Monthly Archives: March 2021

An interview with… Christina Jones

I interviewed chick lit writer, Christina Jones about her ‘method writing’ approach to research in the #100 Feb 210 issue of Writers Forum.

Christina told me she always researches her character’s backgrounds to make sure they’re accurate. She revealed at first she used backgrounds that she knew well – horseracing (her granddad was a jockey), lorry driving (her husband was a trucker), fairgrounds (her dad was an ex-circus clown who then travelled with fairs).

However, once she’d run out of her own life experiences, she explained it was quite a challenge to start writing about things she didn’t know so well. To do this she turned to books for basic facts (the library was her second home), the internet for a quick-fix (God bless Google), but her favourite way of researching is to meet and talk to people who really know.

Christina explained experts are definitely the most helpful. She spent hours on the road with lots of lovely lorry drivers while writing Running The Risk learning all about transport law and how the haulage industry really works – and so that she’d know how Georgia, her lorry-driving heroine, carried out her job. Christina was even taught to drive a 42 ton lorry – but in the safety of a lorry park!

When researching Heaven Sent (about fireworks) Christina told me she had one of the best times of her life with the lovely pyrotechnicians from Fantastic Fireworks – they even taught her how to set-up and fire her own remote-controlled firework display.

With Moonshine Christina joined a local winemaking group to learn how to make homemade wine (such hardship!) and since adding a touch of practical magic to her novels, she had lots of help from various lovely white witches.

Before she meets her experts she puts herself into her heroine’s (or hero’s) shoes and make notes about everything they’re going to encounter or experience in the book and ask questions from their point of view. She write everything she think she’ll need to ask down.

During the interview she uses a dictaphone to make sure she gets all the facts correct, but she also take notes if something interesting crops up. When she gets home she transcribes both into a notebook like a long essay, then go through it and red-pen everything that isn’t needed and highlight everything that is. Christina told me:

“I think, without exception, I’ve become friends with everyone who has ever helped me with research, but I always write a thank you letter immediately afterwards, always acknowledge their help and expertise in the front of the books, and always send them a signed copy as soon as it’s published.”
Christina Jones

Christina’s explained it is vital to list your sources and acknowledge your experts. It’s only good manners if people have been kind enough to give up their time to help then this is the least you can do. And it’s good publicity for them, too – and they all love seeing their names in books.

When she was writing Walking On Air she spent weeks with the Utterly Butterly Barnstormers to learn all about wing-walking (and spent lots of time with the pilots of small planes and had several flying ‘experiences’. She even did a wing-walk so she knew exactly how Billie would feel in Walking On Air.

“…strapped to the wings of a tiny wood-and-fabric bi-plane, hundreds of feet up in the sky, travelling at a hundred miles an hour, feeling the almighty force of the wind, and the cold, and the insects that get EVERYWHERE and stay there, and how much your arms ache, oh, and your face flaps.”
Christina Jones

Christina revealed like Billie, her heroine, she wasn’t great with flying, and the thought of tiny planes with no escape routes terrified her. But once she’d met the pilots and wing-walking girls from the Utterly Butterlys and spent time with them both at their base and at air shows, and scrambled in and out of the Boeing Stearman bi-planes and teetered on the fabric wings ahw explained it was exciting, exhilarating and amazingly different. In fact, she LOVES flying now. She has even spent time watching them strip down a radial engine so she knew exactly how it worked and sounded.

Christina’s research tip for other writers is be prepared to listen to EVERYTHING you’re being told and then listen to a lot of other conversations going on around you as well. These little insider snippets – the things they don’t think are important – are sometimes the hidden gems that can spark off a whole new subplot.

“When I was researching Heaven Sent (fireworks) I had no idea until I listened to the pyrotechnicians chatting over a cuppa that no-one in the firework world has ever managed to create a dark green firework – and that this is the pyro world’s holy grail. This gave me a whole new area for Clemmie and Guy (my h&h) to explore and actually became one of the main plotlines in the book.”
Christina Jones

To read the complete feature you can purchase a copy of #100 Feb 2010 Writers’ Forum by ordering online from Select Magazines.

