As a child what were your favourite books and which authors inspired you? What about now?
As a young reader I devoured poetry, folk and fairy tales (Grimm, Andersen), and stories from the Arabian Nights and Ancient Greece. I loved Ann Holm (I Am David) and Robert C O’Brien (Z for Zachariah) – my first realisation that I could be utterly transported by words on a page. As for now – ah, I am inspired by so many authors. Particular favourites are Donna Tartt, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Ali Smith, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, Maggie O’Farrell, Tove Jansson amongst many, many others.
Why did you want to be an author and what caused you to start writing?
I felt as if there were only two choices of career for me – an actor or a writer. I loved pretending to be other people. I was always acting out poems and stories for the “entertainment” of my family. And I was always reading. I was in all the school plays, but my favourite subject was creative writing. I went to university to study both drama and English, then I went to drama school, became an actor, but never stopped writing. But being an actor is a tough life and I gave up when my second son was born because I couldn’t take two kids out on the road with me. I began to write more because it was my only creative outlet. It never felt like a decision, more like a destination, if that makes sense. All the roads I’d taken so far in my life led me here.
Your previous books, Before I Die and You Against Me, have won a huge number of awards, including the Waterstones Teen Fiction Prize, the Branford Boase Award and Before I Die was shortlisted for the Guardian children’s fiction prize and even made into a film! What has been the highlight of your career so far? Why?
As an unpublished writer my greatest hope was that one day I would get a book published. Nothing will ever beat the moment when I found out from David Fickling that he wanted to make me an offer for Before I Die. After years of struggling as a writer, someone had finally said, “I have faith in you.”
What’s the best thing about being a writer?
When it’s going well and the words call me, it’s not a graft, it’s not work, it’s the one thing I really want to be doing. And it gives me joy in a way nothing else does.
What advice would you give to your teenage self?
Dare to be yourself. Don’t get stuck trying to fulfill other people’s expectations of who you are.
Where did you draw your inspiration to write Unbecoming? What does the book mean to you?
I knew very little about the book when I started writing it. I had a few ideas, but they were abstract, theoretical, as if I knew the tone of the piece, but nothing else. I use free writing techniques when I start a new project. This is a bit like improvising in theatre – throwing words down and not planning anything in advance. Most of it goes in the bin, but the strongest voices keep returning.
An elderly woman called Mary, appeared very quickly and I liked her a lot – she had such a zest for life and she kept making me laugh. A little triangle of a family came next – 17-year-old Katie and her younger brother, Chris, and their very controlling mother, Caroline. I put them in a new town where they knew no one and gave them all a few problems to deal with and then I threw Mary in as the long lost grandmother who needed somewhere to stay because she had Alzheimer’s and could no longer cope alone and suddenly, the story began to buzz.
Every time I wrote, Mary kept trying to run away (even if doors were locked ). She was desperate to find something, said it was imperative, but when questioned, couldn’t be more specific. Katie wanted to know what this was (so did I at this stage!). Katie also wanted to know why her mum hated her own mother so much. What was the nature of their estrangement? It made Katie question everything she thought was true about her family. She decided that solving these mysteries would make her life better, like some kind of magical salve. And her life was very bad. She was being bullied at school and she was struggling with who she was and how she might fit into the world.
It became obvious very quickly that there were family secrets to be unearthed and rules to be broken and wild adventures to be had and that Mary would be the catalyst for change.
When you ask what the book means to me – I have to say that it is probably the most personal of the three books I’ve written, because my own mother had Alzheimer’s and became very unwell and died while I was writing Unbecoming. I hope I was a better carer and daughter as a result of writing this book. Certainly, I found it very cathartic to try and imagine how my mum might have been feeling as she faced the erosion of her memories. There’s a lot of my mum in Mary.
How long did it take you to write and how many drafts did you have to work through?
It took four and a half years. I am very slow! I don’t really do drafts, but revise as I go along, working on several chapters at once. Also, I write in narrative order, letting the story unfold without any kind of overall plan. It’s quite scary to write this way because I never know how a book will end andI often go down wrong paths and have to throw thousands of words away. I guess this explains why I take so long….
