My son is writing his first book. He’s not the first of our family’s second generation to follow me in this path. Since outing myself as an author, more than a few of my nephews and nieces have sought to outdo my efforts, often with nerve-jangling success. On a trip to Worthing last month, my nephew Daniel sneered quite derisively when I told him it had taken me three years to write my book, since he’d written two that weekend alone. My niece Anna wrote a novel – with the enviable title of Two Children, Millions of Doors and Good and Evil – that was jarringly readable, while nine-year-old Oisin has spent the past year compiling lore for his similarly excellent deep fantasy series, Ice, Fire, War.
I’ve had many conversations with them about their works, because passing wisdom to the next generation is the least that should be expected of a famous author like myself. And I can assure you that these interactions are a two-way street. They keep me abreast of updates as they come in, and I heavily imply that their lack of copyright means I can take their best ideas for my own work any time I choose. They’re smart kids, so they get it.
At four, my son’s adventures in writing have only just begun, complicated slightly by his difficulty in getting ideas down on to the page. A lot of this is logistical, since his left-handedness makes writing a bit fiddly and he’s not yet fully committed to the horizontal left-to-right writing form typically taught in this part of the world. Unwilling to be blunted by convention, his text goes up and down at will, which I take to be a clever reference to the proto-literate forms of Sumerian pictographs. He also uses his Bs, Ds, Ps, and Qs interchangeably, which explains his book’s final page, which features ‘the enb’ in massive blue betters.
For the sake of legibility, my wife takes on writing duties for the body of the text, transcribing the words as he dictates and leaving him to draw illustrations below. It’s her dad’s birthday, so luckily Me & Grandad’s Biggest Adventure is every bit the non-stop thrill-ride its title implies. ‘They saw fruits that they liked,’ is its conspicuous opening line, perhaps informed by the fact he was eating fruit at the time. As I so often tell my students, it’s important to write what you know.
‘Then,’ comes the striking next line, ‘they saw vegtable monsters.’ The misspelling of ‘vegetable’ is actually my wife’s error, but I am too distracted by the teeth-baring veg below to tease her at the time and resolve to do so later in the national press. ‘Then they went to outer space,’ blares the following page, replete with rocket ship, aliens and planets, ‘and finally’ comes the conclusion, ‘they went to Hook lighthouse.’
This climax at a landmark on Ireland’s southeast coast, is a masterpiece in misdirection and a fitting tribute to his grandad, who takes him there most summers. More importantly, it shows he’s learned the true secret to any good story: strip away all the fancy stuff and keep it simple. All you really need is a beginning, a middle, and an enb.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