To read my future Research Secrets or Writing 4 Children interviews you can invest in a subscription from the Writers’ Forum website, or download Writers’ Forum to your iOS or Android device.

An interview with… Nancy Campbell

In this months issue of Writers’ Forum I have interviewed Nancy Campbell about how her experiences as a writer in residence inspired three books.

Nancy wanted to write a universal compendium of snow: looking at words for snow in fifty very different world languages to show how different peoples around world celebrate, and use, snow. Fifty Words for Snow builds on that fascination, looking at cold climates around the world, through fifty different words. This book is the accumulation of a decade of research and travel in the polar regions, which began in 2010 with a winter residency at the most northern museum in the world, Upernavik Museum, Greenland.

Nancy has been appointed as Writer in Residence by many places: the English canal network (as Canal Laureate for the Canal and River Trust), a fishing museum in Iceland, an ecological research centre in Denmark, a state-of-the-art modern library in the Swiss Alps, and most recently, a year in an 18^th-century water palace in Bavaria. These appointments, usually for a relatively short duration of time, are an intense and immersive way of growing to understand a community and culture, and producing new work.

The residency at Upernavik Museum was her first role of this kind, during the winter of 2010, and she said she learnt a lot from it. Her role there was to write about the museum collections and the wider life of this small arctic community.

“I got to know the hunters and fishermen on this tiny, rocky island, and began learning Greenlandic from them. Learning the language was an important step in understanding the culture (few of the islanders spoke English). I lived in a tiny wooden cabin down by the sea, which when I first arrived, was completely covered in snowdrifts, and my desk looked out over the icebergs of Baffin Bay.”
Nancy Campbell

Nancy drew largely on encounters and observations on the island. She found a few old books on archaeology in the museum and followed up with more reading at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge when she got home.

“It was a life-changing experience. I had expected to write just one book as a result of that winter, but in the end it started a fascination with the Arctic that took me through a decade, and several book projects, including The Library of Ice and How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic before culminating in Fifty Words for Snow.”
Nancy Campbell

Nancy told me that a sense of place drives her work, as well as her encounters with people in the landscape. It’s important for her, to gain a personal experience of place. She explained how early on in her writing career, when she was in a library in Switzerland, tweeting a dilemma: Should she go out for a walk in the mountains, or continue with her research? One writer responded: ‘But going for a walk is part of your research!’ Nancy proclaims she was absolutely right. Research is not only about reading. Being in a place allowed her to understand the atmosphere which she evokes so visually through her words.

Nancy revealed that as she travels she likes to take photographs and make sketches in her notebook. She prefers the speed and sensation of writing by hand and find it allows observations to transform more readily into thoughts than typing or using a dictaphone.

During the lockdowns, she has been using academic sites which offer online journal access such as JSTOR (https://www.jstor.org), especially for scientific research on climate change and glacial ice. But her writing is driven by her imagination, she these texts are used as a jumping-off point for her own ruminations, rather than quoting from them in her work. She also found https://publicdomainreview.org a great inspiration for researching images, as are libraries’ digital collections, such as the British Library https://www.bl.uk

“Even under lockdown in a pandemic, it was still possible to voyage around the world through books, and online. I read the environmental coverage in The Guardian and the New York Times. I am especially keen on amateur YouTube recordings as a substitute for my own direct experience.”
Nancy Campbell

As a writer who interweaves memoir and nature writing, Nancy said she relies on memory a lot, infusing her books with past experiences from her life. While the Arctic words for snow obviously relied on her travels in, and knowledge of, the region, she also returned to early childhood memories of the Netherlands. She believes personal experience to be the richest research of all.

“My father was an art historian who was researching 17thC Dutch painting in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and on visits to see him I grew fond of the chocolate hail which is commonly eaten by children at breakfast-time – Over 750,000 slices of bread topped with hagelslag are eaten every day in the Netherlands. Hagelslag became my Dutch entry for the book.”
Nancy Campbell

Nancy’s research tip is that it is valuable to share your research topics with your friends, always. They may come up with some surprising leads. Nancy hadn’t realised there was snow in Hawaii until a friend in Munich, who is originally from Hawaii, told her about Poli’ahu, the Hawaiian Goddess of Snow. This revelation inspired her story for the Hawaiian language.

