Making Mrs Doubtfire
ANNE Fine is a multi-award winning and top selling author.
Her appearance as part of the Rochdale Literature and Ideas Festival, at Rochdale Sixth Form College, was part of the celebration of 30 years since her best-known book, Madame Doubtfire, was turned into a highly successful film starring Robin Williams in the lead role.
She is also a comfortable and engaging speaker telling her stories with ease.
As a child she was part of a big and noisy family and found that reading and writing was a distraction that she really loved.
At school her favourite English teacher would give the students the opening for a story and then leave them to write while he would sit back and smoke his pipe; Anne loved that freedom to write.
She first began writing when a snowstorm prevented her from getting to the library, leaving her without new stories to read, so she started creating her own and hasn’t stopped since.
Her process involved writing by hand, lots of editing written onto those pages and then typing them up on an old manual typewriter and she showed the audience some of her original much-corrected writing.
In answer to the frequently asked question ‘where do your ideas come from?’ Anne explained how real-life events often lead to the stories she creates.
For example, the story of Madame Doubtfire grew from seeing a neighbour who was a father waiting fruitlessly every second Friday for his children to come and visit.
When asked where the name came from, Anne explained that Doubtfire’s had been the name of a charity shop in Edinburgh that used to sell things that smelled somewhat of cat pee.
In a question and answer session to close the session, the author also spoke about the differences between writing for young children and writing for older people, with the language remaining similar but the books for adults being longer and requiring a greater effort both from the writer and the reader.
Her advice on writing for each audience was summed up by the phrase ‘never underestimate the reader’s intelligence and never overestimate the reader’s intelligence’.