
(What a huge, huge shame for the health of the British Nation, I do feel, since the English kids I saw a few years ago were far less fit than their Australasian counterparts.)
LOCKERS
As part of his research, Bennett visited the London Nautical School to avoid outdated clangers.
My main impression is how burdened the boys are, humping all their possessions with them wherever they go so that they’re slung round with coats, togs, books and bags, none of them seemingly having their own locker or desk.
This is true in my experience too (both as student and teacher). This was to do with theft and vandalism, and no doubt also to do with the tendency for students to leave uneaten food in their lockers, to rot the wood and attract rodents.
I wonder how many schools still have lockers, compared to how many fictional students still have lockers. In American school dramas we always see scenes involving lockers. The lockers themselves are often used as a plot device, with plantings of drugs and offensive graffiti emblazoned across them, and love notes pushed through the cracks, and timid boys being locked inside… In fact, everything I know about lockers comes from fiction:
Now, it is possible to slip a note into a locked locker through the vents. Even, with some pushing, a pencil. Once, Tiny Cooper slipped a Happy Bunny book into my locker. But I find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine how Jane, who, after all, is not the world’s strongest individual, managed to stuff an entire winter coat through the tiny slits in my locker.
- from Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan.
But I have no idea how many North American schools still provide lockers for their students. (Perhaps one of you will enlighten me.) In New Zealand, as in England (like Bennett observed), most students lump around a bag full of textbooks all day. This can’t be good for the back. I think at some schools parents are starting to complain about this, and lockers may be making a comeback.
SARCASM
Bennett writes:
Nicholas Hytner has shown the script of The History Boys to one of his former teachers at Manchester Grammar School, who says that teaching these days is so circumscribed that many traditional tools of the trade are now impermissible. Sarcasm, for instance, is out, pupils are never touched and there are often viewing panels in the doors.
Each of these observations is very true, and it does frustrate me when I see sarcastic dialogue from teachers in modern fictional schools. We were taught firmly at teachers’ college that sarcasm is a no-no — and the objection doesn’t just come from above; today’s students detect sarcasm in a second, and will pull you up on it. I remember filling in for another teacher, turning up to anarchy and saying, ‘Some quiet would be nice.’
One of the students was listening, at least. She turned to me and said, ‘Watch the sarcasm, Miss.’
And if I hadn’t been so busy with the humdrum, time-consuming and dreary job of calling a class of unknown students to attention, I might have delivered a lesson on what ‘sarcasm’ actually means, and how it compares to ‘understatement’ but this was a maths lesson. (I also remember later in the hour being asked how to do quadratic equations, and I was of no help whatsoever with that.)
Yet authors of fictional teachers are still making heavy use of sarcasm in lessons, and this lacks authenticity to me… Which is problematic if authenticity is what they are going for.
PHYSICAL CONTACT
Regarding the touchy issue of touching, in every school you’ll probably find at one point in staff history:
a teacher who gets away with quite a bit of physical contact because they have a wonderful rapport with all of their students, and it never gets them into trouble
at least one teacher who crosses the line, and who seems to get a certain titillation out of mildly through wildly inappropriate touching of students. This is my own experience of schools.
But most teachers never, ever touch students, not even in kindness. So when I see a teacher in a fictional drama touching a student, even on the shoulder, even to gain attention, I notice.
I also notice when a teacher keeps a student behind after class for a talking to. Even if this is innocent — like ‘Where’s your homework?’ — I always think how unlikely it is, that a teacher would keep a student behind after class. Teachers know to keep their classroom doors open, and when speaking to an individual student, keep their friends along too, or just outside the door, within earshot. Isn’t every modern teacher ever-aware of fictional claims of sexual abuse and harassment? Even fictional characters? I get the impression that authors of fictional teachers underestimate this unfortunate and lingering anxiety.
BEFORE THE BELL
So often in American dramas the bell rings; students snap their books shut, stand up, walk out.
I have never seen this scenario (except with one teacher who, it was widely acknowledged, had major problems controlling her classes).
What usually happens is this:
1. The teacher is keeping an eye on the clock about every five minutes. (You don’t see this much in dramatised classrooms either.) The teacher is often more cognizant of the end of class than the students, and it is the teacher who orchestrates the wind-up of a lesson.
2. About ten minutes before the end, a good teacher will ask the class to contribute to a recap of the day’s learning material. There’s usually some boring admin stuff, like homework, but I can forgive a scriptwriter for leaving that stuff out.