To find out more information about Nancy Campbell and her writing see her website: www.nancycampbell.co.uk Twitter: @nancycampbelle and Instagram: @nancycampbelle

To read the complete feature you can purchase a copy of #231 Apr 2021 Writers’ Forum by ordering online from Select Magazines.

To read my future Research Secrets or Writing 4 Children interviews you can invest in a subscription from the Writers’ Forum website, or download Writers’ Forum to your iOS or Android device.

Book Review: Meet the Oceans

Title: Meet the Oceans

Written by: Caryl Hart

Illustrated by: Bethan Woollvin

Published by: Bloomsbury

This creative non-fiction picture book is the sequel to Caryl Hart’s highly-acclaimed, Meet the Planets, also published by Bloomsbury. Written successfully in rhyme, we follow a young girl and her dog on an incredible underwater voyage in a submarine to explore the many seas and oceans of the world to learn about the multitude of diverse habitats and sea-life they can discover there.

We start our ‘epic adventure’ in the world’s smallest ocean, the Arctic Ocean, where we are introduced to beluga whales and narwhals. We travel on to the breezy Atlantic, then to the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific and the busy South China Sea. Then we journey on to the Coral Sea and the Great Barrier Reef, the colourful Indian Ocean, the cold Southern Ocean to see the penguins and end at the beautiful warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea. At the back of the book is a map of the world for the children to study the route they travelled and compare each sea and ocean’s location to the five continents.

Each illustration by Bethan Woollvin has its own colour palette. I particularly like the way Bethan has bought each of the seas and oceans to life by giving them faces. Together with Caryl’s text they create a different endearing, watery character for each spread.

Meet the Oceans is both exciting and educational. It supports KS1 topics on the environment and meets the requirements of the Geography curriculum attainment target of locational knowledge to name and locate five oceans, whilst introducing some basic geographical vocabulary in a fun way. It also provides opportunities for discussion on conservation by highlighting the plastic pollution littering the Pacific.

This book is sure to become a timeless classic. It is full of interesting, well-researched facts that will sit nicely alongside Moth: an evolution story and Fox: a circle of life story both by Isabel Thomas and Daniel Egnéus.

Overall a truly breath-taking experience that will capture any child’s imagination and inspire them to find out more.

An interview with… Anne Cassidy

In the #196 Feb 2018 issue of Writer’s Forum I interviewed YA author, Anne Cassidy, about why she believes it is important not to shy away from difficult subject matter such as rape, in young adult books.

Anne used two of her Young Adult books No Virgin and No Shame to illustrate how they sensitively deal with the issue of rape. No Virgin tells the story of Stacey Woods a seventeen-year-old girl from Stratford East London. She falls for a boy and finds herself used and exploited by an older man. In No Shame she goes to court to try and get justice for what has happened to her.

When writing about teenagers Anne explained it’s important to go back to your own teenage years and rediscover the teenager you were, the friends you had, the problems you had to overcame or otherwise. It’s key to remember how you felt about things. When I was a teenager I was very lonely. I was an only child and made friends easily but didn’t always keep them. The feeling of uncertainty, of needing to connect with people; those feelings can be used when writing about teenagers, whether they’re contemporary or from any other time in history.

The trappings may be different, the voices a bit louder, the technology mind boggling but the feelings are not different. Teenagers are struggling to become the kind of adult they want to be. That is the same in 2017 as it was in 1966. So, finding your ‘inner teenager’ is a must.

In No Shame Stacey, is very close to her best friend Patrice. She depends on her for lots of things. When it comes to the trial she has to stand on her own two feet. Stacey and Patrice have this thing about doing each other’s hair. When Stacey realises that she must act on her own she declines Patrice’s offer to style her hair and makes her own decisions about it. This is a statement about becoming more independent, something Anne explained that she went through as a teenager.

