So you want to become a writer, a novelist, and you don’t know how to begin. My daughter, Sharon Maas, during her last visit to Guyana gave a few hints for those who dream of writing. Her first novel, ‘Of Marriageable Age,’ became a bestseller in France. She published two other novels and now her fourth novel is ready for publication.
She gives us a taste of her experience as a child and then gives advice to would- be writers.
If you want to write, you have to read in order to write well. I remember at school in the sixties, being made to learn entire passages from Shakespeare by heart; repeating them over and over again until I could say them in my sleep, and never forget them. Now, 35 years later, I boasted of this to my daughter, lamenting the fact that learning by heart just is not done in today’s English c1asses. She challenged me to prove it, and right away I spouted ‘The quality of mercy’ from The Merchant of Venice − words I had not seen or spoken for decades. Something deep inside me had absorbed the speech and made it a part of myself. Such is the power of the subconscious mind. It forgets nothing.
Good writing comes from the subconscious mind. Many today will question the use of learning speeches by heart, but exquisite examples of the English language, if soaked into the mind at an early age, embed themselves there and provide a hidden template for our own use of words. Rhythm, cadence, the very sound of words become a part of us, and if these are planted wisely when we are young, then deep inside they grow into a deep wisdom, a knowledge of how words fit together. Subconsciously that knowledge speaks to us when we are older and influences our own choice of words.
The same is true of storytelling. We learn how to tell stories by first hearing them. As with learning by heart, our subconscious mind figures out how to piece together all the elements that have been fed into it from our own experience, and weld them together to make a new, original story, a story that comes from the heart. These are the best stories…
Stories have been coming to me all my life. As a little girl growing up in Guyana I could sit for hours and dream. I could set people in motion, put them in situations, and hear them speak. I could put them in and out of trouble and spin out happy endings to unfortunate circumstances. When I was eight I began to write such stories down. They were adventures a la Enid Blyton: several children, a dog, perhaps a horse or two, buried treasures, robbers, kidnappers and the like.
Adults don’t approve of children who dream. Dreaming is seen as a bad habit, and the adult world – in particular, school – is very concerned with breaking such children and getting them back into the ‘real’ world – the world that, for us dreamers, at best is just so very boring, so grey in grey!
Dreaming was for many years an escape. A nice soft cushion, a woolly cloud in the sky. It took some good hard-boiled suffering to wake me up and transform it from a pleasant pastime into an act of creation. I began to write Of Marriageable Age, and once I started I couldn’t stop, and that was when I rediscovered the joy of writing. I realized that I could only become whole when I stopped dreaming my dreams, put in the hard work of getting them down in black and white. Stories are given to be shared with others.
