Ed Melia: ‘Quick Reads. The short stories written especially for emerging readers and people who have lost the reading habit were first published on world book day last year. As part of a series of NIACE podcasts looking at the impact of the quick reads initiative, I spoke to Minnette Walters, author of Chicken Feed and the winner of the inaugural Quick Reads Learners Favourite Award in 2006. She started by telling me how she first heard about Quick Reads’.
Minnette Walters: ‘My Editor, Maria Rejt at Macmillan, she had been approached by Gail Rebuck who got the whole thing going. Basically, Gail asked Maria to ask me if I would write one and I was thrilled. We all were. And I thought well I have this wonderful window of opportunity. I had finished one book before starting another one and I thought is was something I would really like to do.
Ed Melia: ‘So where did you come up with the idea of Chicken Feed?’
Minnette Walters: ‘In a way, that was the hard part. It was trying to think; ‘So what story could you write which is only 20,000 words long?’ because mine tend to run to about sort of 110,000 words and I thought; ‘How am I going to be able to condense a sort of complex plot?’ Which is what I quite like to write, complex plots; ‘How am I going to condense that down to 20,000?’ And I have a huge number of books on real crimes. I just happened to be reading one and I was reading the story of Norman Thorn. I do know that story quite well anyway and I have always felt that there were question marks over his guilt and I thought that would be a very, very good story to do and by coincidence I have a lot of chickens myself and at the point that I was looking at that story my chickens were knocking on the French windows in my office and I thought; ‘You know they do have quite evil eyes, chickens’! I am extremely fond of them but I suddenly came up with the idea for the title ‘Chicken Feed.’
Ed Melia: ‘So once you had decided on the title ‘Chicken Feed,’ what was the process like of writing?’
Minnette Walters: ‘It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Originally, what I was sent as the guidelines on how to write the story was: short paragraphs; no more than about four or five lines if possible; words of one and two syllables; and words of three syllables only once per paragraph (unless they were very obvious words like cigarette or something that people would recognise easily); sentences of no longer than 10 words, I believe, and I thought; ‘This is going to be fabulous, to actually be able to write a story with words of one and two syllables’. And then I discovered how very difficult it is, because the more syllables a word has the more short words you need to use the same word and I will give you a very good example: I wanted to say that one of the characters said something “repetitively”. Right, ‘repetitively’ is four or five syllables. To be able to say the same thing but in shorter words the only way I could do it was to say ‘he said,’ or ‘she said,’ ‘over and over again’. That’s four words for what was originally a five syllable but one word. Now when you are looking at your word count and you have been told no more than 20,000 words you become very parsimonious about whether you want to use expressions like ‘over and over again’. It was a very, very good discipline and I am incredibly glad I did it. It made me think a great deal about how we use words and it also proved to me that it is quite possible to write an exciting story with some really strong themes but in simpler language, and so I have to say I found it most rewarding experience doing it’.
Ed Melia: ‘And was there a part of it that made you think of emergent readers and what they have to go through to understand society around them?’
Minnette Walters: ‘Well, I had a definite advantage in that I have been a prison visitor for a very long time and it is a horrible truism that between 50 to 75% of any prison population will struggle to read. I mean, some of them are completely illiterate and semi-literacy is extremely common. So I already understood from talking to them what it is like to struggle to read and because I have spoken to so many prisoners; it must be about a thousand by now, the one thing I have always understood it that literacy or semi-literacy has nothing to do with intelligence. Some of the people I see have incredibly high IQ’s but they have never learnt to read. They probably started truanting so early, probably from the age of about 6, and they never gave themselves the opportunity to learn to read. So when I set out to write the story, I kept at the forefront of my mind all the time, because somebody can’t read does not mean that they don’t have an average or above average IQ. I have been so pleased at the number of people who are perfectly fluent readers who have read ‘Chicken Feed’ and said ‘great story,’ ‘loved it,’ ‘forgot after three pages that you were writing it in a different format,’ and that’s great. I mean I love that as well. I love the idea that completely literate people can pick up the book and forget that they are actually reading words of one and two syllables. I think that that is brilliant.’