Teenagers deserve to read about serious and sometimes challenging subjects. I have always been interested in writing such stories. In No Virgin and No Shame I deal with the rape of young girl by an older man. Anne told me the first thing she had to do was to create my character and her family circumstances. She is a working class girl from Stratford doing her ‘A’ levels. She has a close friend and has had one boyfriend who she has had sex with. She is not a virgin and this is key to the situation she finds herself in. Anne asked herself the question: “How would a young girl find herself in a situation where an older man felt he could override her feelings and have sex with her?”

The one explanation Anne had for this was that she is manipulated by someone else, someone she likes and trusts. So at the beginning of the novel she is swept off her feet by Harry, a boy from Kensington who she meets by chance. It is these elements which lead up to the situation where she is raped.

Anne did a lot of research on the internet for No Shame. She revealed there is a lot of information about rape procedures and trials, which will help to get the basic facts right. She also knew an expert in criminal law so she asked a few questions. Anne explained this was because the factual stuff was important but it was also important to get the emotional story right.

Occasionally ‘facts’ have to be sacrificed for narrative development. For example, Anne wanted her main character, Stacey, to meet up with the rapist at the trial – just the two of them accidentally bumping into each other. It was important for the readers to see them together. It’s unlikely this would happen in real life but she engineered the situation in the novel.

We all would want to keep our children young and safe. But they grow up and go out into the real world. Just as we tell them to be careful on the roads we must do the same about other things. We hope that parents will have these conversation, but we can’t be sure about that. It may come up in school but that’s not until much later (year 11 perhaps).

Young Adult literature is exactly the place where young people can read and grapple with these things. It has all sorts of things going for it. It’s accessible (in school libraries) It can be read alone – so no embarrassment factor. A story speaks to an individual in a way that nothing else can. They can make their own mind up.

Anne believes you can not just choose a subject and say you want to write about XYZ. You have to have strong feelings about it. Anne read a lot about rape cases in the newspaper as part of her research and was incensed at the coverage and the way the story was portrayed to make the victims look as if they were to blame. These feelings simmered for ages before she decided to write No Virgin the first book about Stacey Woods.

Her advice to writers who want to write about gritty subjects for theYA market is to think about subjects that you are interested in and genuinely have feeling about. It might be political or about refugees or climate change. Whatever makes you sit up and want to speak – that’s the subject you should write about for teenagers.

Before you write about a subject you have to find the teenager you want to write about. That teenage character will probably have some of YOU in them. It has to be a sincere attempt to write something real. Then the writing will be good, strongly felt, authentic. If it’s just about ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ the gatekeepers will know. They are sharp. If it’s good they have to support it.

Anne Cassidy is the author of over 50 novels for teenagers. You can find out more about her writing on her website: www.annecassidy.com or follow her on Twitter: @annecassidy6

To read the complete feature you can purchase a copy of #196 Feb 2018 Writers’ Forum by ordering online from Select Magazines.

To read my future Research Secrets or Writing 4 Children interviews you can invest in a subscription from the Writers’ Forum website, or download Writers’ Forum to your iOS or Android device.

A Year in Nature

Today is World Book Day and I am busy doing virtual visits using my book Rabbit’s Spring Gift, which is beautifully illustrated by Lucy Barnard and published by Quarto Publishing.

This delightful picture book about friendship and the changing seasons that includes activities, crafts and discussion points to develop an understanding of the natural world. It is the ideal book for virtual visits throughout the Spring Term with reception and Key Stage One children. Rabbit’s Spring Gift is a tender and reassuring story of sibling rivalry and gift-giving. Rabbit wants to give her brother a thank you gift but her brother tries to out-do-her at every turn.

A virtual visit would consist of a 30 minute session to include:

An introduction about me and my books
A little background information about writing Rabbit’s Spring Gift
A reading of the book
A discussion about spring and the kinds of things they do during the spring eg. spring walks, spring art, planting seeds, etc.
A spring activity.
Q+A

The other books in the series are Frog’s summer Journey which was launched with Rabbit’s Spring Gift last March at the beginning of the first lockdown in the UK. Squirrel’s Autumn Puzzle and Fox’s Winter Discovery will be launched this Autumn. All these fantastic picture books would be suitable to do similar virtual visits throughout the year.

