Interview in Soup Blog

Soup Blog

I was interviewed a little while ago by Rebecca Newman for Alphabet Soup magazine; the full interview is on their blog, as it couldn't all be fitted into the print magazine. For an online look at this great magazine for kids 0f 6 to 12 who love reading and writing, go to: http://www.alphabetsoup.net.au/

Meanwhile, here's the interview:

1. Where do you live?
On a hill near the sea on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne.

2. What made you become a writer?
I love stories and books so much that I always knew I wanted to write them. My dad used to tell us crazy stories that he made up, and my mum read us wonderful books for bedtime stories, so wanting to write books never seemed like a strange thing to do.

3. What do you like to do when you are not writing?
Reading, going for walks (especially on the beach or in the bush, and especially with my dog), seeing my friends and family, doing tai chi, and travelling.

4. Was it easy to get your first book published?
I was quite lucky with my first book (Amanda’s Dinosaur) because it won a competition, and the prize was having it published. The next few were harder!

5. What was your favourite book as a child?
At different ages: Winnie the Pooh; My Son in Law the Hippopotamus; Anne of Green Gables; Swallows and Amazons; Little Women; The Eagle of the Ninth.

6. Where do you get your ideas?
I’m often not sure where an idea has come from until I’ve finished the first draft. Sometimes it’s from something that has happened in my life, and sometimes it’s a crazy sort of thought—which of course has still probably happened from something I’ve seen or heard or experienced in some way. Sometimes it might be by asking ‘What if?’ about something that’s happened. Of course you need a lot of ideas to make a whole book—one idea starts it, but then you need more for how a character looks or acts, or what happens in chapter 3, and what’s exciting in chapter 5, or how everything all comes together in the end … I sometimes think that there’s a little bit of magic in how all these different ideas come together.

7. Do you prefer to write with a pen in a notebook, or on the computer?
On the computer. I use a pen to make notes in a notebook with a pen; often one book will have its own notebook and I jot down my thoughts or try to work something out. But once I start writing the story, I always use the computer. (For one thing my handwriting is so messy that writing a whole story with a pen would be too tiring— and even worse, I often can’t read my writing!)

8. What do you love best about being a writer?
Living inside a story and playing with it till it comes out right.

9. Of your own books, do you have a favourite?
It’s very hard to choose a favourite, because they’re like friends or pets. I sometimes think Ark in the Park is my favourite, because when I read it there are still no words I want to change or lines I’d like to rewrite. But Nim has been my favourite character for a while—except that now Raven’s Mountain is out, in many ways that’s my favourite, because I always feel very protective about a new character about to face world. So that might be why Raven is my favourite character right now.

10. Are you working on a book at the moment? Can you tell us anything about it?
I’m always working on several books at a time. I’ve just finished Raven’s Mountain, which was out in February. The short blurb would be, ‘Three people go up a mountain; one comes down.’ It’s an adventure story about a girl named Raven who goes mountain climbing with her older sister and stepdad—but when there’s a rockfall and the others are trapped, Raven has to face the wilderness alone to try to save them, and herself.

I’m also working on a series of books set in The Rainbow Street Animal Shelter. I’m doing these with an American publisher; in Australia the stories will most likely be collected into one or two books. I’ve just finished editing the second book, MISSING: A Cat Called Buster, and now am waiting for my editor to work on the third book while I rewrite the fourth (FREE: A Lion Called Kiki).

There are also several other books at various stages on my computer and in my head!

11. You write picture books, books for primary school aged kids, and young adult books. Do you have a favourite age group to write for?
If I had to choose one age group, it would be primary school or middle grade readers. But I’m very glad that I can skip around and play with a picture book or plan an adult novel in between.

12. How do you know if an idea is best for a picture book, a middle grade book or a young adult book?

That’s part of the mystery of writing that I don’t understand. As an idea starts to grow into my mind, it shows me the shape the book will be, so that by the time I’m ready to write it, it’s obvious what sort of story it wants to be.

13. Do you have any advice for young writers?
Just keep on writing! Have fun with it; try writing different types of stories with different types of characters. Remember that the first person you’re writing for is yourself—you need to love what you’re doing. When you’ve finished, read it and see if there are any parts that are a bit boring, or don’t make sense—pretend you’re a teacher with a big red pen, be brave and mark everything that isn’t good. Ask yourself if that bit needs to be in the story. If it doesn’t—delete it. If it does—make it better. Does it make you laugh, or cry, or hold your breath? Keep on rereading and rewriting till you’re happy with everything in your story.

