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:
He picked up the chopper and was just about to start chopping away again when he heard a shout behind him that made him stop and turn.
‘Sponge! Sponge! Come here at once and look at this!’
‘At what?’
‘It’s a peach!’ Aunt Spiker was shouting.
‘A what?’
‘A peach! Right up there on the highest branch! Can’t you see it?’
‘I think you must be mistaken, my dear Spiker. That miserable tree never has any peaches on it.’
‘There’s one on it now, Sponge! You look for yourself!’
‘You’re teasing me, Spiker. You’re making my mouth water on purpose when there’s nothing to put into it. Why, that tree’s never even had a blossom on it, let alone a peach. Right up on the highest branch, you say? I can’t see a thing. Very funny … Ha, ha … Good gracious me! Well, I’ll be blowed! There really is a peach up there!’
‘A nice big one, too!’ Aunt Spiker said.
‘A beauty, a beauty!’ Aunt Sponge cried out.
At this point, James slowly put down his chopper and turned and looked across at the two women who were standing underneath the peach tree.
Something is about to happen, he told himself. Something peculiar is about to happen any moment.
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:
… one day, James’s mother and father went to London to do some shopping, and there a terrible thing happened. Both of them suddenly got eaten up (in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street) by an enormous angry rhinoceros which had escaped from the London Zoo.
Now this, as you can well imagine, was a rather nasty experience for two such gentle parents.
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:
They were selfish and lazy and cruel and right from the beginning they started beating poor James for almost no reason at all. They never called him by his real name, but always referred to him as ‘you disgusting little beast’ or ‘you filthy nuisance’ or ‘you miserable creature’, and they certainly never gave him any toys to play with or any picture books to look at. His room was as bare as a prison cell.
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:
… My father came in and lit the oil-lamp hanging from the ceiling. It was getting dark earlier now. �
�All right,’ he said. ‘What sort of story shall we have tonight?’
‘Dad,’ I said. ‘Wait a minute.’
‘What is it?’
‘Can I ask you something? I’ve just had a bit of an idea.’
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘You know that bottle of sleeping pills Doc Spencer gave you when you came back from hospital?’
‘I never used them. Don’t like the things.’
‘Yes, but is there any reason why those wouldn’t work on a pheasant?’
My father shook his head sadly from side to side.
‘Wait,’ I said.
‘It’s no use, Danny. No pheasant in the world is going to swallow those lousy red capsules. Surely you know that.’
‘You’re forgetting the raisins, Dad.’
‘The raisins? What’s that got to do with it?’
‘Now listen,’ I said. ‘Please listen. We take a raisin. We soak it till it swells. Then we make a tiny slit in one side of it with a razor-blade. Then we hollow it out a little. Then we open up one of your red capsules and pour all the powder into the raisin. Then we get a needle and thread and very carefully we sew up the slit …’
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my father’s mouth slowly beginning to open.
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 …
Postscript
The last time I saw Roald Dahl was at an event in 1988, when he won the Children’s Book Award from the Federation of Children’s Book Groups for Matilda. I was asked to pop over and say hello to him. He was sitting down next to his wife, Liccy, while various people were asking for his autograph and telling him how much they loved his books. I remember that he looked at me and said – almost as if he was talking to all the children’s book writers in the world – ‘Well, it’s over to you now. You’re the ones who’ve got to do the writing now. I’ve done my bit …’
At the time, I thought that this was an odd thing to say. Surely he wasn’t going to stop writing now, just when the whole world seemed to be waiting for whatever he wanted to write next? Well, it wasn’t quite the end. Roald did write more. But he was very ill and two years later, in 1990, he died. He was seventy-four.
But, of course, that isn’t the end. Anyone and everyone can read Roald Dahl’s books, or listen to him and others reading them, or stare goggle-eyed at the many film versions, or watch a real live musical at the theatre!
There’s even a Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. It’s a marvellous day out, you can find out all sorts of things to do with Roald Dahl’s life, and you can even explore his hut with all its original contents. You can go on a ‘trail’ and see places round the village that he used in his stories, like an old petrol pump which appears in … do you know which story? Belonging to someone’s father?