3. A tidy teacher will ask students to pick up any litter on the floor, and if it’s the last lesson of the day, the chairs will go up onto the desks. (Can you think of a single time you’ve seen this on the screen?)
4. If students start packing up before they are requested, any teacher with middling management skills still knows to put the kybosh on that, or else students soon learn that they can pack up a good 20 mins before the end of each class and battle for position near the exit, ready to burst out the door with the first tinkle of the bell. Any teacher who lets this happen is not on top of things.
So why, in fiction, do students pack up and leave taking their cue from the bell, not their teachers, with ‘good’ teachers shouting over top of the ruckus in order to finish their sentence?
STUDENT CENTERED LESSONS
In modern classrooms, students have far more to say than in the classrooms of yesteryear. The teacher is no longer a lecturer; rather a facilitator. Students are frequently divided into groups, set to work on a task (often on a computer), then present to their peers.
What I see in fictional classrooms: The teacher yaks. Students listen. This is a particularly vexing scenario when the class is supposed to be ‘difficult’.
I can tell you for a fact, modern students have little tolerance for lengthy lectures. There are still lessons during which teachers do a goodly proportion of the talking, but they are not met with the bright and alert faces which are seen so often on TV and movies. What you definitely get during a high school lecture lesson is a teacher who is telling Amy to stop talking, Corey to refrain from tapping the desk with his pencil, Riley to quit rustling with whatever is in that plastic bag yadda yadda yadda.
The most realistic depiction of a fictional classroom that I have seen is Summer Heights High (Australia), closely followed by Seven Periods With Mr Gormsby (New Zealand). Matt Lucas as Vicky Pollard and Catherine Tate’s ‘am I bovvered’ are also scarily accurate. That, of course, is exactly why they’re funny. These are all parodies, yet they achieve a realism that serious drama can’t seem to match.
These depictions get a bit closer to what really happens in a modern high school lesson, at least in Australia, NZ and England. The Catherine Tate sketch is scarily accurate… A VERY similar thing happened when I went to teach English to the English with a New Zealand accent. I almost think Catherine Tate was a fly on the wall that day, especially since my main sparring partner was called Lauren.
In the blogosphere you’ll find quite a few personal blogs with titles such as, ‘Confessions of a Neurotic X’ or ‘Crazy Tales of an X’. Any synonym for ‘crazy’ will do.
Alan Bennett writes of his mother’s mental illness. He’d had little experience of mental illness, so:
Part of me probably still thought of neurosis as somehow ‘put on’, a way of making oneself interesting – the reason why when I was younger I thought of myself as slightly neurotic.
IDENTIFICATION AS QUEER
According to Dan Savage, more and more people are calling themselves queer these days, partly in solidarity with the LBGT community. You can call yourself what you like. Even if you’re hetero-missionary, you do sound more interesting when you call yourself ‘queer’, if only because your interlocutor will be encouraged to consider what it is you get up to, to identify as queer.
ALLERGIES
Allergies are on the rise and no one really knows why, but that doesn’t mean you can go ahead and imagine a few of your own simply because you feel left out.
STRANGE TASTES IN (OR AVERSIONS TO) FOOD
This was my thing in primary school. I used to make out I liked weird combinations on my sandwiches (marmite and peanut butter, for instance), while expressing disdain for the foods everyone else enjoyed.
I have since come to enjoy marmite and peanut butter sandwiches for real. (Don’t knock it until you try it.) I also seem to attract attention for my food choices whether I intend it or not – e.g. eating an entire cob of corn in public, using its sheath as a convenient handle, or stinking out a staffroom with a gloopy whitesauce/canned tuna concoction or eating some of my own baking, which never looks appetizing due to self-discovered shortcuts. Last night’s leftovers for breakfasts, that sort of thing.
There’s nothing like food choices to attract attention to yourself. I wonder how many dieters/fussy eaters secretly enjoy the fuss they create when it comes to preparing and ordering food. I wonder if they feel a little bit more special than average.
PHOBIAS
When does a fear morph from aversion into phobia? Real phobias are terrible afflictions but I wonder how many people have self-medicalised an aversion, in the same way colds can become ‘flu’ and headaches ‘migraines’ when a day off work is required.
