Guess the age of the child that wrote this

[Cortina]

My niece wrote this at school. What would you gauge her 'writing age' to be from this ( admittedly isolated) example?:

With a good ten minutes to spare I settled myself down in a corner seat on a train to London, and for a time it looked as if my only companion was to be an old lady. Then, almost at the last moment, a man and a girl hurried up the platform. The man pushed the girl into the carriage and threw her case in just after her. "Only just in time!" He said angrily. "And now, don't lose this one!" Besides a flush and tightly pressed lips the girl took no notice, leaving the ticket where he flung it in her lap. The man said a cold goodbye and walked off. The girl didn't look at him as the train drew off from the station.

Sorry , sure if it's a direct lift - the character in the book was on a train to Cornwall not London but apart from that it's the same as far as I remember. I gave the book to the charity shop as soon as I'd finished it so don't have a copy to check. I have googled the book and there is a lot of detail about the character meeting a sad little girl on a train. I remember the scene because the father was so cold about leaving her on the train on her own. As soon as I read the post I knew I'd read it before.

quirrelquarrel, I love it. Especially the names. DD now 10 spent ages today making up names. I give you...Mr Bacterkiltch, Charlie Wafer and Jerome Naler.

I should add that I also used to copy ,or re write from memory, chapters from books I had read when I was a child. I loved books and loved writing and I'm sure it's not unusual for kids to do this. If my Mum had found a piece of my writing she may have thought I was some sort of child genius too ( thankfully the internet was not around in the 70's or she would have been proudly showing off my work too!)

Oh, that's a bit sad, Mumleigh. Am now feeling a bit sorry for the kid who's copied a story out of a book perhaps because she feels her efforts aren't good enough.

PMSL at Quirrelquarrel's story, especially the names, oh yes! it's a pre-teen thing to come up with the most fanciful names, isn't it? I remember writing stories at that age with the poshest, longest names I could think of.

I'm a bit sad for her too! I hope she doesn't get in trouble.

I was obsessed with Tallibeth when I was 12. I thought it was quite possibly the most amazing name ever.

All my writing was very famous fivey. I actually met Enid Blyton's daughter and she took my 'novel', and wrote a 2 page letter to me about it :)

I need to get a life.......or at least get off this thread
12? 9? 6? who cares!!!

I was quite taken with Mr. Noswhimple when younger...where did that come from? It was a book like Paddington, or some other classic.
Bacterkiltch :o her imagination's first rate! am still v. impressed with that story!

Another 'gem':

The girls scrambled for corner seats. Unfortunatly , there were only 5 in each carriage so any-one who got them were lucky! Bethana and her freind, Deletia searched for the new girls . They soon gave up becuse there was such a crowd and they were only first-formers. But as they got into a carriage ,they saw a pair of such funny -looking girls that it was agony to stop laughing!The girls looked disaproving." Gloriana and I did not come here to be jeered at!" one of them said . " we came here to............ well as a matter of fact , we did not want to come here!" Bethana and Diletia looked taken back . " Come on , lets get into another part of the train."Bethana whispered. So they did . In there they found another new girl..........

Gosh and when I think of what a fuss people made of these little scraps...:o didn't they read Enid Blyton at all? Doubt I knew what jeering was...I remember being quite mystified by "forms" too. Classes or types or vaulting horses?!
As a child you get so into these books- the fact that they're so formulaic just completely passes you by...I still come out with a stray "topping" or "ripping" on occasion :o

heh heh - I know exactly what you mean - after a good run of Georgette Heyers I start talking in very old-fashioned English and using phrases like "devil fly away with him" etc.

Those names!

It was Thomas Kempe.

Just incase anyone was interested.

That was a great book, MrsDeVere.

Loving 'Deletia'.

I wrote a story about someone called Magdalena Potworska when I was seven or eight. I still use it as my pretend name when my daughter requires me to make up something really unlikely. She's currently got three pretend friends called Marigold, Jetty and Super Sammy. Little girls and mad names are very very funny.

Do all the people who were so snippy feel slightly abashed now that we find this is almost identical to writing by a successful author?

Or does Rosamund Pilcher write like a nine-year old?

I don't feel abashed-I said from the start that it must have been written by a child that read widely, it seemed to get a lot from a book, and that they had probably been asked to write 'in the style of.........'
I also bet thatThomas Kempe had used a new line for each speaker.

I said I often come across 11-year-olds who can write like that and it's absolutely true; I have a pile of marking in the house that I could find very impressive excerpts from. Of course, it would be very unlikely that they could keep it up for a full-length novel, but I can think of four or five children I teach right now who could produce a paragraph of that standard.

I have The Carousel and it's not lifted from there, it's a short story about a girl and her music case, she's a cello player and the twist is quite modern day. It's style is very similar to pre war stories, I grew up with them too.

Others remind me of something that happened at school. I remember a girl at school who was convinced the English teacher had it in for her so she lifted an acclaimed story from somewhere. Sure enough it was ripped to shreds by the teacher, there was a huge hoo hah as I recall. She got the idea from a St Clare's story as I recall.

