Strangely I’m in a cover lesson doing an English cover. I wasn’t actually teaching at all. For the first part of the lesson they had been given a book to read. They were reading ‘Wolf’ by Gillian Cross.
As I write this, in longhand on some A4 paper out of the drawer, I am sitting in a classroom with twenty-five thirteen year-old kids who are all silently reading.
It is incredibly quiet in here. I don’t think it was anywhere near as studious back when I was at school. It certainly wasn’t in my lessons but then there was quite a disruptive force in those classrooms.
Someone has just coughed. There is a small rustle as kids change positions. Occasionally someone turns a page.
I am free to indulge my memory and scrawl this.
I look around the room. They all appear to be absorbed in the story. It must be good.
I think about this phenomenon. It is quite incredible. A writer has accumulated a series of ideas into a coherent tale, has created a plot and strung those ideas together into a story. They have explained what they have imagined in words and strung the ideas together in words to tell the tale. The words are abstract symbols for things, concepts, actions and descriptions. These other minds are interpreting those words back into those concepts and translating them into meaning. They are piecing together the story from those symbols.
The writer describes and constructs a tale.
The readers are accessing that tale.
They want to know what is going to happen. They want to find out. The words are creating images in their minds. I wonder if they are all imagining the same pictures? If they are conjuring up the same scenes? Are they all embellishing it with their own personality, experience and imagination or is the writer directing them to see it just as she saw it in her own mind?
They’re absorbed. I do not have to say a thing.
There is no doubt that humans have an amazing ability to imagine, to communicate, to learn from the experiences of others. It is a gift.
Strange that – using the term gift presupposes the presence of a God. A gift is given. It is a skill.
I am a writer.