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EBD: Her skill at writing
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Author:  ChubbyMonkey [ Wed Jun 24, 2009 5:53 pm ]
Post subject:  EBD: Her skill at writing

EBD was a very successful writer, but do you think she had more skill at writing than others in the genre? Do you feel that she dealt with some themes very well, and are there ideas or themes that she doesn't deal with as well? What are the strengths and weaknesses of her writing? Could she have changed parts of her writing? If you were her editor, what would you have done differently and why? Do you feel that some of her ideas are dealt with better by other authors - either published authors, or drabbles/fanfic that you have read?

ETA: Idea by JayB.

Author:  JayB [ Wed Jun 24, 2009 8:33 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: EBD: Her skill at writing

Ooh, lots of interesting questions there! I'll have a bash at some of them.

I'm not sure that EBD was necessarily a better writer than her contemporaries, but I do think her achievements put her at the top of the genre. No other writer has written such a long series, spanning so many years, with an ongoing cast of characters. (Of her two nearest competitors in terms of numbers of books, Angela Brazil didn't write series, and EJO didn't write school stories.) (And having thought about it, I do actually think EBD was a better writer than Angela Brazil.)

She was of course constrained by the genre she was writing in - Exile showed what she could do when she had some really meaty subject matter to get to grips with. On the other hand, that was a one-off, the result of special circumstances, and she might not have been able to replicate that success.

I do think EBD tackled more serious themes than some of her competitors. Leaving Exile aside, she looked at bereavement, faith, parenting, among other topics. I think perhaps she is unusual in often giving the adult's point of view, whether mistress or parent, as well as the girl's, and showing sometimes that there were faults on both sides, rather than portraying everything in black and white.

She is less successful, as has often been said here, at portraying modern life once she tries to move the series in to the 1960s - but she's not the only elderly writer to have had that problem - Agatha Christie seemed ill at ease with the times in her later books.

EBD's particular strengths I think are:

Her ability to create a sense of place, when she is working from personal knowledge. Considering she (as far as is known) visited Austria only once, she succeeds amazingly well in creating her Tyrolean setting and maintaining it over the whole sequence of Tyrol books. I personally also think she succeeds in creating a believable setting in Jean of Storms (set in NE England, which of course she knew well) and The School By The River (set in the Balkans, which, as far as is known, she never visited).

Her skill at characterisation. While her books were becoming formulaic and lacking in plot towards the end, I think she kept her gift for characterisation almost to the end. I don't know how many characters she created over the forty-plus years she was writing the CS, and how many of those played substantial roles, but it must run into hundreds. And while some of her 'naughty Middles' might at times seem a little generic, I think all her leading characters were distinctive and three dimensional.

Author:  Alison H [ Sat Jun 27, 2009 10:35 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: EBD: Her skill at writing

I think that she tacked "adult" topics such as Grizel's depression in Reunion and the situation with the Nazis very well - far better than anything in Jean of Storms which was meant to be an adult book.. Also, showing the staff/parents' view of things is unusual in school stories, and makes the CS much more of a "world" than somewhere like Malory Towers.

Most of the leading characters are very well-characterised, far more so than they are in Enid Blyton or even DFB books, although by the later books things are definitely in decline. & some of the description of the area in the Tyrol books is just glorious, as are some individual sections such as "Christmas in Innsbruck".

The EBD-isms drive me mad, though! I understand that it's difficult to remember everything you've written, and that in the days before computer databases made everything easily accessible it would have been difficult to look things up, but things like changing the first name of a character as central as Mlle Lepattre really aren't very impressive :lol: . Changing people's ages or even their personalities to suit the plot is understandable - TV soap operas do it all the time - but mistakes like the Therese-Elise thing are quite annoying IMHO. It always makes me laugh when I read the bit in which Joey is very upset to realise that she's muddled two of her characters up, and we're told firmly that authors have to be very careful about such things!

Her bias towards her heroines sometimes gets on my nerves as well. The doctor at the Tiernsee "loves" Joey, Frau Braun thinks that there's "no-one like her", and only either "baddies" like Matron Besly or people-yet-to-learn-CS-ways like Kathie criticise either Joey or Mary-Lou.

She did pretty well to keep people's interest for such a long series, though. That probably says it all :D .

Author:  Sunglass [ Sun Jun 28, 2009 10:26 am ]
Post subject:  Re: EBD: Her skill at writing

I think (as with so many things) that EBD's strengths are very close to her weaknesses as a writer.

One of her strengths is her brilliantly detailed description of the CS world, the school's various interiors and locations and customs and daily routine, rituals and history - but the flipside is that she can get bogged down in that detail, which can get terribly repetitive and space-invading. Later in the series, new girls appear to be introduced more for the purposes of being yet another newbie to have the trilingualism, bath rota and who Joey is explained to them, rather than because there's a story involving them to be told.

Related to that for me is the length of the series, which is a considerable achievement - no one else has done that, kept a school story readership engaged for that long - with the flipside that there is no particular story to be told anymore after a while, apart from the general one of the school. Shorter school series focus on one character or a group moving towards leaving - Malory Towers focuses on Darrell and her friends' journey through the school - but after Madge gives up the running of the school and Joey is no longer a schoolgirl, the CS focus gets much more diffuse, and it becomes more a matter of Another Chalet School Instalment. The CS itself becomes the main character in the series, which is both interesting and kind of a problem - look at the difference between a school pantomime or nativity play which is just narrated 'flat' (just because it's a school event and therefore important )and the much more dramatically vivid one where the 'story' is Con trying to cope with only a few hours to rehearse her leading part. Or the difference between an expedition which has no particular point, but reads like a geography textbook, and the one where the Margot/Ted/Emerence's clock situation comes to a head.

As Alison H says, EBD writes memorable characters like Joey, but the flipside is that she can then (not in all cases, but Joey is the obvious example) lose all sense of perspective on them, stop working to keep us interested in them, and just keep telling us how adored and important they are as a substitute.

One of the things that makes the CS books stand out is their wealth of adult perspective throughout - think how different the setting-up of the school would have been if we only had Joey's perspective - but the flipside for me is that it has repercussions for the way EBD writes younger people. I find her writing of girls younger than mid-teens poor, and even when she's writing about the inevitable naughty Middles, which she does well, the fact that they are almost inevitably caught and punished for their pranks suggests her adult self worries about her readers' copy-catting, so she feels she needs to show justice being meted out.

I suppose related to that is what is on the one hand an attractive and forward-looking ecumenism, which can flip over at times in the late books to a less attractive heavy-handed Christian preachiness.

I have to say, though, that some of what I enjoy about the books is very close to what annoys me about them - I can be both irritated by yet another description of the interior of a cubicle, and exactly how to hump your mattress, and yet strangely charmed by its inevitability....

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