If you are interested in booking a virtual visit to help with distance learning or enhance the children’s education in the classroom please get in touch through my website to enquire about prices and availability http://www.anitaloughrey.com

An interview with… Sophie Kirtley

In the latest issue of Writers’ forum I talk to Sophie Kirtley about how she created the fictional worlds in her debut novel, The Wild Way Home, which came out with Bloomsbury in July 2020.

The Wild Way Home tells the story of two very different children: Charlie, who is from our time, and Harby, a boy from the Stone Age. It’s a story of friendship, courage and adventure as Charlie and Harby journey together through the wild green Stone Age forest in search of Harby’s missing baby sister. You can read my review of this mid-grade novel here.

Sophie told me The Wild Way Home was inspired by her own childhood. When she was little she often played with her friends in a wood near where she lived; it was called Mount Sandel Forest. She vividly remembers the feeling of the place – its sense of mystery and seclusion… and wild freedom. Only years later did she realise that in this very forest archaeologists had found the remains of a Stone Age settlement, it was in fact the oldest human settlement in all of Ireland.

The idea that she’d played somewhere where children had been playing for millennia was the spark which ignited this story; it made her curious about the Mesolithic children who’d played in that forest so many years before she had. She started to imagine what might’ve happened if she’d actually met one of those Stone Age children and that’s how the story-spark ignited and the story-flames raged to become, eventually, The Wild Way Home.

Sophie told me creating a fictional world can be a bit of an overwhelming ask. She explained she works her way outwards from very small details towards creating a bigger picture or building a world. She love interesting objects or strange place names or curious graffiti or fascinating gravestones.

Once something small like this has caught her eye, she let herself interrogate it; asking lots of questions about the possibilities that the small-strange-something might have thrown into her mind.

“Little by little I build all these little details together into something bigger, kind of like creating a story patchwork. In The Wild Way Home I did this with Stone Age small things that fascinated me – artefacts from museums or from ancient sites.
The intricacies of the time-slip elements of The Wild Way Home took a lot of work in order to make the shift in time smooth and believable. The setting of the story really helped me; when Charlie ends up in the Stone Age a lot of the natural features in the landscape remain the same – the river, the cave, the cliff – these physical links plus having Charlie’s consistent narrative perspective helped to carry the story between worlds.”
Sophie Kirtley

Sophie revealed writing a book set in a specific period can be tricky. You’ll feel the weight of responsibility to ‘get it right’. She did oodles of reading and researching about pre-historic life, but even within that different sources can offer contradictory angles and Sophie is adamant that you should not to tie yourself in knots with the pressures of absolute accuracy.

“At the end of the day, this is fiction, and we’re writers aren’t we? And we’re definitely allowed to make stuff up. Well that’s what I told myself anyway as I picked through my research, magpie-like, choosing what I found fascinating and eschewing the less fun bits.”
Sophie Kirtley

Sophie explained when you’re writing for children anything really is possible. Children are accepting of adventures in a way that adults aren’t – it’s very liberating as an author. Child readers are also incredibly judicious and deserve the best – they’re a hard audience too, because if they’re not gripped they simply won’t read on. Just like they simply won’t eat peas or cheese or whatever the foible may be. Sophie loves the challenge of writing for children – delivering them something they like the taste of.

If you want to write for children then there are two main pieces of advice Sophie offered: Read and listen. Read as many contemporary children’s books as you can and read them as a writer, learning along the way. Also listen to kids you know, how they talk, what makes them laugh, what makes them grump… or even think back to you as a child and squeeze your big feet back into those small shoes.

And one final thing, writing is always going to have its ups and downs, its good days and bad days. Just keep writing and don’t give up.

You can discover more about Sophie Kirtley on her website: www.sophiekirtley.com and follow her on Twitter @KirtleySophie.

To read the complete feature you can purchase a copy of #230 Mar2021 Writers’ Forum by ordering online from Select Magazines.

To read my future Writing 4 Children or Research Secrets interviews you can invest in a subscription from the Writers’ Forum website, or download Writers’ Forum to your iOS or Android device.