Fine Words Butter No Parsnips

In the novel that I am currently writing which, at the start, is set in the early 1960s, there is an unpleasant character called Edna Blaney who doesn’t believe in praise. She subscribes to the notion that children need to know when they have done wrong, but they don’t necessarily need to know when they have done right. When I was writing this character, who was very vivid to me, I realised that she was an amalgam of many teachers and other adults who populated my childhood.

Seventy years ago there were many beliefs about motivating people to achieve desired outcomes, whether behavioural or academic, which bear little resemblance to the way that children are encouraged these days.

In the 1950s and 60s, many schools still caned children for routine misdemeanors along the lines of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child,’ and I can remember being rapped over the knuckles with a ruler on a fair few occasions at my own school, despite being one of the more compliant kids. Praise was thought to make you both ‘big-headed’ and ‘too big for your boots,’ both clearly terrible afflictions for a child, so we were routinely ‘belittled’ in order to cut us all down to size. I shall never forget the moment when, as a thirty-eight adult, I asked my boss if he thought that success was going to my head and that I was getting too big for my boots, and he replied “well, Tricia, if you are, then maybe you need a bigger pair of boots!”

Which is much closer to the way that children are motivated these days. My two grandsons went to a primary school which subscribed to something called ‘a growth mindset’. Instead of saying ‘I can’t do it’, they were encouraged to say ‘I can’t do it yet.’ This idea starts with an obvious truth: that when you try something new and are given the opportunity to practice it under expert guidance and supervision, this will help you to get better at something. 

This is a million miles away from treating children as people who either have talent or don’t. When I was at school there were many labels applied to us. I was ‘clever’ (sorry - big-headed - but it just meant I was good at passing exams). But I was also decidedly not ‘sporty’ or ‘arty,’ I was ‘hopeless at maths’ and I definitely couldn’t sing in tune.These are deeply ingrained beliefs that I carry to this day. Who knows? I might have become Virginia Wade back in the day if my tennis teacher had said: “nice try, now do it this way,” instead of “you’re useless, this game is clearly not for you.” And it is only recently that I have discovered that I can draw. Rather well. A huge surprise.

However, the danger with constant praise is that it can become mindless quite quickly. “You’re so clever,” “That was amazing,” “You’re brillant” and “Well done!” said constantly, for the most trivial effort can be counter-productive. It may lead to children not understanding that becoming really good at something requires effort, hard work and perseverance. Does it also require lots of talent? Perhaps it does if you are going to become Carlos Alcaraz or maybe win a Nobel prize for mathematics or the Turner prize for art, but most of us aren’t aiming for that. Like my grandsons when they were little, we are just pushing ourselves to see precisely how far we can go with a new skill if the circumstances support our success.

Now that I am seventy-eight rather than seven or eight, surely my days of trying something new should be far behind me?  After all “I can’t do this yet” can hardly apply when you’ve had so many years to have a go at something but never quite got around to it. Surely a better mantra is ‘I can’t do this and now it’s too late.’  Except that every fibre of my being rejects the notion that there is some arbitrary moment that we stop being able to try something new. Even if we fail. Even if we are mediocre. Because, you never know what you might be capable of doing if only you had a go. And, very especially, if you get the right sort of support at the right time to encourage you to keep going.

For evidence of the truth of this, I am indebted to an article I have just read called ‘How a Well-Timed Word Can Change Everything’ by Tim Harford in the FT. He quotes some research on Economics undergraduates in Texas who were sent a personal email from their tutor if they came in the top 10 per cent of the class. These emails praised their achievement, referred to them as top performers, noted that they had an aptitude for economics and encouraged them to sign up for further classes. The results were not trivial. Students just above the cut-off for receiving the email were 40 per cent more likely to enrol in the follow-up intermediate microeconomics course than those below it. As Harford notes: “It’s remarkable to see such a trivial action - a nice email - having such a transformative effect.”

Well, I concur with this one hundred per cent. Because I have my own evidence of how a nice email containing a ‘well-timed’ word made all the difference to me in the past six months and how this was then very nearly derailed by someone who was of the Edna Blaney school of withholding praise and encouragement. 

A Well-Timed Word. 

As many of you know about ten months ago, I began to do something I had never done before and started to write a novel. I was so terrified that people would pour scorn on this that I kept it a complete secret except for a close Irish friend who agreed to help me shape the content, especially the dialogue between the Irish characters. I wrote 82,000 words (the romance), planning to write the second half of the story (the fallout and resolution of that romance) as book two. Then I hit a road block. My friend had been encouraging, because she’s a lovely person, but now I needed a professional appraisal. But it had to be secret.

So I enrolled for a service offered by Faber Academy and sent the manuscript for professional appraisal at a cost of £500. I was on tenterhooks for three weeks and then I got back an eleven page document which may just have changed my life. Well, perhaps, more accurately, like the emails sent to those economics students,changed my direction in life. Because it said: “Well done. You are in the tiny percentage of people who actually write a novel and there is much to like in both your story and writing.” The rest of the eleven pages highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the book, gave me lots of excellent pointers, and suggested that I needed to take out all the ‘fillers’ and write it as one book, not two.

A Badly-Timed Put-Down

Buoyed and delighted by this encouragement I began a second draft, then a third in which I cut the 82,000 down to 40,000 words and embarked on writing the second part. Then I decided to enrol on a mentoring programme, again with the Faber Academy, just to get some professional inputs and constructive guidance. I was paired with someone who sounded amazing and had a ninety-minute zoom call with my designated mentor who, having only read 1000 words of my book - about two pages - condescendingly told me that my story was implausible and would need considerable work. She left me with a distinct impression that she thought that I was wasting my time. I was so crushed by this that for several days I couldn’t bring myself to look at my manuscript. Talk about going from hero to zero (me as a writer, that is).

Fortunately I had enough confidence to get some feedback from another very dear friend. Admittedly not likely to be my harshest critic, but I knew that she’d be honest. I told myself that if she hedged and said “well done, but sadly not my kind of book” I’d leave the story in its folder on my laptop and no-one would be any the wiser. However, to my great delight she WhatsApped the minute she finished it and said: “What can I say? I am devastated. I just want to stay in the Finn/Evie bubble but I couldn’t stop myself and now I am bereft! A wonderful story so beautifully written. What an achievement. I wonder who will write the screenplay?!”

Now so many more people have read my book and I have received some fine words about it, which have definitely buttered my parsnips. Happily I initially gave myself permission to try something new, then I got some timely constructive guidance from a professional, and then I sought encouragement from a potential ideal reader, and then from many more ‘super readers.’ As they say ‘the rest is history’ but I will be eternally grateful for those words of encouragement that came at the perfect time to validate me as a writer, and now as a published author.