How did Roald Dahl go about writing such fabulously original and funny – and really quite rude – books, one after another?
First, he always did things in the same way. For most of his life, Roald liked writing with a yellow pencil called a Dixon Ticonderoga 1388-2 5/10, medium. (Try saying that quickly!) He wrote on American yellow legal pads, which were sent to him from New York City. It may come as no surprise to learn that yellow was his favourite colour.
Next, he had a special place where he wrote. He and a builder friend built a little brick hut in his garden in Great Missenden. Inside he put things that he liked and he arranged his chair – which had a hole cut in just the right place so that it didn’t press on his injured back – to be in the perfect spot, with a special board across the arms of the chair for him to rest his paper on.
When he was writing a book, Roald would walk through the garden to his hut, close the door and no one was allowed to disturb him. Well, that’s how it was supposed to be, but you know better than me what children are like! Yes, they would occasionally pop in and out but I imagine the only creatures most likely to see Roald Dahl at work were the cows in the next door field. If they had peeped through the window, they would have seen Roald scribbling away with his pencil on his yellow paper. Usually, he did his writing only in the morning and in the late afternoon, which would leave him free to do all the other business and fun things during the rest of the day.
Inside his hut, Roald went into a kind of trance. He concentrated so hard that he could whisk himself away to all sorts of different places in his mind – visiting scenes and people and things, both real and imaginary. It was here that he came up with plots and plans and schemes – the wicked tricks that happen so often in his stories. He had a notebook to capture his ideas and whenever he thought of something, he scribbled it down. Then, later, if he was wondering what to write next, he could comb through his notebook, looking for ideas.
Most writers I know have notebooks. I do. I sometimes think that I have a notebook because I’m afraid that I’ll forget things. That’s not such a crazy idea, because writing was invented as a way of remembering things. And maybe that’s what Roald was doing – trying to hang on to his thoughts and memories. He was always on the lookout for stuff that would surprise his readers, even if it was shocking or disgusting. Sometimes, he was just capturing a bit of language. I imagine that he thought something like this: I like that … I like the way it sounds … I like the image it conjures up in my mind … I mustn’t forget that … I’ll put that in my ideas book because it might come in handy when I’m trying to describe someone in a story. I can’t tell you if Roald really thought that, but I can tell you that I do.
Like a lot of writers, when Roald was in the middle of writing a book he could be quite twitchy and irritable. Why? To me, it’s because the book feels like unfinished business. I am nervous about whether it will work out or not. I worry if I get stuck or if I think that this book is not turning out as well as the last book. Half of me wants to show the book to other people, the other half thinks that if I show it to someone else, they’ll blow away the magic that’s making the book happen in the first place or they’ll suggest something that will send the story off in totally the wrong direction.
After he’d finished a book and sent it off to the publisher, instead of dancing with relief, Roald would be worried. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever write anything again, and the thought of this made him grumpy. But, as we know, he did go on and on writing, and with the books came stupendous success.
I’m guessing that you’ve read a few of them (see the whole list on page 160) and I’m also guessing that you have favourite scenes, favourite people and also characters you most like to hate and despise. I hope so, because I think that’s part of the fun in reading. But was Roald Dahl trying to say something to us with all with these books?
In Matilda, Roald seems to be saying over and over again, ‘Don’t forget to read books!’ But there’s a LOT more going on. He paints a picture of a school that is so horrible and a teacher who is so lovely that it’s almost as if he’s dreaming of the perfect school – one where every teacher is as nice and as kind to children as Miss Honey. And what about Matilda’s parents? Is he saying that children deserve better parents than these and that if they don’t have them, and if they read and read and read, they can get themselves a better life?
And then there’s Danny the Champion of the World. I like this book a lot. It’s a story about people who don’t have very much and people who have too much. There’s a father and son who get on really well and together they play an amazing trick that … well, I couldn’t possibly say. If you’ve read the book, you’ll KNOW. If you haven’t, go and find a copy at once. You won’t be disappointed, I promise. But despite this fabulous, amazing plot that I’m not going to tell you about, Roald wrote something else that he would repeat over and over again. Danny’s dad was ‘sparky’ and Roald said that parents should always try to be sparky. What do you think he meant?
When The Twits and George’s Marvellous Medicine and The Witches came out, some people started to wonder just how beastly Roald Dahl could get. Were all his books going to be full of incurably horrible characters? And was destroying them the only way to stop them being so despicable? Some people said that too many of these nasty people were women.
Once again, Roald found himself arguing with his critics. He told them that in his books he had horrible women and nice women. And hadn’t all stories for children always been like this? In particular, some critics picked out the passage at the beginning of The Witches where he says that any woman you meet could turn out to be a witch. Was he trying to make children suspicious of women?
