Tag: learning

WRITING. Ten thoughts on the last four years! (PS don’t tell me off for not really having a twitter break; it’s automatic from my site. x)

by Anna Vaught, posted in Uncategorized, writer, writers, writing

I am off social media until November or so as I am working on edits for my next book (novel, Saving Lucia, which is out in April) and doing a rewrite – and expansion – of another book. Head is down because I’m balancing this with teaching and a brood of offspring and…well, you know. Anyway, if you reply to me on twitter or FB, I won’t see it, but I hope you find these thoughts encouraging or interesting. They are not only about me, but about what I have learned and seen, since I started writing in 2014.

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  1. Don’t ever assume that writing is not for you. There are many reasons why you might. In my case, I thought, ‘Oh I’ve left it too late’ and other lame things related, in my case, to self esteem, which has, I will tell you frankly (and as I have written about elsewhere), been radically affected by a tricky background and a daily management of sometimes scary mental health stuff. And I am not going to sugar coat issues of structural inequality; it’s there – let’s look for ways to overcome it as we support each other.  Writing, if you want to do it and can make a good shot at it, IS FOR YOU.
  2. Related to this, I bet pretty much everyone feels like an outsider or has that old chestnut, imposter syndrome. I am constantly sure I am about to make a massive fool of myself, but if I do, I do it with a full heart. Make sense? Would you rather be mightily arrogant and therefore, I would argue, less able to self reflect, less delicate in your observations, perhaps less kind to others, because you NOTICE LESS – and maybe you are thus a lesser writer? Because don’t you need doubt in order to write well?
  3. There could well be some mighty cock ups. You don’t need to hear the ins and outs of what has gone wrong for me, but you might be heftily let down by someone, have a book that is not promoted, simply not be valued or find yourself actually gaslit by someone you work on a book with, in some capacity. This is not the end; it is part of learning, of amassing (sorry, but I do love swearing) the twats in one useful corner (or rather the people who were twats to you) and, though beaten, you can get back up. The writing community is large and welcoming, everyone has disasters sooner or later, far as I can tell, every writer has bad track in common (that is, a book that tanked, but bear in mind that this is more subtle than it looks because much also depends on the provenance of that book) and so lift your sights.
  4. Do not wait for ideal circumstances. Room of your own? I should cocoa; no chance in my house. To be happier, thinner, less busy, add anything…NOOOO. If you want to do it, start right now. YEAH. THIS AFTERNOON. Even it’s just scribbles or a few lines; or a chapter; or the whole first draft vomited onto the page. It will be dreadful, it will be your shit first draft, but it will also be the germ of something that is not. Or lead on to another piece of writing that is so much better in the first place.
  5. You do not have to write every day. Well, if you feel you do you do. But don’t feel that you can’t write a book if you can’t write every day. Write when you can. Also, don’t wait for inspiration. Start writing and inspiration will come; if it doesn’t, take a break. Try later.

