Authors Electric

Writing Children’s Fiction  by Yvonne Coppard and Linda Newbery  (Bloomsbury) ISBN 978 1 408 15687 2 Yvonne Coppard and Linda Newbery interviewed by Dennis Hamley When, a few month ago, I was asked to interview Yvonne and Linda for Armadillo, the on-line children's book magazine,  about their new book I was both pleased and slightly daunted. Yvonne and    Linda (herself once an AE blogger) are authors of high achievement and real quality - and also very different.  I knew there would be so much in this book and in the space of an 1800 word interview we were only going to scratch the surface.  However, just three days ago, on Wednesday September 11, Julia Jones wrote a superb review of Writing Children's Fiction on Eclectic Electric and, if you haven't yet seen the book itself but want a good taster before tackling this interview, you can't do better than to turn back to it. Don't go to Writing Children's Fiction thinking it's ...

Too big June and July have been the Month(s) of the Child as far as I'm concerned. You might expect that with five children of my own plus five grandchildren that every month would be Month of the Child – but that's not necessarily so. The older ones are now too old (youngest will soon be seventeen) and the younger ones are still too young (oldest is not yet six). At the risk of sounding like a grumpy Goldilocks (“too hard” “too soft” “too hot” too cold”) this leaves A Gap. My sailing adventure stories are intended for ten-year olds and up and – while I'm naturally thrilled to discover that nonagenarians enjoy them – if I'm not getting it right for the tens then there's something essential lost. Too small When I wrote first drafts of the three volumes of the Strong Winds Trilogy, my prime reader (Child Number Four ) was aged 10, 11, 12. He and his younger brother were still at the village primary school and our garden, especially in the summer afterno...

Until recently I thought I was the laziest writer alive. I know I'm not really, because there's a bookshelf lined with books to prove otherwise, but when I'm idling at my desk - or doing something else altogether to avoid facing the screen - I feel  incredibly lazy. There are writers who turn out three thousand words a day, or write tirelessly for hours on end. I just can't do that. Sometimes, especially at the start of a project, I have to cajole, bully and threaten myself in order to get anything done at all. Fortunately it's not always like that, or why would I do it? A book usually takes off for me when I'm about a third of the way in. And I love revising. When I was revising THE DAMAGE DONE for its Kindle edition, I found myself working at all hours, reluctant to stop. Revising is so much easier than first-stage writing. It's come as a surprise, this last month, to find that writing non-fiction feels so very different. I'm co-writing a commiss...

It may seem odd to do your research some while after finishing the book - in this case, five years after publication. But everything is useful to a writer, and I’m sure that somehow or other I’ll make use of the stone-carving I did last summer. It’s not that I did no research at all for SET IN STONE. I talked to stone-carvers, handled stone, studied the work of Eric Gill, learned about Jurassic limestone. But last May several things fell into place and I found myself chip-chip-chipping away. Shortly after SET IN STONE was published, I met a local stonecarver, Bernard Johnson, who was exhibiting during Artweeks in Oxford. I loved his work, and could see at once that he was influenced by Eric Gill. I’d decided that if my publisher gave me a commission to write LOB, I would find a stone-carver to make me a Green Man for my garden, and was hoping to find someone suitable; as soon as I saw Bernard’s work, the search was over. He made me a calm and wise Green Man, in Portland stone, whi...

I had another piece lined up for today, but then realised that my posting slot coincides with Charles Dickens' two-hundredth birthday (well, it would be hard to miss that - Dickens is every where). He hardly needs another mention, but here it is anyway. I'm reading Bleak House, enjoying the revelations as the plot unfolds, the slow grinding of the law court in the background, and of course the cast of characters - effete Mr Turveydrop, the neglected but spirited Caddy Jellyby, the birdlike and ever-hopeful Miss Flite, useless Mr Skimpole, Lady Dedlock doomed by her guilty secret. Esther Summerson's first-person narrative alternates with the chapters relayed more conventionally by an omniscient narrator, giving variety and freshness to a complex plot. (Is Esther Summerson the only female character in Dickens to be given her own voice?) Throughout, there are universal themes of finding the balance between happiness and duty, and of individuals striving to find goodness, purp...

