I am really excited to properly introduce our guest writer, best selling children's writer, Tom McLaughlin.
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| Tom McLaughlin |
Tom
Mclaughling is an author and illustrator from Devon. He works with Bloomsbury,
Oxford University Press, Puffin, Simon & Schuster, Egmont and Scholastic.
Before getting into publishing he spent nearly 10 years as political cartoonist
for the Western Morning News. He’s also worked as animation designer and script
writer for Nickelodeon and Disney.
Tom's latest book 'The Accidental Prime Minister' can be found here.
In a recent post I reviewed his book, 'The Story Machine' . I contacted him soon after to ask him to write a little about his experiences of having dyslexia and he kindly sent me this...
Tom writes...
I’ve
decided that being dyslexic is cool.
That’s right, you heard me cool.
Imagine
someone asked you to take a pill that meant that you thought differently to
other people, that your brain works in a more creative way, or that you’re
better at problem solving than others. Imagine thinking in a similar way to the likes of Albert Einstein,
Steven Spielberg, or Robin Williams.
Imagine having something about you that meant
that Mi6 would want you to work for them, because you have the skills that
others don’t.
Would you take the pill?
Most would. I would!
I wish I’d known
about this when I was younger. For years I was deeply ashamed of being dyslexic.
I thought words belonged to other people, clever people, who knew their adverb
from their past participle. People who could read a children’s picture book
without getting stuck, or without having to be corrected by one’s own child
while reading them a bedtime story. I found out in the late 80s that I had this
thing, but times were different then and as hugely liberating as it was to give
a label to this thing, this thing that made me embarrassed to read in class,
ashamed to hand in a story I’d written because it was littered with spelling
mistakes and backwards letters; it didn’t make any difference to my
day-today-life.
I decided that books and school wasn’t for me. I needed something
different in my life, something like drawing. Of course being able to excel at
art was the the flip side of being dyslexic, something that didn’t occur to me
at the time. Not being well read, meant I had to develop other skills, it meant
I had to absorb words and language in other ways, through comedy, the likes of
Blackadder, Monty Python, or Fry and Laurie, all which was great grounding for
when I decided to take the leap and do something that I didn’t think was for me
and write, actually write a story.
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So while for a long time, I thought dyslexia
was holding me back, things couldn’t be further from the truth. It was
helping me. Dyslexia enabled me to throw myself into art, into illustration, which
helped me develop characters and ideas, which finally gave the confidence to
write. And guess what? It turns out words are for me.
It turns out I’m all
right at it. I make people laugh in my novels, I make people think with my
picture books.
So thank you dyslexia, thank you for being there, for being so
cool.
Tom McLaughlin
Children's Writer