Ed Melia: ‘How satisfied were you when you had finished it; do you read your books over again?’
Minnette Walters: ‘I do, because I never use plot schemes so I have to keep reminding myself where I am in a story and I have to say it is funny, when I first started it …let’s say I had written about two chapters and I was reading it back and I was thinking ‘Oh goodness, you know, does this work? … I don’t know, very difficult to tell, but I think once I got to the end I had really got to grips with how to use language and I think as I progressed through I got really very excited about it because it did seem to work. I mean it kept its pace. I think I was able to get over a lot of interesting ideas. The way Norman was sucked into a relationship that at the age of 18 he was much too young to be able to cope with a woman who had a personality disorder and the sort of relentless pressure that was put on him. By the time I got to the end I felt that the language really did support those ideas. So I was very pleased with it at the end.’
Ed Melia: ‘It is a very thrilling end actually and I particularly like your epilogue and thought that perhaps you should have gone into detective work. The part of his statement that you pull out at the end, is that something you do in all your works?
Minnette Walters: ‘I am very fond of using different ways of carrying narrative forward. I didn’t do it quite so much in ‘Chicken Feed,’ although there are letters from Elsie to Norman and vice versa, but I love the idea that the reader isn’t just presented with traditional narrative all the time. I like to be able to take a story through by using say a letter or in my full-length novels I tend to use emails, letters, police memos, statements, things like that. I love the idea that a readers eye is challenged when they turn the page and suddenly there is a different format on the page. I think that is exciting. It demonstrates that words, they are not just cerebral things but the way you present them on a page, they are also a visual excitement. What I felt very strongly about with this story was that it did need a commentary from me at the end as to what I felt about it, rather than to just leave it entirely to the reader to decide whether they think Norman was guilty or not. I felt that it was important that I should put something in myself. It was an opportunity to use words that are slightly more complicated. I mean if you look at that you will see that particularly dealing with the borderline personality disorder, although I have tried to keep the language as simple as possible there are some rather more challenging words in the epilogue than earlier in the story and I hoped that anybody who had managed to read as far as that would have become proficient enough to cope with those slightly harder words and the responses I have had, from the emergent readers who have read it, it would seem that they did and I think that that has been a great excitement for them.’
Ed Melia: ‘Obviously, the emergent readers loved the book. You were voted the Quick Reads Learners Favourite Award winner last year. What was that like?’
Minnette Walters: ‘It was completely and utterly fantastic and I am going to be very beastly here and say because beat Ruth Rendall, Maeve Binchey, Joanna Trollope and assorted others and am very fond of all these three, all these people, but it is very thrilling to beat some really world class writers as they are and I thought; ‘Oh how exciting!’ and to be voted by the readers. I have been on judging panels and I have won other prizes but when readers judge, I think, that is very different matter all together.’
Ed Melia: ‘How much of an added thrill is it to know that ‘Chicken Feed’ is one of the first books that these people have read and it has completely transformed their lives?’
Minnette Walters: ‘Well, I had an email sent through to me from a woman of sixty-three. The last book she read, I think it was when she was at school and she never finished it because it was too hard and she has never read another novel from that time until this and she read ‘Chicken Feed’ and she emailed through to say that it was the most exciting thing that had happened. She absolutely loved it and as a result she was now reading books. And I thought; ‘now that is phenomenal.’ But I don’t take any particular credit from that. I think it is Gail Roebuck. I think it is everyone that is involved in keeping this project alive. If we can build up a bank of these books and really keep them at the forefront of peoples’ attention, ‘that is what it is all about. And yes, you know, I mean of course it is thrilling that ‘Chicken Feed’ has made a difference to somebody but I think the whole scheme is what is making the difference and long may it keep going.’