Learning

In "seven" today, a magazine that comes with The Sunday Telegraph, there is an interview with James Patterson who is "one of the world's most prolific authors with 70 odd titles to his name and over 170 million books sold". Phew!
I read one or two of his books some time back - I think I reviewed one for Wales on Sunday, a newspaper that started literary and went downhill to pop-like stuff - and enjoyed them; he's one of those writers who write books which are often called "page turners"- you can't put the darn things down once you start them. He admits he writes such books and is rather proud of it I think; once, he says, he read only what is called great literature and said he was a bit of a snob but when he came to write he found he was best at more popular kinds of writing. He said something that at first I thought was rather strange: he had been studying literature for a PhD but gave it up because "studying literature would destroy his love of reading". Hello? Shouldn't it do the reverse? Isn't that what studying literature is all about - making great literature more enjoyable, not less?
Well, I can actually appreciate what he is saying. I have two "case histories" which go some way to proving the truth in his remark. One has to do with a man I knew who wrote plays for the BBC, radio and TV plays, but had no education to speak of. He was urged by people he got to mix with in drama circles to attend Harlech College and get himself educated. Not only did he do that but from there he went to Oxford University where he got a 1st in literature. After leaving the university he never wrote a play again. It had destroyed his powers to create characters.
Another case is of a young woman who also had been to university when, again, she came away with a 1st in English; she said she wanted to write stories for children; we were on a course together and I tried to help her. But I couldn't. She did not know how to write a story, never mind a story for children
It seems they had both been educated to criticise literature to such an extent that they could no longer create stories, as if their critical faculties were so strong that when they started to write something they were too critical of it.
James Patterson didn't want his studying of literature to destroy his love of reading. I think you could probably add his love of writing to that as well.