Look at Grandmamma in The Witches, he and his defenders said. Look at Sophie in The BFG. They were both clever, tender female characters. And he would go on to write about Matilda and Miss Honey in Matilda too.
Now, I’ll let you into a secret. Did you know that writers don’t always get a story right the first time round? It’s true. They might try out a storyline and if they or the people who help make the books (the agents, editors and publishers) don’t think that the storyline works, they try another one. It’s a bit like going to a clothes shop, trying on an outfit, looking in the mirror, deciding if you like what you’re wearing, listening to what other people think and then trying on something else. It rarely comes out right the first time. A book is really the end of a long and winding road. Roald wrote several drafts and it often took him over a year to finish a whole story.
Here are some of the storylines that Roald tried out and then scrapped. Which do you prefer – the early storyline or the version that made it into a book?
James and the Giant Peach
The original cast list starred a Hairy Green Caterpillar and an Earwig. But there was no Old-Green-Grasshopper, no Miss Spider and no Glow-worm either.
The crocodile is whirled up into the sky by Trunky the elephant, but instead of hitting the sun he falls safely to earth.
The Twits
Mr and Mrs Twit are stuck upside-down forever.
The Witches
Bruno the mouse became a spy for the British government.
Instead of being good, Matilda was the wickedest child in the world. Meanwhile, her parents were really nice and longsuffering. Miss Honey didn’t even exist. And there was no Miss Trunchbull either. Instead, there was a teacher called Miss Hayes, who loved betting on horses. Matilda used her special powers to make sure that the horse she wanted to win was first past the post. And that was what kept her from going to prison! In the end this really dreadful Matilda died in a car crash. Oh dear.
Looking at some of Roald’s early drafts reminds me that he tried very, very, very hard indeed to make you laugh, make you surprised, make you amazed. Perhaps you think that writing is pretty easy – all you have to do is sit on your backside scribbling a few words down. Well, I’m not going to say it’s the hardest thing in the world to do. But I will say that Roald Dahl was a writer who tried hard, day after day after day, to make the stories work. If you really like his books – perhaps love them – then that’s because of this hard work. You can’t see the hard work, because reading is about fun and enjoyment and interest. And that is part of the magic of writing.
What is it about the way Roald Dahl wrote that makes his books such fun? I think there are LOTS of things he does to entertain his readers. You might think of totally different things. But that’s what is so splendid about books – there are no right answers. Everyone is allowed to have their own ideas about what is and what isn’t GREAT.
First, let’s peek inside the pages of Matilda. Here, the terrible Miss Trunchbull is confronting poor Bruce Bogtrotter:
I love all the different names Miss Trunchbull calls Bruce Bogtrotter. But in real life, people don’t usually talk like this. Try it. Pretend you’re really angry about something or somebody and make a list of insults. It’s actually quite hard. But it’s very entertaining. This kind of writing is called exaggeration or hyperbole, which is pronounced ‘high-per-bolly’ – a word that I’m sure Roald would have loved.
Flip back a few pages to the very beginning of Matilda.
A fun thing to do with writing like this is to think about who’s speaking. Is it Roald Dahl? Maybe … except Matilda is fiction and Roald was absolutely real. In most storybooks, the person telling the story is usually someone pretending to be the author – as if it’s a diary or a memoire – or a kind of invisible storyteller who isn’t a character, just someone who can magically tell us what’s happening.
One of the really intriguing things about Roald Dahl’s books is that he liked to say Roald-Dahlish things and do the invisible-storytelling thing, sometimes in the same book, sometimes on the same page. What’s more, the Roald-Dahl-ish things are often rude, funny, amazing or totally outrageous.
In this extract, it sounds as if Roald is in the same room, just chatting. It’s actually quite hard to write like that, because you have to forget all the stuff you’ve been told about making sentences long and interesting, with loads of describing words and plenty of connectives – like ‘but’ and ‘and’ and ‘because’ – to join them all together. Instead, you have to make the sentences short and snappy, with very few connectives, because that’s how most of us speak when we’re just chatting to each other. Look at the very first sentence: ‘It’s a funny thing about mothers and fathers.’ There’s no introduction to that sentence. It’s almost as if Roald is thinking aloud, or there’s been a conversation about mothers and fathers and this is halfway through it. Again, it sounds as if he’s just chatting to the reader.
Now for another Roald Dahl trick … it’s one very small word: we. Roald was brilliant at getting readers on his side. By using the word ‘we’, it’s as if he gets the reader to become his friend, or join his gang while he is telling the story. He doesn’t really know that ‘we’ all think that parents who boast about their children make ‘us’ sick! He just gets us thinking that we do by saying that we do! When writers do this – especially if it’s funny – it can feel kind of cosy. Roald Dahl and others also do it with the word ‘you’. I could write, ‘Hey, you know how when you’re ill and you’re lying in bed …’ and, in one stroke, I’ve sounded as if I know you, you know me and we’re all in the same situation – being ill. If you ever watch stand-up comedians, they do exactly the same thing.