I went through a phase of writing like my niece lots of Blyton inspired stories of poverty and falling on hard times: 'Mr Williams looked at Allie his pleasant, rather stoic wife 'that's it, Allie old girl, we're down to our last ten shilling note. I am rather afraid we've 'gone smash'!'. Prudence had to leave her expensive boarding school and be tutored at home by an eccentric but educated washer woman etc.

Insomnia strikes so have found the passage in the 'The Carousel'. There's an conversation between a man and girl. It's similar in that it's a tense interchange at a railway station in the 1930s or 40s (?) but I could quote half a dozen paragraphs from different books that were as similar I think, in the days when you couldn't pre-book tickets and minors travelled alone? My niece's man is slightly more sinister than this one who at least gives the girl money and a cursory wave and smile when the train leaves:

A voice said 'I'm sorry is this seat taken?'
'What...?' I looked up and saw a man standing there in an aisle between the seats. He carried a small suitcase, and there was a child behind him, a small thin girl about ten years old, dark haired and wearing round owllike spectacles.
'No, it's not taken.'
He said, 'Good' and lifted the suitcase up into the rack. He did not look in the mood for an sort of pleasantry, and a certain impatience of manner made me not ask him to watch out for my bunch of chrysanthemums. He was dressed, as Nigel had been, for some City office, in a navy chalk-striped suit...
'There you are,' he said to the little girl. 'Go on sit down.'
She did so cautiously, perched on the very edge of her seat. She carried a single comic paper and wore a red leather purse slung by a strap across one shoulder...I was reminded of other small boys I had observed on station platforms, fighting tears, and being told by beefy fathers how much they were going to enjoy being at boarding school.
'Got your ticket all right?'
She nodded
'Granny'll meet you at the junction.'
She nodded again.
'Well...' He ran a hand back over his head. He was obviously longing to be off. 'That's it then. You'll be all right.'..
Once more she nodded. They looked, unsmiling, at each other. He began to move away and then remembered something else.
'Here...'He felt in his breast pocket, produced a crocodile wallet, a ten-pound note. 'You'll need something to eat. When it's time, take yourself along to the restaurant car and get some lunch.'
She took the ten pound note and sat looking at it.
'Good bye then.'
'Good bye'
He went an. At the window he paused to wave and give a cursory smile.

Actually think I might re-read some Pilcher now The Shell Seekers was good I think.

Oh good, I'm glad you found it, Cortina! I looked it up on Google books but could only get the brief excerpt around the £10 note so couldn't see how similar or not it was. Perhaps your niece has read it too!

So, not lifted, but stylistically copying - well that's fairly normal. Lots of people do it! Even celebrated authors...

but we all rehash everything we've ever read and recreate it in everything we write!

Death of the Author and all that...

Good God where would Harry Potter be without the Worst Witch and Malory Towers and goodness knows how many other books I have never read?

Cortina you probably missed it but I asked earlier what her writing was like last year?
Did the school use Pie Corbett Talk for Writing? because part of the technique is learning a text well then adapting and innovating to produce an independent piece of writing.

Yes Cortina, I'm glad too that it was an 'original' piece from your niece. She writes very well in that style. Perhaps it was an exercise similar to what mrz said. The teacher's written comments 'good beginning but I thought the explanation was rather unlikely' suggested that there was a 'task' of sorts.

Does your niece feel that she should be in a higher set? If so it may be worth some direct dialogue between her and the teacher wrt what exactly she needs to be able to do in order to be in the next set up.

[Totally unrelated but my DD missed being moved up a level in her swimming lessons because she hadn't made one out of fourteen targets. When we found this out (direct dialogue and all that) she was able to 'fix' things within two weeks and move up then rather than having to stay in the same group for a whole term doing much of what she could already do.]

My dcs are heavily into writing their own stories - much influenced by their current crazes.

Dd (7) loves "misery lit" so it's all orphans/blind girls/cruel stepmothers and every heroine is called Samantha.

Ds (12) is working his way through the box sets of 24 so I'm always ploughing my way through (er, skim reading) long-winded Jack Bauer-esque adventures.

Surely you need to be read widely to write your own stuff? I read somewhere a piece by Martin Amis who said that his heart sinks when budding writers boast that they don't read much so as not to sully their own ideas/style.

Well, if she is reading widely and re-using what she reads now, that sounds very promising to me. Noone expects an 11yo to have an original voice, surely? She will need to be taught to write in a range of styles, but if she can learn to imitate this language, which she has never heard in RL, then she can probably learn to imitate other registers too. Let's hope she gets good English teachers for the next few years.

Mine did have gone through various phases as well Gramercy - Ballerina stories featured for DD2 for ages even right up to GCSE level when her Russian (of course) heroine accidentally revealed her previously hidden talent for dance in a piece of creative writing coursework.

DD1 went through a dreadful goth/emo stage when every protagonist was some sort of outcast and not happy with the world and DS(14) is somehow stuck on vampires or zombies no matter how much I try to move him on although his latest story did have a love interest in it and that is certainly a new development.