Old Dog, Old Tricks

I have grandchildren. Three of them: two boys and one girl.

I generally say this while holding my hand out at waist level, as if they are still toddlers, when I should be holding it at head height. The oldest is now 14, and the girl is 9. The middle child, Charlie, is 12, and he is a writer.

I found this out last year when we visited them in the States. He was showing me a project he was working on involving photos of his dinosaurs taken with his mom’s phone, which he turned into a sort of monster horror comic book. Very creative. He then told me he also made regular books, and that he was writing a detective adventure novel and would I, ahem, publish it for him.

This thrilled me to no end. Being an absentee grandparent, I do not have a great deal of interaction with the G-Kids, and have very little I can offer them, but writing and producing books is one thing I know a great deal about. So, I told him I would be delighted to publish it. Then I went home and forgot all about it.

That’s not because I’m senile or uncaring, it’s because, as a writer, I am more aware than most that many, many people say they are working on a novel, but very few produce an actual manuscript. So, imagine my surprise when, five months later, I received an email from his mom with Detective Mitch and the Thirty Dollar Mystery attached.

It was fantastical and zany and light on character development, but for a first effort it was pretty good, and displayed a keen grasp of what makes a good story. Not a believable one, but a good one, nonetheless. It also showed a completed lack of knowledge concerning manuscript preparation: font, spacing, margins, page layout, indents, etc. But, pleased to finally be of some use, I cleaned up the text, formatted a professional-looking book out of it, had a professional cover made, and loaded it up on Amazon. I even added it to my Lindenwald Press website, with Charlie as the second of two authors, writing young adult fiction.

And that’s where I left it, thinking he might sell a handful of copies to his family and friends. What he did was admirable, but clearly not unusual. In fact, for budding writers, it’s almost a rite of passage. Practically everyone who wants to be a writer when they grow up makes some ham-fisted effort at self-publication when they are a child. I did, Stephen King did, even the Brontë sisters did. But what Charlie had, which they did not have, was a grandfather with a miniature publishing business.

And, as it turns out, an awful lot of moxie.

Instead of showing his book off to his friends and cajoling half a dozen people into buying it, he got it into the local library (my local library told me, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you) and even had a signing and gave a talk. He also got his book into a local bookstore (something I tried, with results similar to the library), which led to the bizarre situation of me contacting that bookstore and telling the owner I was Charlie’s grandfather and that I had, ahem, some books of my own, thereby getting my only US-related promotion by riding my grandson’s coattails.

And that, I assumed, was that, until I received book #2, which was longer, more complex, zanier and more unbelievable, even lighter on prose, and showed no improvement in formatting. I was, however, scheduled to see him in a short time, so I held off on the manuscript, hoping to hold an impromptu masterclass in writing during our upcoming holiday. I was looking forward to this because, having taken up writing when I was his age, I recalled that I would have given up a kidney for the chance to talk to someone who had been writing for fifty years and publishing for forty.

Long story short, it turned out my usefulness began and ended with my ability to publish.

But I was still useful, and I am good at publishing, and having a professional-looking book is Charlie’s USP, so I pushed fifty-years of writing experience to the side and went to see the Minion Movie.

It was actually Despicable Me 4, and we went with another couple, which must have looked odd: four middle-aged people without a grandchild in sight, surrounded by children, watching a movie with a PG rating. But it was quite the revelation.

It was in your face, utterly, unabashedly fantastical, but also fun and flashy. In one sequence, our heroes are running from the bad guys after having broken into their lair to steal a honey badger (as you do) and, after a series of completely over-the-top episodes of peril and escape, they jump in a handy vehicle but, still in danger of being caught, they put it into flight mode and sail away over the compound walls. It was like a fever dream, but of course the kids loved it. And it was then I realized I truly did not have any writing advice that would help Charlie. The notion of story, and what sells, has moved on so far from what I learned that any knowledge I could impart would be meaningless.

And as if I needed more convincing, Charlie was featured in a newspaper article recently and, in his interview, sounded quite adult in his opinions about writing. So, yeah, he’s young, he’ll make mistakes, but he’ll find his own way, and there is nothing I can tell him that will do him any good.

But when he sends his next manuscript, I’m going to return it with a style sheet; he might not need to hear anything about writing from me, but he still needs to learn how to properly format a document.