    brown notebook in between of a type writer and gray and black camera
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  6. Read. It’s your greatest teacher. Why not read from a genre you haven’t tried before? Or perhaps read a book that seems too long or too difficult. Try works in translation, novellas, poetry, a play.  All time periods if you like. Get to know the brilliant small presses there are. Try non-fiction as well as fiction.
  7. Your writing and all the shit first drafts that got crossed out or maybe the books – it happens – that didn’t make it: it’s all an apprenticeship. You are learning. While I have been writing, though, I’ve been learning about the industry, because that seemed to me to be something I ought to do. Plus I was interested because I like to learn now things work. By the industry, I mean learning about small presses and big publishers, agents, independent and big booksellers, international markets, editors, marketing and book PR. Also, connect with people. I am a funny mix; I’m naturally quite shy and need to hide, preferably under a duvet with a book, after a big social event, because my tank runneth dry. Nonetheless, I love talking to people and learning about what they do; chatting to people who love reading is a joy of my life but it is also a great way of learning what’s going on.
  8. Pay it forward. Help others. I am a great believer in communities; they are the mainstay, I think, of our world. If you get a break, try and help someone else to. Or just try anyway.
  9. When you come to submit – and this is based on manuscripts I have seen and conversations I’ve had with people more knowledgeable than I am – be you, but be mindful of the fact that agents and small publishers get many, many submissions and so as well as being you, you’ve got to be you pitching up having done the groundwork. Craft your approach really well; make your query personal to them and really do your homework – on their catalogue, say; or be aware – and tell them – of a recent wish list they published or an interview they gave where they mentioned a book they’d love to see and you think you might pique an interest. Likewise, if you are submitting to an indie press, then you really should have read some of the books on that catalogue, otherwise why are you submitting to them if you don’t really know what they publish? If you’re submitting in a particular genre you need to be aware of that genre at market. And follow the submissions guidelines always and without exception.
  10. This might be a testy one, but I stand by it. I have found the best use of your time while waiting for rejections – or hits! – is to be working on something new. I’ve heard people say that they cannot start another book until they know about the one that they have submitted, but you might be waiting many months. This may or may not have happened to you and it sucks and it isn’t really good enough, but here are two things that happened to me. First, I wrote something to time for an agent who then rejected it with a form letter after many a cheery back and forth and I never heard from them again. I thought THIS IS IT (how naive was I?) and didn’t work on anything else. Then I stalled because I was upset. Also, I haven’t, compared with some of you extraordinary indomitable people out there, submitted that widely. But I would say that about 30% or so of the people I submitted to, including big agencies who promise they take notice of the slush pile, never replied. I had a no reply after a full manuscript request. Submission is testing; rejection after rejection is testing. There will be low points. So I say, don’t wait to clear your decks before you start another book. Get cracking. This, by the way, is one reason I’ve managed (nearly!) 7 in four years and I am not a full time writer by any means: I am always writing a book. And the writing can be planning, researching, daydreaming in the bath, reading, mind-mapping: all this is your book writing, be reassured. x

    books in shelf
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On creative writing: this is for you, GCSE students.

by Anna Vaught, posted in GCSE, Uncategorized, writing

This is especially for my cousin, Gareth. and one of my own boys, Isaac; year 11, both. But I can take this off if you just died of embarrassment. No, I will.

So. You have to write a creative piece somewhere in your two English language exams. You might be writing a descriptive piece or a story. What are some useful tips to help you manage this in an exam? You will probably have done lots of creative writing in primary and possibly less at secondary and, frankly – you did want me to be frank, yes? – creative writing may not get much space plus, unless your teacher is a copious reader or maybe also a writer, it is hard to teach. So here are some pointers because there are plenty of people out there who feel stuck on this one and think, ‘It’s not my thing.’

NOT SO FAST.

 

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Right. Choice of tasks; do one. You’ll get story/writing titles, probably a first line and maybe also a last line of a story and, depending on the board, you might get given a picture or photograph to use as stimulus. The exam may ask you to write a ‘story’; it may also simply say ‘write about’ (in which case you could do a narrative, descriptive OR reflective piece) but you need to crack on in prose – continuous writing – even if you were to include a poem in there.

Before we start, what about your nuts and bolts?

  1. Check your high frequency punctuation errors: capital letters; clauses (parts of sentences) separated by commas (ask me if you don’t know what I am on about). Promise me you will not commit CRIMES AGAINST APOSTROPHES? I’d rather not see them at all then see them plastered everywhere there is an s. Simple plurals do not have them. You use them before the s if you’re showing possession and after the s if you’re showing possession by more than one person. You use them in contraction where the missing letter or letters are – do not becomes don’t. CHECK THIS OUT: IT’S meaning it is has an apostrophe BUT ITS meaning something that belongs to IT does not. Ever. Neither do his, hers, theirs, whose or ours.
  2. Check your homophone spelling errors. Touched on them there. Words that sound the same but are spelled differently. So who’s/whose or they’re/their/there. Go online and google LIST OF HOMOPHONES and print it and stick it up somewhere. It’s one of the things that makes you look less literate fast. Too/to and also near homophones, like off/of. AAAAARGHHHH. Wait. What’s this? homophones
  3. High frequency spelling errors. A lot is two words; definite has a FINITE in it. Necessary is like you in the old school uniform there: it has one collar and two socks. Do you get it? Again, google COMMON SPELLING ERRORS, print off and observe.
  4. Please check for errors. Are there words missing? Do you have a sentence which doesn’t make sense? Plan five minutes and check five minutes WITHOUT EXCEPTION. The plan can be simply a list of the main ideas you want to cover, but make one because your writing will be better. And remember, in your plan, that if it’s going to be a story, you need to aim for a beginning, a middle and an end. Plot that out.
  5. NOW CREATIVE CONTENT. Be bold and brave in your choice of words and language and do not panic about using 27 metaphors and similes but, instead, focus on using a beautifully chosen verb. Use adjectives and adverbs judiciously and word combinations in unexpected ways.
  6. Dialogue. It enlivens a piece of writing so practise writing it and be sure you know how speech punctuation ought to be handled. Check with your English teacher if you are using a computer on this because you could use italics for speech if need be.
  7. Look at these pictures. Imagine that you can feel their texture. Really imagine that. 
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    Well now, that’s what you are aiming to do in a descriptive piece or story. You want to magic up the texture of that place and how it feels, looks, smells and tastes. Bring it alive.

