Writing as a subversive activity

As mentioned a few blogs ago, I recently finished writing a shortish and rather crazy kids' novel. With a working title of The Elephant Heist, it details an outrageous plot to rob a town bank. (The two bandits hitch a parachute to an elephant, and plunge from 30,000 feet in the dead of night to crash through the bank's roof—with chaotic results for the town and a particular group of kids.) But what may not be immediately apparent, unless you think about it a bit, is how subversive this activity of writing a novel is in the 21st Century. We now live, of course, in the age of television. Children are being drawn to watch more and more on screen, whether it is television itself, or television's major allies (i.e. movies, Youtube clips, and video games). Writers may therefore feel the need to justify their writing of a new novel, which is precisely what I'm doing in this blog.

Now, firstly, I should point out what I am not saying. I am not saying that kids should be forced to turn screens off and read books instead, as much as I might like that to be the case. Parents and teachers, by contrast, may quite legitimately turn screens off, for they have responsibility for the children under their care. But writers are in a different category. They do not possess—nor should they—such powers of coercion.

What I am saying is actually something more subversive. As a writer, I am not trying to force kids to do anything. But I am quite deliberately seeking to subvert the dominant medium of our age: television. I am seeking to use words—words that will be read, not produced graphically—to tell a story that kids will love: and I am presenting it in a medium that is ultimately much more wonderful (I believe) than mere television.

Television, remember, presents every image ready-made. Each frame is prepackaged. There is no room—not the slightest room—for a child's own imagination. A certain TV program may appear "imaginative", even highly so, but it is the imagination of the program's creator and producer, not of the child who is watching it. The child therefore consumes a highly produced package, a package which cares nothing for the imaginative contribution of the child, and is, in fact, opposed to it. A TV program only "works" if it is consumed as a ready-made piece.

But "reading a book" is, and has always been, different. Words are printed on the page. The author and child meet half way. All the images, and sound effects, and voices, and characters, and scenery, and story highs-and-lows appear in the child's own mind. The child is constantly engaging with the words and producing their own graphic version in their brain. The story becomes "theirs" in a way that a television program never can.

Television, I expect, will only increase its dominance in the coming decades. It has too many powerful tools at its command to be easily resisted. But one place of resistance that continues to retain considerable power is the reading of books. When a child truly discovers the joy of reading, they develop a certain immunity to the flashy yet empty promises of television. They develop powers of creativity, imagination and thoughtful engagement, equipping themselves to be more human, and thereby more real in their futures.

That's why my writing of a new novel is subversive. It opposes (happily) the age of television in which we live. And hopefully (joining a host of books by other authors already out there) it will wrest many hours away from screens!

My 10-tonne elephant

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) I don't really own a 10-tonne elephant. I only own an imaginary one. But, since this elephant of mine figures quite prominently in the crazy kids' novel I have just finished writing, I thought it might be worthwhile telling you about it. This elephant, in fact, may even make it into the novel's title―that's if the publisher ends up using the title "The Elephant Heist" (pictured) which I hope they will.

Let me tell you the set-up for my novel, and then you might understand why I so wanted the elephant. You see, the story is about an ordinary town that wakes up one morning to find the town's bank has been robbed during the night. But I didn't want this bank heist to be ordinary. I wanted it to be dramatic and wacky, because this was a novel for kids aged around 8-12 years and I wanted the plot to be pushed to the max wherever possible. So, the two bandits in the story did a strange thing. They didn't just break into the bank with a sledgehammer in the middle of the night, or dig a tunnel underneath. No, they had one of their henchmen fly a plane at 30,000 feet over the town. Furthermore, they had nabbed (from who knows where) a huge African male elephant that very unwillingly was now forced to play a major part in the heist. Fixing a giant saddle on the elephant's back, and slipping the elephant into an enormous parachute harness, the bandits then hopped on while the huge beast was PUSHED out of the airplane. Down, down, down the elephant zoomed in the parachute. The two bandits guided the elephant by means of a massive rudder they had fixed onto the elephant's back. Then, with a large CRASH, the bull elephant smashed through the roof of the town bank. The bandits were in!

Thus the town woke up the next morning to a double emergency. Not only had the bank been robbed, with the bandits still at large (presumably) somewhere in the town, but also there was a massive and very angry African elephant inside the bank that couldn't get out.

This was the sort of set-up that gave me something wonderful to work with in the remainder of the novel. The town was in an uproar. The media was frenetic. The police were trying to track down the bandits. And four kids and a Dobermann were drawn into the middle of it all, and become, as the novel progresses, key to resolving the whole outrageous situation.

So you can see (hopefully) why my elephant was key. He turned a fairly humdrum set-up into a very wacky one, surrounded, by the very nature of things, with heaps of drama and possibility.

I'll probably tell you more about The Elephant Heist novel in some future blogs. And, if you're interested, you can follow me on Facebook at facebook.com/peterfriendwriting to hear news of where and when this novel might actually be published! It should be LOADS of fun.