Those who want to find out even more about Roald Dahl can arrange to visit the Museum’s archive. It’s a special store of his handwritten works – stories, poems, letters, scripts, notebooks and scribbled-down notes. The contents are so precious that they have to be kept in a very large, very dry fridge. I’ve included some things from the archive in this book – the letters he wrote home to his mother and sisters, and the early storylines for his books.
As I’ve been writing this book, I’ve been trying to find out what sort of person Roald Dahl was and asking myself what were the ingredients that made him into such a wonderful writer – the Fantastic Mr Dahl.
I hope I’ve come up with some answers for you.
Acknowledgements
The author and publisher would like to thank Dahl and Dahl Ltd and the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, for their kind help and assistance, and the following for permission to use the copyright material below:
Additional illustrations from More About Boy, copyright © Quentin Blake and Rowan Clifford, 2008; extracts from Boy, text and illustrations copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 1984; The BFG, text copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 1982; Danny the Champion of the World, text copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 1975; ‘First Fig’, published in First Figs from Thistles, published by Harper & Bros., copyright © The Edna St Vincent Millay Society, 1922; Going Solo, text copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 1986; James and the Giant Peach, text copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 1961; Matilda, text copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 1988; Roald Dahl’s Cookbook by Felicity and Roald Dahl, text copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd, 1991.
References: Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl by Donald Sturrock, first published by HarperCollins Publishers, 2010. D is for Dahl, first published by Puffin Books, 2004. More About Boy: Roald Dahl’s Tales from Childhood, first published by Puffin Books, 2008.
Bibliography
Books by Roald Dahl in chronological order
The Gremlins, first published in the USA by Walt Disney/Random House, 1943
James and the Giant Peach, first published in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1961; published in Great Britain by George Allen and Unwin, 1967
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, first published in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1964; published in Great Britain by George Allen and Unwin, 1967
The Magic Finger, first published in the USA by Harper & Row, 1966; published in Great Britain by George Allen and Unwin, 1968
Fantastic Mr Fox, first published by George Allen and Unwin, 1970
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, first published in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1972; published in Great Britain by George Allen and Unwin, 1973
Danny the Champion of the World, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1975
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1977
The Enormous Crocodile, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1978
The Twits, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1980
George’s Marvellous Medicine, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1981
The BFG, first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape and in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982
Revolting Rhymes, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1982
The Witches, first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape and in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983
Dirty Beasts, first published in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983; published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, 1984
Boy: Tales of Childhood, first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape and in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape and in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985
Going Solo, first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape and in the USA by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986
The Complete Adventures of Charlie and Mr Willy Wonka (a bind-up of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator), first published by Unwin Hyman, 1987
Matilda, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1988
Rhyme Stew, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1989
Esio Trot, first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape and in the USA by Viking Penguin, 1990
These books were completed before his death in 1990, but published posthumously:
The Minpins, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1991
The Vicar Of Nibbleswicke, first published by Random Century Ltd, 1991
My Year, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1993
These books have been carefully collected together from Roald’s papers and previously published material:
The Great Automatic Grammatizator and Other Stories, first published by Viking, 1996
The Roald Dahl Treasury, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1997
Skin and Other Stories, first published by Puffin Books 2000
D is for Dahl, first published by Puffin Books, 2004
Songs and Verse, first published by Jonathan Cape, 2005
More about Boy – this special edition was published with new material by Puffin Books, 2008
Spotty Powder and Other Splendiferous Secrets, first published by Puffin Books, 2008
And some of Roald Dahl’s novels have been cleverly adapted into plays:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: A Play (adapted by Richard George), first published in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1976; published in Great Britain by Puffin Books, 1979
James and the Giant Peach: A Play (adapted by Richard George), first published by Puffin Books, 1982
Fantastic Mr Fox: A Play (adapted by Sally Reid), first published by Unwin Hyman and Puffin Books, 1987
The BFG: Plays for Children (adapted by David Wood), first published by Puffin Books, 1993
The Witches: Plays for Children (adapted by David Wood), first published by Puffin Books, 2001
The Twits: Plays for Children (adapted by David Wood), first published by Puffin Books, 2003
Danny the Champion of the World: Plays for Children (adapted by David Wood), first published by Puffin Books, 2009
PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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