  8. Perspective. You might think of where you are; above or within. Up in the air or below; to one side and unobserved by others. Perhaps you’re not even supposed to be there. OOOOH. Your perspective – the place from where you are seeing events and things – radically changes how you and your reader observe or experience things. Also, shift it within your description or narrative. Like a camera angle, moving from a wide angle observation of a crowd scene to a zoom in on one particular detail or person; their thoughts, feelings – what you read in their face as you look very carefully at them.
  9. Vary your line length. So, you might have a small number of very short paragraphs – perhaps of one line each, contrasting with your longer paragraphs. You might do this with the first and last line. It might actually be the same sentence; say, an intriguing rhetorical question.
  10. And finally, have faith in your imagination. Here is a great piece of ongoing homework. Be more observant. People watch wherever you are. Discreetly, mind. Notice how extraordinary the everyday is; observe and watch and think about how you could weave and extend a story or a piece of descriptive writing from a conversation you overheard or an unexpected encounter you saw. and go forth, storyteller.story

Because language matters

by Anna Vaught, posted in Uncategorized, words

I am currently editing a thing or two and getting in a total stew about language. In this case, what other people have written and whether I dare challenge.

And I think I do dare.

Language matters – what it connotes and the attitudes it betrays; words other and marginalise and encourage others to do the same. I found, when writing The Revelations of Celia Masters (this is my fourth book, currently on submission after a revise and resubmit) that I took apart some of Trump’s words and phrases.  They are not new. My book is about settlers in the Middle Plantation of Virginia during the English Civil War and I came to look at such words as ‘tame’, ‘infest’; ‘crazed’ and ‘animal’. One of the things many have observed and protested about is that language – presidential and administration language – matters and Trump is roundly casual about the way in which it is used, blaring and glaring; full of brutality.

Trump’s proud ‘We tamed a continent’ says a lot, doesn’t it? The verb ‘tamed’. It says something like, they were savages, but I am not: I am civilised. And the pronoun itself, we. The colonisers who did tremendous things and set the natives straight. The we. We are still that we and it’s still encumbent on us to tame them, he would have you believe. It’s so erroneous I don’t even know where to get started. Trump also refers fairly constantly to ‘Western Values’ which has absolutely no meaning at all. It’s a shadow phrase which I doubt he could even articulate.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the important of language choice when I was preparing Celia Masters (as I am now as I edit others’ work); mulling over sources and academic works like David Hackett Fischer’s exemplary Albion’s Seed. I was thinking about how the Cavaliers, coming into asylum under Berkeley (which is the starting point of my book) held freedom in the highest esteem, but that within it was the freedom to oppress others – and I realise I have expressed that in very broad terms, so you’ll have to read the book! (His and mine!) I explored how, through noting contemporary sources, you could see that colonists clearly believed that their settling of America was God’s work and that He had intervened to make it possible. I promise to write more about this later – and you can see that Celia Masters becomes repelled by it because of what she sees, comes to understand about herself and her true past and what she creates…

 

Back to the editing.