Did you realize that Roald Dahl had squeezed so much into the very beginning of Matilda? Put all of these fantastic writing techniques and tricks together and they add up to one thing: a great way to grab someone’s attention. It certainly worked for me!
Next, let’s dive into James and the Giant Peach to one of my very favourite parts, at the end of Chapter Five and beginning of Chapter Six:
Here, Roald is building suspense. Writing can be a bit like unfolding something, like a game of pass-the-parcel. Slowly, the writer reveals what’s happening. But that’s only half of what’s going on … Writers are very cunning people who are not only unfolding and revealing. Just like conjurors and magicians, they are hiding stuff too. Imagine Roald Dahl sitting in his hut. He knows what’s coming next. He knows that he’s going to tell you about a peach. He knows that he’s going to tell you about a GIANT peach. But as he’s writing, he’s got to keep that wonderful, topsecret information hidden for as long as he can, while making you desperate to know more.
One way of doing this is to reveal details v-e-r-y slowly, bit by bit. Here, Roald does this through the eyes of someone who doesn’t believe in the amazing thing that’s happening right before her eyes. Aunt Sponge says, ‘I think you must be mistaken.’ We are pretty sure that it’s her who is mistaken, because we have inside knowledge from earlier in the book. We – the readers or listeners or viewers – know more about what’s going on than one or all of the characters. And this sometimes makes us so edgy and involved that we want to SHOUT at the character who doesn’t know what’s going on, just like the audience does at a pantomime.
Then James tells himself, ‘Something is about to happen.’ This takes us into the mind of one of the characters, giving us insider knowledge. And, because we know what James is thinking, it’s almost as if he knows that we know! It’s also a way of building suspense. By taking time to say that ‘something is about to happen’, it delays for another moment the very thing that is about to happen! It might make us say to ourselves, ‘Go on, go on, happen!’ It keeps us hooked.
In the first chapter of James and the Giant Peach, this happens:
Is this sad or funny? I think it’s funny. But how can Roald Dahl make it sound as if a child losing his parents is funny? He does this in lots of clever ways: he makes the terrible event happen in a flash; he makes it happen in a totally crazy and impossible way (rhinoceroses don’t escape from zoos, and even if they did, they would eat grass, not meat); and then he finishes by saying that it was ‘a rather nasty experience’, when we know that it would really be a sad and tragic thing.
As the story goes on, Roald introduces Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, James’s new guardians:
Again, Roald makes an awful thing sound funny. James hasn’t done anything wrong and he doesn’t deserve any punishment, yet here he is being mistreated. At once, I feel sorry for him and hope that this is going to be a story with a happy ending.
But Roald does something else too: he makes sure we are very firmly on James’s side. I think this is one of the most important things about his writing. Over and over again, his readers are on the side of the child against horrible adults. For some adults, this makes his books shocking – even rather nasty. For millions of children, it’s made them funny, exciting, naughty and even a bit dangerous.
There’s one fairy tale that particularly reminds me of James and the Giant Peach and that is Cinderella. Just like poor Cinderella, James is stuck with two horrible, ugly sisters. When writers write stories, they can’t escape from the stories that have been written before, especially the really famous ones like fairy tales. It’s almost as if they’re haunted by the old stories, so that when they write the ghost of an old story turns up. This can make us feel that we’re at home in the story, rather as if we’re in a room and recognize the furniture. But it can also mean that the differences between the old story and the new one give us extra surprises and extra fun. I think Roald Dahl knew that very well.
Roald Dahl specialized in the fantastic and the amazing. Nearly all of his books feature odd, bizarre and weird stuff. He even used the word ‘fantastic’ in the title of one of his books. (And – ahem – so did I.) These fantastic and amazing storylines often involved incredible schemes and plans. One of my absolute favourites appears in Danny the Champion of the World:
Here, Roald is building suspense again. At first, the adult doesn’t believe what the child is saying. Then, bit by bit, more details are slowly revealed, while at the same time others are kept hidden – the conjuror’s trick again. This time, something is being revealed that will make life better for the characters Roald has made us care about. It’s a FANTASTIC plan. It’s crazy, wild, weird and maybe even IMPOSSIBLE … But hang on a minute. Maybe it is possible? Wouldn’t it be brilliant if it were possible?
If a writer can make a reader really want something to be possible, then I think they’ve done a brilliant job. And Roald Dahl was an absolute master at doing it. On page after page after page. In book after book after book.
I think that’s pretty much all I have to say about him. Or very, very nearly all …
