Children’s Authors: Enid Blyton on writing from life

A guest post I wrote recently (Dutch Boys and Fast Boats) for the amazing Blog of Green Gables: a mother–daughter reading journal by Kristen den Hartog and “N,” got me thinking about the books that made an impression on me as a child. Not long after the post appeared, I was sad to learn that John Christopher (real name Christopher Youd, and he wrote under many pen names), an author I’d loved as a girl, passed away on February 3, 2012. I’ll remember John Christopher especially for The White Mountains fantasy trilogy, which an elementary school teacher read to our class — captivating me completely — and which I later read to my sons.

I decided to research some of my remembered authors online and see what they had to say about writing, and the writing life. Over the next few months I’ll share their thoughts with you in the hope these inspire your writing — and also rekindle memories of your own favourite childhood reads (search Category “Children’s Authors on Writing” on my homepage).

First, Enid Blyton …

Enid Blyton with her daughters Gillian and Imogen

“The Famous Five” are the Enid Blyton characters I remember best from my childhood reading. The Five were four adventurous children — siblings Julian, Dick and Anne, and their cousin Georgina (“George”) — along with George’s dog Timothy, who was depicted on book covers, I believe, as a Golden Retriever. A British television series based on the books was broadcast in 1978 and 1979.

Blyton was a much-admired British children’s writer who also wrote as Mary Pollock. She penned a series of books for younger readers featuring one of her best-known characters, Noddy, as well as several series of children’s adventure books, including the Famous Five (21 novels, 1942-1963), the Five Find-Outers and Dog (15 novels, 1943–1961), and the Secret Seven (15 novels, 1949–1963).

According to Nicolette Jones of The Telegraph (30 June 2007), Blyton “wrote nearly 800 books over a 40-year career, many of them quite slim, as well as close to 5,000 short stories. She sold 200 million books in her lifetime, with few translations until the 1960s and 1970s, and has sold some 400 million altogether. About half of her titles are still in print, and they still sell 11 million copies a year. . . .”

Blyton published an autobiography in 1952 titled The Story of My Life, but her fiction too was informed by her life experiences, which she said

“… sank down into my ‘under-mind’ and simmered there, waiting for the time to come when they would be needed again for a book — changed, transmuted, made perfect, finely-wrought — quite different from when they were packed away.

“And yet the essence of them was exactly the same. Something had been at work, adapting, altering, deleting here and there, polishing brightly — but still the heart, the essence of the original thing was there, and I could almost always recognize it.”

In a letter to psychologist Peter McKellar dated 26 February 1953, she elaborated:

“These things [seen and experienced] come up time and again in my stories, changed, sometimes almost unrecognisable — and then I see a detail that makes me say — yes — that’s one of the Cheddar Caves, surely! Characters also remind me of people I have met — I think my imagination contains all the things I have ever seen or heard, things my conscious mind has long forgotten — and they have all been jumbled about till a light penetrates into the mass, and a happening here or an object there is taken out, transmuted, or formed into something that takes a natural and rightful place in the story — or I may recognise it — or I may not — I don’t think that I use anything I have not seen or experienced — I don’t think I could. I don’t think one can take out of one’s mind more than one puts in. . . . Our books are facets of ourselves.”

Source: “Enid the Writer,” compiled by Anita Bensoussane, The Enid Blyton Society: http://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/enid-the-writer.php