I am, for example, struggling with some of the phrases white writers use to describe skin which is NOT white; this has to be handled so very carefully or not handled at all, some might say. What do you think of  ‘honey-coloured’ or ‘cocoa-coloured’? I’d say you delete it if you’re a white writer. Do you baulk at that? I am also…bothered by the phrase ‘traditional cultures’ in that I see it used by anthropologists and sociologists, but I see academics in the same and in other fields taking it apart. Am I on shaky ground? Quite possibly, but I want to have a discussion about it and with different sources. And I personally don’t think anyone should be using the phrase ‘third world’ because that IS diminishing, patronising and othering.  My older boys were mortified to learn that I had challenged its use in their secondary school. I am a person who is sometimes chided for being ‘too PC’ which makes me tremble with a sort of punchy anger. Overreaction?

When I was writing The Revelations of Celia Masters, I had to think very carefully about the language and concepts I handled because my protagonist is a mid 17th-century white girl tangling with cultures and worlds that ate deeply unfamiliar to her. She has seen only Somerset, the Dorset coast and the court of Charles I. I was really worried about how I was going to write about the use of slavery in the colony and also to write about the Algonquin Indians who are in my story and, like the slaves, integral to it. I sought advice from an excellent source and was led, amongst other things, to the article below; I also discussed how I might approach my exploration and found that what I needed to explore was Celia’s whiteness. I turned it on its head. ‘…write you‘ in the words of the article in this link. As you write, reflect on your own privilege and power. There are plenty of jarring narratives about black culture from white voices. Also, I was damned if I were going to reduce folklore to some hokey thing about fairies, when it’s fire and blood and richly syncretic. The article was useful for that, too. Read carefully, discus with various sources, don’t shoot from the hip, be prepared to be totally and utterly wrong (you might enjoy what the late Hans Rosling has to say about this in Factfulness) and remember that words have power.   

What do you think? About any of this?

(Article from Buzzfeed: succint, intelligent and pithy – and I’d love to discuss it further!)

. https://t.co/gvJ06LmBwe

EDITING SERVICES. TAKE A LOOK! FOUR FREE READS A YEAR TOO, SO KEEP AN EYE ON TWITTER FOR THAT.

by Anna Vaught, posted in books, editing, publishing, reading, Uncategorized, writer, writing

Have you written a story, novella or novella and you’d appreciate someone else’s opinion on how you might improve it? I should love to help with that.

edison

 

Let me read, ponder and provide an objective critique of your work. I will look at voice, language, plot, structure and style. I will also look VERY closely (and several times) at your manuscript for spelling and grammatical errors, missing words – because we all miss those in our own work and, err, editors miss them too.

OR to put it all another way…

We can work on proofing  – checking for errors of all kinds. You might be amazed at how many words are missing or how many typos or misspellings have found their way into your manuscript. Top of the tree are those pesky homophones: words that sound the same but…you get the idea. There/they’re/their; passed/past; who’s/whose. Funny little things, too; like ‘to all intensive purposes’, ‘upmost’, ‘hairy fairy’ (a personal favourite that) and ‘passer bys’ – not to mention all those poor apostrophes which appear when they don’t need to and don’t when they should definitely be there! You can ignore me if you think I’m a pedant too far. Insisting that ‘disinterested’ means not having a dog or a stake in the fight, rather than being ‘uninterested’.  You get the picture.

Line editing – where we look at the creative content, writing style, and language use at the sentence and paragraph level and focus on the way you use language to communicate your story to the reader. Gosh, you will read a lot about this. Culling your adverbs, for example. Showing not telling…

Structural editing (you might also hear this called developmental editing or substantive editing) and it is really the most complex and time-consuming stage of the editorial process. It means that you evaluate the manuscript as a whole and analyse for its author how well its constituent parts cohere. In other words, the big question is, ‘Does this work as a book?’ To make the matter more complex, not everyone agrees on what, err, does make a book. There are plenty of algorithms about on the structure of a successful novel BUT there are plenty of texts that defy those; there are many texts that are genre defying and experimental work. We can talk about that, because I also want to say that your work is your work.

I will also guide, encourage and do my utmost to help you grow in confidence; I will share what I have learned and I won’t pretend to know something that I don’t. I may also recommend someone else if I feel I am not right for you. We will have a good discussion before anything happens!

