Schools. You Gotta Love Them...

Pristine Private School is one of a number of schools clustered in the middle of tower blocks and residential buildings in Dubai's northern Al Twar area. Yes. I checked. No dust.

I was there as an author from the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, to talk to the 'seniors' about narrative and stuff. The hall was very high but not huge in of itself. The stage was huger and the first thing I made up my mind about was not to use it, but to stay at ground level. The kids filed in: girls to the right, boys to the left. Like a dolt, I hadn't told the faculty I needed an LCD and laptop (my own laptop only does HDMI output) to plug my PPT into. They procured both in seconds flat, smilingly.

Me, I'd have killed me, but you takes yer luck as yer finds it.

So we're talking about 100 students in all, something like that. I told 'em about narrative and its history, why it's so important to learn to tell stories for all sorts of reasons: commercial applications of narrative, social applications. Political applications. How you can define and build change around narrative and counter-narrative. How narrative is used to define people, religions, races. How people telling your story when you're not telling it is not a good thing. Basically, to forget what your mum and dad told you and become good at telling stories: the taller the tales you tell, the better.

I told 'em about how publishing was being screwed by the Internet and associated technologies and about disintermediation and what it means. How the democratisation of knowledge that Gutenberg's press imposed on Europe was being repeated by the web and ebooks. And then I talked about my own journey into publishing and my books. I told 'em about the madness of restrictions on taking 100ml of liquid on aircraft when the IRA's last great bomb weighed 1.5 metric tonnes and blew out the heart of Manchester. And, of course, about women going insane while their friends race to try and find out the root of that existentially threatening turmoil. As you do...

Narrative. This sort of thing. 17,000 years in a few slides...

The questions tumbled in. Writer's block. How do you shape narratives? Does a book really always have to start with someone in 'normal' life who's then disrupted by a triggering event? Isn't that something of a trope? How do you take an idea for the beginning, middle and end of a book and connect that up into a whole story?

I was given a bouquet of flowers and a fancy wee trophy as a thank you. They didn't have to do that, really. I signed books. I lost count of how many. Can you spell your name please? Sorry was that Humaid or Hamed? Shayma or Shaima? Ayesha or Aisha? The girls all wanted Olives and I sold out. Which was a bummer because my next stop was Dubai's English College and I didn't have any copies for the students that wanted it. I ran late and had to dash across the city to make it to English College on time.

Gathered in the library of English College was a smaller group. Same talk, essentially. A few variations. A wee bit looser with the old demotic Anglo Saxon. Fewer questions at the end, a quiet room. And then they all clustered around to buy books and the questions came one on one that they hadn't felt they could ask in a group. Signing away, chatting about which book I preferred, how I had thought this or that up. How do you connect stories together? How do you actually, you know, publish a book? How do you upload files to Amazon? Why did I feel a connection to the Middle East? Had I ever lived in Beirut? What's a good book cover vs a bad one? Where can I get Olives? Guilt trip, that last one. I shouldn't have let them all go to the last school...

Bright as a button, both groups. A genuine interest in telling stories, in narrative and a love of books and writing. You could see some of them really having revelatory moments, while a few were there on sufferance. Most were chatty, engaging and cheeky with a lot of sparkiness and wit on display.

What a way to spend the day. I could do this for weeks on end, honestly. What they made of the sessions I can only guess. Some old shouty man berated us for an hour and made us buy his books and I didn't even want him scrawling on the title page and miss-spelling my name.

The author's dinner is next. We always has fun at this. Not always for the right reasons, you understand...

Back to Skool - Let The LitFest Fun Commence

I love school visits. They're sort of part of being at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. You don't have to do them but there's a lot of effort put into integrating the Festival with local schools and authors are asked if they will drop by a school or two and give a talk to students.

I always jump at the chance. I get to behave like I'm a real author and everything. The faculty usually gets a bit twitchy, because I don't do 'PC' so well, but it normally comes right in the end. I try and use the opportunities as something of a sales pitch to get students thinking about writing their own stories. It's not just about thinking you've got a book in you: narrative is a powerful tool in communications and story-telling permeates pretty much everything we get up to in the nasty, commercial world we're bringing up our kids to inhabit.

Which is sort of funny, given our mums always told us that telling stories was a bad thing to do.

Tomorrow I'm off to Al Ain, where two groups of students from Brighton College are going to spend an hour or two with a strange, shouty man bawling incoherently at them. Next week it's English College and Pristine Private School. I'll be testing the surfaces for dust at that last one.

It's hard to believe, but we're only two sleeps from the LitFest - that fine bonanza of all things narrative, bookish and even literary. 140 writers from 25 countries are set to workshop, panel session, chat, sign books and generally delight something like 37,000 visitors. This year's Festival theme is 'time' and there's a huge programme planned which will take place across two weeks, both over at Shindaga and at the Intercon Festival City where the main programme takes place.

The Festival has grown like a mad thing over the few years it's been running. It's created new writers and seen people getting publishing contracts, start writing for themselves and expand into writing for others.

People have been self-publishing books, forming writers' groups, book clubs and generally enjoying books all the more. The Festival has, in short, triggered all sorts of growth in the literary scene in the UAE and even beyond in the wider Arab world.

The increasing focus on the Arabic programme has created a new opportunity to expand readership and contemporary literature in a language that has seen all too little focus on literature in recent years.

We've seen UAE-based writers clinching publishing contracts, new writers emerging and a vibrancy in the literary scene here which simply didn't exist before the Festival started taking place.

And all because a lady with a bookshop in Dubai woke up one day and thought 'Wouldn't it be lovely to have a literature festival?'

It's staggering, really...