In Unbecoming you write from two very different perspectives, how do you get into character? Did your experience as an actress help to understand different characters?
Yes, I do use acting techniques to write. I keep notebooks for each character, researching them as if I’m going to play them on stage – what they like to eat, what their hopes and fears are, etc. It doesn’t all get in the book, but it helps me to know who they are. I read dialogue aloud and I sometimes wander about the house (when no one is home) and pretend to be the character, so I can imagine how they might move or what might go through their mind as they go about their daily routines.
Unbecoming covers some heavy themes, coming out, dementia and the problems of family, to name just a few, but it is by no means simply an issue book. Is there a particular message you would like readers to take from your book?
When I’m sitting inside the story writing it, I don’t think about ‘themes’, I just get drawn to interesting characters and dramatic situations. My job is to ensure the characters are emotionally truthful and then I find that they lift off the page and begin to tell their stories themselves.
As for messages. I want to take readers on a journey rather than give them a message to take away. Books can address difficult situations and confront social issues and help readers deal with real-life challenges. They can transport you, make you think, move you… the list is endless. I hope my readers shift allegiance over and over again with the characters in Unbecoming. I hope they empathise with teenage Mary in her claustrophobic 1950s town and teenage Katie with all her problems at school and home. I hope readers wonder, “What would I do if that were me?” And I hope, by the book’s end, the reader feels they’ve been somewhere and seen some things and that perhaps the world looks slightly different now.
Why did you decide to forefront the dynamics of family in Unbecoming, rather than focus on the typical themes of teen romance or friend drama (which are in your book, but seem to take a backseat)?
Again, this wasn’t really a decision, it’s just what happened. I’ve been drawn to family in all three of my books – I guess we all have one, whatever shape they take and they fascinate me with their secrets and dynamics. Also, young people are often boundaried by family, just as they wish to become autonomous – that’s a great gift for a storyteller. Put a teenager who is desperate to escape the restrictions imposed by adults into a setting where they are closely observed and suddenly, it’s more difficult for them to experiment with who they are or what they want. If they want to take risks, they have to operate covertly and break rules. For a storyteller this presents an exciting challenge.
What advice would you give to aspiring authors and what are your main tips for writing?
READ READ READ!! Phillip Pullman once said (and he borrowed it from Muhammed Ali), “Read like a butterfly and write like a bee.” I think it’s true, but really hard to do. It’s so tempting to sit and do your own writing and forget that you can learn so much from reading other people’s books. Eventually you’ll begin to read like a writer – with one eye and half your brain looking for just how this author make this character so believable, or that sentence so beautiful, or this story such a page-turner…
Other advice would be to join a writing group, or form one of your own. A place to talk, swap work and offer support and constructive criticism is invaluable. Writing is a lonely occupation and you’ll need friends!
Carry a notebook everywhere. Write down ideas, overheard conversations, random lines that just pop into your head. You’ll forget them if you don’t. Do NOT leave the house without paper and a pen!!
Watch the world like a writer. A trick I learned recently is to force yourself to write a story a day. It can be two sentences or many pages, can take five minutes or hours. But it has to be spurred by something that happened to you, or you witnessed happening or you overheard (you get the idea). It makes you watch the world for stories It makes you listen attentively and imagine with energy.
Discipline. Sit and write. Ignore your critic. Give yourself a daily word count and do it. Even if you sit there and write, “I can’t think of anything to write, all my thoughts are rubbish, why do I even want to be a writer?” Something will come… It always does. Trust yourself.
Ask for what you need as a writer. Be it time or a place to write where nothing gets moved when you leave it unattended. Demand to be taken seriously.
What can we expect to see from you in the future?
I’ve started something new, but it’s very early days. All I have are a couple of voices at the moment and I have no idea where they’ll take me. I don’t like knowing in advance. I never plan. I like surprises. I’m quite disciplined and sit at my desk every day and just write. Most of it gets binned, but I find I return again and again to the things that preoccupy me and eventually I begin to see what the book might be about.
Originally Posted on The Guardian