(Actual picture of me in book and author cheer-leading pose with my favourite pompom)

cheerleader

Details and prices below, but you could DM me through twitter for an initial contact

here https://twitter.com/BookwormVaught

Or you can call, text or whatsapp on my mobile 07814954063 or on my landline, 01225 866488. I apologise in advance: no answerphone because I bought one of those retro 70s style ones and they won’t connect. My email address is annavaughttuition@gmail.com Obviously there’s no charge for that chat. If you are in my area, West Wiltshire, it may be that we can meet face to face. I am based in the Bath area but am also frequently in South and West Wales. That could work too. Or we can do the whole thing online: you might be anywhere in the world!

So, costs…

Novel extract (up to 5000 words) and synopsis: £50

Short story (up to 5000 words): £50

Longer extract or longer short story (up to 10,000 words): £100

How about a submission package, to included detailed feedback on your cover letter, synopsis and first three opening chapters (or fifty pages – dependent on what you are being asked for at submission)? I am happy to  read an agent submission or one which is going directly to a small press. £120

writing

Full novel read (up to 100,000 words) plus your synopsis: £500

Longer novel read – you may have written a stunning and vast work of fantasy or historical fiction – £600 approximately, but we might need to have a chat because HOW LONG ARE WE TALKING HERE?

I will send your critique back to you within 4 weeks of receiving your manuscript and you are then welcome to have a follow-up phone call with me. Sound good? You may wish to send me a paper manuscript but a PDF, Word or a googledoc share are preferred. Either way, you’ll get a report from me plus all my little comments on the manuscript itself. You will know it has been read and loved and more than once.

Ah yes, who am I?

*I am a novelist, short and flash fiction writer, editor, reviewer, poet and essayist.My short fiction, poetry and critical work are widely published online and in print. I’m BA and MA in English Literature and hoping to start a PhD in published work (focus on memory and trauma) when the multiple offspring are a bit older. I am represented by Kate Johnson of Mackenzie Wolf Literary Agency in New York. Works out this year include Saving Lucia (Bluemoose) on 30th April and Famished (Influx) on 10th September. Quite a bit of short fiction and creative non-fiction, too. 

*I am an experienced proofreader, copy editor and copywriter. For literary and business texts.

*Now, you may or may not think this relevant, but I am also an English teacher and tutor and former examiner. This means I am a grammar geek, a spelling whizz and dedicated to preventing crimes against apostrophes. I am a nerd on the deepest level and actually get excited when I see homophone errors or an it’s which should be an its. That might sound a bit weird.

*I am a mentor and advocate – meaning that a joy of my life is to help people – sometimes in very difficult circumstances – improve their confidence and skills. In other words, let me cheerlead you and encourage you to make the mental leap, if you need it, that allows you to say I AM A WRITER.

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*I read about three books a week. May I add yours?

The Life of Almost. My new book’s out

by Anna Vaught, posted in book groups, books, childhood, review, Uncategorized

Welcome to the world, The Life of Almost. Out 31st August with Patrician Press; launch this week at the wonderful Mr B’s Bookshop in Bath. If you would like to come, dm me on twitter @bookwormvaught or annavaughttuition@gmail.com! Or here: https://mrbsemporium.com/events/2018/05/anna-vaught/

The Life of Almost

So welcome to the world, my bard boy, my heart’s song. Novella, The Life of Almost, was published on Friday. News on forthcoming books follows soon; I’ve a lot happening!

The Life of Almost, by Anna Vaughtkha 

(How about you take a look at my first book, too; it’s an autobiographical. A very black comedy about mental illness.)

But back to Almost….

