In an article for CrimeReads, Joanne Harris (Chocolat) says that her career as a teacher shaped her writing.
Early in her teaching career, Harris taught at Leeds Grammar School, a private boys’ school where the masters wore gowns (and were apparently still called masters…) and Latin was compulsory. “Gradually I came to feel a real affection for that little community,” Harris says. “And there were so many stories there, ranging from tragedy to outright farce—that the writer in me just couldn’t resist using a few of them.”
However, Harris didn’t begin her writing career with stories about teaching. A scandal involving one of her peers at Leeds caused her to question her experiences and observations, and so she avoided sharing them. “But years passed, and I realized that everything I’d written so far—those stories of small communities, rebellious women, conflicts against authority, troubled children, outsiders, bullies, influencers—all of that, deep down, had been about Leeds Grammar School, its secrets and its scandals.”
Her years teaching provided plenty of dramatic grist for the writing mill. “Schools are such close communities. Many teachers see more of their school than they do of their family,” Harris writes. “And I realized that I missed all that; the teaching community; the boys; the perpetual soap-opera of Leeds Grammar School.”