"I work all day on a screen; I don't want to look at a screen for relaxation, too." "I like the feel and smell of books." "How can a piece of technology replace such a perfect design?" A friend made all these remarks last week, and it was an echo of the objections I was making this time last year. I live with Gadget Man, and it's made me a bit resistant to devices of various kinds (to venture into his study is to be plunged into an archive of redundant technology - items no one wants, needs or can find ways to recycle). He, of course, bought a Kindle fairly soon after they became available. I was sceptical, but two things happened to make me change my mind and have a go. The spur came at a talk given by Sue Price and Katherine Roberts at the summer gathering of the Scattered Authors' Society. They were messianic about the advantages of Kindle self-publishing, speaking of the control and independence, the ease of publishing, and the attractions ...

I'm at that intriguing, exhilarating, slightly nerve-racking stage of gearing up to write. This means that I'm not doing any writing at all, just leaving my idea to marinade, and working up the sense of atmosphere that is so necessary before I start. I enjoy this time - the daily discipline hasn't started yet, the fretting over plot clunks and stodgy bits, and the story is open to me with all its possibilities. Meanwhile, I'm indulging in various start-up rituals. These include: finding a desktop background for my laptop which sets the right tone; filling the noticeboard in my study with pictures and words; making a playlist of background music (Rautavaara, Gyorgy Ligeti, Arvo Part and Jan Garbarek); ah yes, and buying a notebook. The purchase of notebooks can be a major displacement activity, but this time, after rejecting several, I bought a plain lined pad in order to customise the cover. I don't want to intimidate myself by using a notebook so beautiful that I...

This will be a post in two halves. I'm tutoring an Arvon course next week (last week, by the time you read this): "Writing for Teenagers", at The Hurst, deep in the Clun Valley in Shropshire, with Celia Rees as co-tutor and Gillian Cross as our guest. My blog post will be due just two days after I return home, in a state of exhaustion and excitement if previous courses are anything to go by, so I'm getting some thoughts down now. First, a bit about the Arvon Foundation, for anyone unfamiliar with the organisation. They own four centres: Lumb Bank (once owned by Ted Hughes) near Hebden Bridge; The Hurst (the last home of John Osborne) near Craven Arms; Totleigh Barton in North Devon; and Moniack Mhor near Inverness. Courses run throughout the year, each lasting from Monday until Saturday, with a maximum of sixteen students. The format is generally similar: workshops, discussions, one-to-one tutorials, a guest reader, and group readings; course subjects include screenwr...

As soon as I knew there would be horses in THE DAMAGE DONE, I saw the risk of putting off readers who might take it for a Horse Book. That's partly why I was so insistent that the cover on first publication shouldn't show a horse. But, as I said in my previous post, I don't think the Anne Magill painting, highly accomplished though it is, captures the atmosphere of the story. The new cover I think does better, and this time there are horses, though not in the foreground. As a child, I was addicted to horse and pony stories to the point where my parents once tried to ban me from reading any more. I devoured everything by the Pullein-Thompson sisters, Josephine, Christine and Diana, and also the less Pony-Club-and-competition-oriented stories by Monica Edwards. Later there was the marvellous K M Peyton. From the Pullein-Thompsons, in particular, I absorbed all sorts of information about eggbutt snaffles, impulsion and double oxers. If only I could have learned the Periodic Ta...

I wonder how other authors feel when their books are finished? For me, each time a book is submitted to the publisher after the final revisions, I have a sense of parting with it, knowing that I’ll never again “live” in that book as I did while writing it. Reading the published book isn’t the same at all; in fact, if I do so at all, it's with trepidation, fearing the discovery of some toe-curling mistake, or at the very least something I want to change. Preparing The Damage Done for its e-edition gave me the rare chance to live in a book again, and one of my favourites. I revised it for things that have become outdated (Kirsty listening to her Walkman; people smoking in a pub or waiting for dial-up internet connections) but also made numerous small tweaks, taking a word out here, adding a few there, all so surreptitious that probably no one but me will ever notice. Doing this, I experienced the enjoyment of writing all over again. Especially, I had fun with Kirsty’s father, G...