The literary path to creative writing

Yarns

Srijaya Char insists that parents and teachers need to encourage children to read for pleasure and indulge in creative writing.

It is very true that story-telling influences creativity in children. In our country we have done wonderful work in publishing books on Indian stories. We have only to tell our youngsters that India is the motherland of stories and that Indian stories have travelled round the world. The greatest of literary men from Boccacio to Shakespeare down to Voltaire and T S Eliot have utilized Indian stories, thoughts and philosophy in their writings.

Our Katha Sagara Saritha, Jataka Stories, Panchatantra, our epics, and the Puranas are indeed wonderful and more interesting than many western fables. The Aesop’s fables, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the Arabian Nights have surely borrowed profusely from literatures across the world.

It is a challenge on the part of the English teacher to exploit the potential of a ‘creative writing’ student and make her write what she wants to write in a way her mind imagines. I wonder whether, in our country, we have what is called literature for children written by children!

English is neither the mother tongue nor the native language of our children; but it is a fact that our students speak, read, and write English from a very young age. It so happens that in urban India where children are spoken to by their parents in English from the time they are babies, their thought process gets ‘trapped’ in English with some confusing influence of their native language.

Experience tells us that not many of them enjoy literature as such. Prose and poetry are just school subjects and they prefer to ‘study’ it for exams rather than enjoy it as ‘reading for pleasure’. How many of our children really enjoy poetry? Not many. Nilufer Bharucha in her paper entitled “Literature for children by children: Does it exist?’ has a question “The field of music and sports has had its child prodigies. The world of mathematics also has its young geniuses. Why then do we not have such famed names in the world of literature? I am not talking only about English. What language are we good at? We are forced into a three language formula in every state and the second language that we are supposed to teach our children is anything but creative and interesting! It does not inculcate any creativity in our students. Frankly 90% of our students think that learning of the second language is a chore and it is learnt only for the sake of examination as it has been made compulsory.

A student’s world should be blissfully an amoral place free of adult prejudices. But unfortunately, the world of adults enters this place in the guise of prescribed books. I have always had a feeling that it does not allow the students to hone their creativity. Most of the time what a student writes has to be what the teachers want her to write and it is meant for her to pass an examination and the writing is so closely monitored with the ‘nuts and bolts’ of grammar that it strangles the creative ability of the student.

Professor ONV Kurup in his paper “Children and Poetry” makes a reference to a poem in Malayalam written by one of our celebrated poets. In a dialogue between a child and his mother, the child sees colourful butterflies flitting away from flower to flower and the child imagines that the flowers are flying away.
“Mother, come and see, the flowers are flying away so beautifully from the plant,” says the child with a feeling of joy and wonder!

“No, you are wrong. They are all butterflies,” says the mother in a matter-of-fact way.  Dr Kurup says, though the knowledge imparted by the mother is valuable, the sense of impressions that arise in the child linking the colour patters of the butterfly-wings and the flowers is as important as or more important than the knowledge imparted by the adult.

The mother, on the other hand, could have appreciated the observation made by the child and said, “Yes, my dear. Your imagination is really wonderful! The butterflies flying from the plants do make it look as if the flowers are themselves flying away.”

I personally wonder whether giving overwhelming importance to facts, mechanical skills, grammar, and spelling is right when going through the compositions of younger children. Composition writing need not necessarily be viewed as a task of conformity when the students are very young and are writing in a language that they have just learnt. Is it necessary for a teacher to develop language skills and ignore language development when a child is young? Rigidity in the rules of correction inhibits and restricts the child from saying what she wants to say. In my personal view, correction in such cases should be flexible. Although, I wonder how many teachers would agree with me on this!

Science, religion, politics, mythology – name what you may, we, in India, have abundant literature for children in all subjects. Our children should be given ample freedom for creativity, to make use of all that is already there and think out-of-the-box. This reminds me of one incident. When my daughter was three years old and knew the story of the Hare and the Tortoise, she asked me a question.

“Amma, when the hare and the tortoise ran a race, the tortoise came first, isn’t it? You know why?”
I replied, “Yes, of course. The Hare thought he was too fast and slept under a rock for a while.”
“No, not at all, stupid! The tortoise was on roller-skates!” she said and laughed aloud.