Well, he was humming this hum to himself, and walking gaily along, wondering what everybody else was doing, and what it felt like, being somebody else…
- A.A. Milne, In Which Pooh Goes Visiting And Gets Into A Tight Place
by Wurz
I sometimes wonder how different we are from each other: between sexes, across time and culture. And does everyone think the same amount of things in a day, or do some people think a lot more slowly than others? Does this change as we age?
How often do other people think about what the world is thinking about them?
How often do other people think about food? About sex, music, the weather? How much do these proportions depend on our training, daily activities, disposition?
Do some people have a greater capacity for menial tasks which engage the brain just enough to stop them thinking their own thoughts? Or do some people just refuse to have their minds caught up in such a way, and strive to do something more interesting with their brains?
Do some people hate it when their mind is left to wander? Maybe because it wanders where they don’t want it to go.
Are we far more similar to each other than we think, or wildly different?
Fiction offers one way into the mind of others. But this is not a real delving; rather, it’s a simulation, because authors themselves can only imagine what other people think in any given situation. We are really seeing the simulated mind of an author, and how representative are authors, of a general population?
Nor can we rely on what people say. What we say is different to what we think. Some people don’t say much at all. Others seem to blurt thoughts out to all and sundry, but how much are they self-editing, really?
We never really know what’s going through other people’s minds. And even if we knew, our understanding would only be overlaid with what’s going on in our own.
They lamb every year by the same sheltered wall, come lower down when they sense the cold is coming or a storm expected and all in all these sheep know a good deal and the farmers know that they know it. I wonder, though, if there are other things the sheep know which the farmers do not acknowledge. Do they know that their male lambs will be taken away a few months after they are born? Do they know or do they wonder where they are being taken on the vast two- and three-tier lorries that ship them halfway across the country to market?
- Alan Bennett, from 2001 diary entry, 14 June
In the YA novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, Peter Cameron’s main character is troubled by the disconnect between his thoughts and his ability to express them. This is no doubt another way in which people can be different.
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of simultaneous translation, like at the UN where everyone is wearing little transmitters in their ears and you know that somewhere behind the scenes the simultaneous translators are litening and transforming what is said from one language into another. I understand how such a process is possible, but to me it seems miraculous — the idea that words can be thrown up into the air in one language and alight in another as quickly as a ball is thrown into the air and caught. I think there is some sort of sieve in my mind that prohibits the rapid (let alone simultaneous) transference of my thoughts into speech.
- Peter Cameron, p97
Not unusually, for someone who writes a blog, I sense that I think most clearly about something after I have said it, and even more so after I have written about it.
With a writer the life you don’t have is as ample a country as the life that you do and is sometimes easier of access.
My first play was set in an English public school, which was not an institution of which I’d ever been a pupil. … State educated, I had quite early on tried to write about the kind of school I had attended, a northern grammar school, but found it impossible and have never really managed to write about it since, perhaps because few others have managed it either.
- Alan Bennett, from Art, Architecture and Authors
I don’t think I’ve had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me. If I think something that happened to me is interesting enough to use as fiction, all that means is I can make it better. Or, as the case may be, worse.
Taste is no help to a writer. Taste is timorous, conservative and fearful. It is a handicap. It stunts. Olivier was unhampered by taste and was often vulgar; Dickens similarly. Both could fail, and failure is a sort of vulgarity; but it’s better than a timorous toeing of the line.
- Alan Bennett, from Art, Architecture and Authors
For a long time, years even, it seemed to me I had nothing to put into what I wrote; and nor had I. I did not yet appreciate that you do not put yourself into what you write; you find yourself there.
- Alan Bennett, from Art, Architecture and Authors
Philip Larkin’s diary was probably livelier than his poems… [but] his dutiful executrix put it into the shredder. Feeling as he did about death, the surprise to me still is that he cared.
- Alan Bennett, from Art, Architecture and Authors
I don’t know how Philip Larkin felt about death, but from what Bennett says, I’m guessing he was an atheist or agnostic. (This blogger calls him a ‘reverent agnostic’.)
Thing is, I’m not sure if anyone’s beliefs about death, and life thereafter, have much at all to do with our posthumous wishes.
When Larkin wrote his will, and ordered his diaries destroyed, he was alive and kicking. Therefore, he was keeping his living self happy, believing that nobody would ever get their hands on something he intended to keep private.
I’m glad when the wishes of the dead are carried out, regardless of their perceived beliefs — regardless of whether they had been known to proclaim from the roof tops that there is no afterlife — because that shouldn’t come into it.