Published August 31st, 2018

Prices: £9.00 (print). The ISBN is 9781999703028 (print) for book ordering and library use and the kindle edition is now up on Amazon, too. If you do buy from Amazon, note that owing to demand outstripping supply – BOO AND YAY – you can still buy there from Amazon affiliated sites such as The Great British Bookshop. AND there’s any number of wonderful independent bookshops. If they don’t stock it, they can order. Here’s a lovely spot – where I’ll be having my launch this week.

https://mrbsemporium.com/shop/books/the-life-of-almost/

https://mrbsemporium.com/

This is a dark comedy set in Wales and a spectral reworking of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Almost is a boy, brought up by his sister, Perfection. He is shrouded by bereavement and surrounded by the hauntings of his family’s undead. He plays in the sea caves, visits graves, amongst mermaids, longing mermen, morticians, houses that respire and a poltergeist moss that grabs your foot. A cast of family and friends drawn from sea caves, the embalming table, the graveyard and the dark Clandestine House, which respires heavily and in which time has stopped. And like Pip, he sings into the sea and likes to tell stories – the key theme of the book which is the story of his life, his struggles and triumphs. He is thwarted in love but understands – the night he meets a ragged convict, for the convict is a merman, come on land – that he has deep and commanding powers.

The poems are the author’s own.

“An exhilarating, exuberantly poetic book with such a wonderful cast of characters, I couldn’t bear for it to end! Like a song, a myth, a fairy tale – by a spellbinding writer.” Heidi James

“In The Life of Almost Anna Vaught has conjured a dark wonder. She writes a distinctive, thrillingly precarious prose, making and breaking its own rules as it glides between voices and stories and worlds with giddy pleasure and incalculable cunning. This short, concentrated novel certainly delights in the fantastic, but it is always rooted in the glorious thicknesses of language and landscape, the ripenesses of a blackberry hedge, the trembling density of a jellyfish.” Anthony Trevelyan

See Storgy review here: https://storgy.com/2018/07/19/book-review-the-life-of-almost-by-anna-vaught/

The first chapter of the book was published by the New Welsh Reader in May 2018. Here is the online edition: https://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=2241

The Life of Almost, although not published until 31st August 2108, was nominated and voted for in The Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize in July 2108. It received a great review from baldoukie:

“Poetic, comedic, a reworking of Great Expectations set in Pembrokeshire, this is a reading delight. A smorgasbord, satisfying at all levels. The child Almost, raised by sister Perfection, lives in an underworld of the dead, with their stories from the past, and with the living. Segueing between both, an interweaving of prose and poetry is the story of his life. The Llewhellin family (my favourite is Muffled Myfanwy Llewhellin), alive and dead, with Miss Davies and her adopted daughter Seren, with mermaids Nerys and Dilys, with the convict Derian Llewhellin, and many more.”

Here is the latest review from the inimitable Jackie Law:

https://neverimitate.wordpress.com/2018/09/03/book-review-the-life-of-almost/

The Life of Almost is a short novel and the second title published by Patrician Press. The first was Killing Hapless Ally, a novel about mental health.

AND IN A WEEK’S TIME, I will also hold a stock of copies, signed and dispatched in 24 hours. Get ’em quickly. £11.50 including postage.

https://patricianpress.com/book/the-life-of-almost/

For our young

by Anna Vaught, posted in anxiety, childhood, teenage, Uncategorized

This post is specifically about young people in their last few years of schooling, year 11 and below. My background is in secondary teaching and also mentoring, as well as mental health advocacy – and my boys are 7, 14 and 16. (As you see, I write, too.) These are just thoughts on the past few weeks. Below them a piece that I felt to be relevant. It was written by a fourteen year old. She’s on the ball, incisive, literate, driven by moral purpose and a clear eye. How wonderful is that?

 

First of all, as study leave began for the year 11s early last month, I wrote…

gcse

So, for our local lot, study leave begins tomorrow; for some of them, their last ever class tomorrow before they leave that school. Some folks sail through school; some sink. Some have very few opportunities (look at some of the recent work by MP for Tottenham, David Lammy on that, for example), and for some, school, getting a meal and someone to focus on you, is the best part of the day. Some struggle in a good place because of problems with mental and/or physical health, some young people lack confidence, are recovering from something or have an acute sense they don’t fit in, and this can be eviscerating for them. There will be young people who have not established a friendship group and it really bothers them; young people who will feel really upset and disempowered if a well-meaning member of staff says in a briefing or assembly for year 11, that ‘this is the best summer of your life!’ What does that say to the young person who isn’t going to the prom (and I mean, not through informed choice, but because it scares them or they feel they don’t know how to mix, say)who isn’t invited to parties and maybe to a lot more people who ingest, ‘It’s all death and taxes after this’?

prom

I think about all this a lot. I wonder if, in our attempts to prompt excitement at ages and stages, we in fact create anxiety around what should be very natural transitions. I also think we must, as teachers and parents, accept that normal and healthy is HUGE and the failure therein is generally in the lack of imagination from adult caregivers. 

