Reading and writing

[Spoiler alert if you've never read Jane Eyre and don't want the plot spoiled. Stop reading now.]

Today in Jane Eyre, we learned that Mr. Rochester was already married and his mad wife lived on the third floor of his estate. I paused and asked if anyone was surprised. No, no one was surprised. The foreshadowing is extremely heavy. Plus, as everyone pointed out, there was still too much of the book left for a facile happy ending of Jane and Mr. Rochester getting married. 

I was telling this to J. tonight while dinner was cooking. He asked if Jane Eyre was published in installments like Dickens' work. I didn't know, so I looked it up. The short answer is no, it was all published together, but in three volumes meaning you didn't have to buy the entire expensive book at one time. As I was searching up the answer, I typed in, "Was Jane Eyre..." and continued with my question. But, I was also interested in the predictive questions that popped up. The very first one was, "Was Jane Eyre a real person?" I'm not quite sure what to make of that. 

Also in the midst of my search, I found a page that gave a brief description of novel publishing mid-19th century, with masses of people eagerly awaiting the next installment of Dombey and Son, which was evidently extremely popular. That is not a Dickens novel I (or J.) were familiar with. A little Google searching says that it was Dickens' first masterpiece. I guess I'll put in on my Dickens to-read list, right after Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities. At the same time as Dombey and Son was being released, Thackeray was releasing Vanity Fair in installments as well. (That, I have read. If you enjoy Victorian literature, I highly recommend it.) This was the popular culture of their day. It seems it was really no different than people eagerly waiting for the next episode of a series they are watching today to be released. Maybe I am the only one who finds this fascinating, but because I do, you know about it as well.

Are we heading somewhere with all of this? Maybe. G. and L. are in my Creative Writing class at our co-op, so I spent some time today looking at what they are going to be sharing with everyone at the end of the year. I know I have mentioned this before, but I don't teach writing here at home. (And my teaching of writing at co-op is more discussing different aspects of writing than it is editing.) What struck me the most about what they had written was their innate sense of voice and dialog and story. They have good ears for what good writing sounds like, so that is what they write. (Punctuation? Not so great, but that's easy to fix. A poorly told story is much more difficult to repair.)

So if I haven't taught writing, how did this happen? I am 100% sure that it is having spent thousands of hours listening to me read good books to them. It is why all of my children have turned out to be good writers despite my neglect of overtly teaching them to write. I'm sure that daily discussions at dinner combined with not developing misconceptions about their ability to write also played into it, but the listening to good books was certainly key. 

It is one of those areas where I feel as though I'm hitting my head against a wall, though. People ask how to teach their children to write, and when I answer that they should read them a lot of good books, it's like crickets in terms of response. I don't know why this is such a scary or radical idea. Listening to good writing and copying it is an age old technique for learning to write. I'm hardly making it up.