Before I proceed with the main story, I would like to sketch a portrait of my school,

[T]he primary audience was to be the "nontraditional student," especially "distance learners,"... [I]t was hoped that with a resourceful, dedicated local teacher... the teaching of introductory physics at any level could be enriched... [A]lso... that a large, casual, nonstudent audience would watch... for pleasure and instruction. ...[T]hat ideal target audience was the high-school physics teacher.

When I first set my sights on becoming a writer at age eleven or so, I wanted to be a fantasy and science fiction writer. That was my preferred reading material and that's what I thought I was going to write. That's always been there. You can even see little hints of it in Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonderboys.

At the time, schools were few in number. And despite the conservative nature of society, great interest was placed on the education and teaching of girls. It was this period that largely shaped my personality and later encouraged me to take a particular interest in education, which I consider to be a weapon of choice for preserving the achievements gained in our lives and in those of our people.

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.

I wanted to be a voice that reflected experience and the world I lived in. So I knew in 1972 that to do this I would need to write very well and more individually than I had ever written before.

The more I examined my emotions, the more I was able to put that in my writing. I wanted to concentrate more on human emotions and internal feelings in the characters, inasmuch as I could in an animated cartoon show—ostensibly one for a young audience. There were times when I felt I couldn’t put the depth of feeling that I wanted to in the cartoons at that time, because it’s for kids and you have to keep it kind of upbeat. But I did it where I could. And I put it in my other work as well, when I was writing things like comics and screenplays.

Working at a university I've made the observation that many student writers write for the sake of writing. They are really writing for other writers, not to tell a necessary story, not out of urgency and need. I have keenly felt that writing must be more than that, that it must have a power to enter the world, to begin to change the stories people live by, to open that story into something larger, into something that helps us know how to live. This means that we have to expand not only our work but our ideas about audience. It wouldn't bother me to have academics reject my work if somebody read it and it changed their attitude about deforestation, for example. I think I began to write out of a desire to make change in the world, searching for language that would help me speak my innermost hopes and ways. Writing was something of a foreign language I learned to be fluent in so that I could communicate emotions and what I knew was important-an ethical way of thinking about the world-communicate what racism is and what it does to people.

When I had been at primary school, I was very good at writing essays. It was a big thing. My essays were so good they would get pinned up on the wall and read out to the rest of the class

Writing is dominant in schools and continues to be important for effective communication. Therefore, learners need to be up- skilled in writing skills as their everyday activities.

I want to portray history through the eyes of the people living it. I write primarily for an American audience, and, you know, Americans can sometimes be rather closed off to the outside world.

I've been playing these schoolgirl roles in all my movies. Every time I went to the set, it felt like I was going to school.

I am basically writing for a general audience rather than an academic audience. So, I explain stuff, I don’t assume knowledge of any of this on the part of the reader. In a kind of general sense I suppose I have, when I am deciding how much needs to be explained, in mind my primary audience.

I wanted to produce something that would resonate strongly with the audience. When we showed it to the Korean audience, they said it was a good mix of both the personal and political aspects of that era.