This time of year can be really hard for parents, for families, for our young. Allow me to be bossy and say that if you are a parent, you ought to put any competitive talk away right now and maybe, in August, share your offspring’s glowing GCSE results privately (I know some will dislike my saying that!) rather than on social media. Encourage your offspring to do the same. I do not mean don’t be proud; I don’t mean don’t halloo or go to the ball: I mean, be mindful.

In homes and schools and settings, know that some young people choose to be alone; that does not mean they are lonely, nor that they will never manage good and abiding friendships – this will come; they are so young still. I think we should offer a challenge if an assessment of someone and their ability are predicated on how much the student says in class; it isn’t the only index of engagement and, also, it can be horrifying to some students to pipe up in front of their peers. And some people never socialise widely, don’t like to be in a group or, say as introverts, need quiet time after an event and being busy (this includes me).

So far, in parenting, we’ve had extensive school refusal, CAMHS (child and adolescent mental health services) and many talks from a secondary school about how opportunities were closing down (meant well; meant to be firm guidance) and I cried myself to sleep many times over that. Some young people need more time. To suggest – and I swear I am not joking when I tell you I heard this, myself, in KS1 – that their way is entirely mapped is ludicrous and limiting, for them and for you as their parent or carer. A school refuser or young person who is only partially in school or who has been withdrawn for whatever reason will need more time, but have faith in that. And I wanted to say that any parents reading this who are feeling tender because, in a year group or with schooling, it just hasn’t gone as you hoped, then know that you did the best you could and never mind what anyone else says, including me. I would list any number of real-life examples of waiting, time, growing into confidence and self acceptance, but that would be to break a confidence. So just hugs, yes? I love doing my writing, but working with young people for 20 (gulp!) years has been the joy of my life.

And finally…a student wrote something for me. not for homework, but to get something off their chest. They are in year 8 and I am writing this with parental and student consent. Here’s why we have to be careful what we say BUT ALSO why we should take huge comfort and pride in this country’s young. ‘This is absolutely how I feel’ they said: ‘And we are going to have to change things, right?’

Teach me, said I.

Society.

Where do I start?

You will be judged on what you wear, which genre of music you like, how you act and what you look like. On top of that, who you choose to hang around with, and are friends with, which shows you like, how popular you are, and any personal trait. You will be made fun of for being who you are.

So don’t tell me that inner beauty is more important than outer beauty, because in society these days, it isn’t. No-one will even try to give you a chance to see if you are beautiful on the inside, if you’re not beautiful on the outside.

Take the Kardashians, for example: their whole lives and careers depend on what they look like. They are the perfect example of what society wants us to look like, in fact! So, are they what we like to call ‘perfect’? Is perfection having big butts and books, a tiny waist, a perfectly symmetrical face? The Kardashians, along with many other social media influencers lead us to believe that we cannot achieve beauty without surgery or extreme measures. They promote things like hunger-suppressing lolly pops, waist trainers, or spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on surgery and improvements every year. But if you look closely, you will see their fan base is mainly young kids, teenagers and people in their early twenties – and I think that this is who kids are growing up with as their so-called role models.

lolly

You open any magazine, Go on.  There are pictures of ridiculously skinny models with perfect skin and hair; girls look at them and think I want to look like them…why can’t I look like them?

We get told not to eat things because we don’t want to get fat. Then when we don’t eat, we get called other names. It is as if we can never win because for years society has been telling women to be beautiful as if beauty were the most important thing in the world. You wonder why girls and women get depressed!

But here’s the thing. We blame society, yet we ARE society. We say how society needs to change, but it’s down to us to make that happen. Above all, we need to stop trying to be like everyone else around us. We are unique, we are individuals – and we need to embrace who we are for,

‘No-one ever made a difference by being like everybody else’ (P.T.Barnum.)

hope

And finally, an embarrassing twitter thread on when your young teach you.