In a packed auditorium of over 300 students, barely a couple of hands went up when author John Boyne asked how many of them wanted to become writers.
The Irish author of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas told his young audience he had started writing at a “fairly very young age” and at the age of eight or nine he knew writing was what he wanted to do.
“In the ‘70s and ‘80s, we didn’t have the distractions you have today. Social media, computers, streaming... all of that. So the library was a big part of my life. Probably the biggest part,” he said.
On Wednesday, Boyne was addressing students of Classes VIII and IX at Mahadevi Birla World Academy and many other children.
The author is in town for the literary fest Kalam, being held in association with The Telegraph.
Boyne said that every Wednesday, they used to get a half-day from school and his mother would take him and his siblings to the local library.
He would take three books a week, a routine that he looked forward to.
“I would always look forward to what books I was going to choose. So while reading what I was also doing was taking characters from those books and I was writing new stories,” he said.
Borrowing books from libraries is on the decline for some years now, teachers across schools in Kolkata said.
“Even if they are forced to borrow books, most do not read,” said a high school English teacher at another school.
For Boyne, “reading and writing were completely connected”.
“I didn’t know if was going to be good enough to do it but I knew this is what I wanted to do,” he said.
During his teenage years, Boyne said he was writing two or three stories a week.
“Most of them were not good but that is okay because I was learning how to write. I was learning how to write stories... how to write dialogues... every single word that I was writing made me feel that I was getting a little bit better.”
Boyne has published 15 novels for adults, six novels for young readers, and a short story collection.
For those who want to be writers, Boyne said it was not about the first draft.
“It’s about the final draft. The first draft of a book is just a skeleton of what is going to come. It takes a lot of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting to get it to where it’s supposed to be.”
“It’s challenging and hard work but enjoyable hard work,” he said.
After his address, the floor was opened for questions and students asked him about Bruno, the character from The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, the holocaust, and about friendships in his life.
Last year, students of Mahadevi Birla World Academy had been asked to read The Boy in Striped Pyjamas as part of their English enrichment activities and they had done assignments on it, making their questions deep and insightful.
Joining them were students from two NGOs — Calcutta Social Project and Ek Tara — with whom students of the host school have a reading partnership.
Across schools, reading and writing have taken a backseat. Especially after the pandemic, when most students from middle school onwards started possessing a hand-held device, said teachers.
“It is a challenge to sustain students’ interest given that digital media has become so rampant. We are trying to revive that interest and hence author visits are important,” said principal Anjana Saha.
“When children see an author and interact, they connect with them rather than just seeing them as a name on the book’s cover,” Saha said.
The waning interest in writing or reading is because of being surrounded by moving images, sometimes also in classrooms.
“There is an overload of moving and visual images that have taken away from them the ability to visualise and imagine. Most children do not write because their imagination has been stunted with the availability of tools at their fingertips,” said Nupur Ghosh, vice-principal, Mahadevi Birla World Academy.