And don’t forget to read, and experiment with different types of books. Writers need to see how other writers work—but most of all, we need to love stories.

My Creative Space

My friend Christopher Cheng has been doing a series on different authors' creative spaces:

http://chrischengauthor.blogspot.com/

Here's mine: 

For the first time in my life, my creative space was designed especially to be my office when we built the house. I was actually quite happy in the odd spaces I had in houses before, but I love this.

I wrote my first books on an old kitchen table, then an IKEA desk my kids had finished with, but a few years ago I had this desk purpose built: lots of room for files, a keyboard drawer, a hole for that messy spiderweb of cords: perfect. Then I had these bookcases built from two blackwood trees that were knocked down in a storm – a long wait of milling, drying, and finally building, but absolutely worth it! The only problem is that they’re not elastic, so books are already being stacked in odd places.

Besides books, I’ve got teddy bears that belonged to each of my parents as well as my kids, a Folkmanis chameleon puppet that the Nim’s Island producer, sent me because it reminded her of Fred, the princess puppet that Red Balloon Books in Minneapolis gave me at the Princess and her Panther launch… the only rule is that everything on display has to make me feel good. The walls have awards, illustrations from my books, a portrait of the Alex Rover hero that was under the writer’s desk in the film and the freestanding movie poster jammed behind the couch. The back of the sliding door usually has maps for the work in progress (I’ve just taken Raven’s Mountain’s maps down).

And I’m lucky enough to have a beautifully peaceful green view out my windows… (and a massage table from when I’ve sat at the computer too long!)

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and I thought it most important to add this photo too that Wendy sent to me ... with a few pieces from the MOVIE!

Mothers Day thoughts

It's the evening of Mothers Day; I spent much of it helping my husband fix a fence, I have wire grass cuts and ant bites on my wrists – and I'm feeling contented. My son lives in Canberra, and my daughter in New York, but I talked to both of them on the phone - and tomorrow when it's Sunday in Canada,  I'll talk to my mother there. I'm lucky. Lucky to have two children, lucky to have had them both grow up to be adults I'm proud to know, lucky that technology allows us easy contact in between visits. Lucky that I still have my own parents, who are active, healthy, and also people I'm proud to know.

But I can't help thinking of the women who aren't feeling so contented today; the women for whom a celebration of motherhood must feel like salt in a wound. Thinking of friends & family who still grieve their inability to have children; who had to give up babies or were not allowed to acknowledge them as their own; who live in fear of the future because their children's lives have gone inexplicably, horribly wrong, or whose children's lives have ended in a car accident or in Afghanistan. And those going through their first Mothers Day after their own mother's death.  Some of these women are relatives I never met, some are close to me, but my heart goes out to them all.

If you're wondering what this has to do with writing... well, everything. The first step in writing is putting yourself into someone else's life for a while. But even if you don't want to write, it's a healthy thing to do once in a while.

Happy Mothers Day, to everyone who's ever nurtured another human being.

Raven's Mountain launch

Better late than never... I promised I'd put up some pictures from the launch for Raven's Mountain, at Robinsons Books in Frankston - and I've added in my talk as well.

One lovely thing about being so slow to put up this post is that several kids who bought Raven on this day have written to tell me how much they love it. Good reviews are wonderful - but nothing beats the first reactions of the readers a book's intended for.

Being introduced by the lovely Susanne of Robinsons Books

Now some of you know that about 3 years ago, I was lucky enough to have a Hollywood Red Carpet launch with Jodie Foster for the film made from my book Nim’s Island. The end of the tour for Nim’s Island was visiting my parents near Vancouver in Canada. I love the mountains there, and maybe that’s why I started thinking about when I was about twelve, and my younger sister and I climbed a mountain in Colorado with my dad and some of his friends. It was called Pikes Peak, and was just over 4000 metres high, about twice as high as Mt Kosciusko. We climbed in the summer so it was warm when we started, but the higher we went the colder it got, and the harder it was to breathe. About half way it was too cold for trees to grow, and then it was too cold for any plants except lichens – so when all of a sudden there was a hail storm, the only place we could shelter was under a big rock. There wasn’t much room, it was cold and uncomfortable – and we didn’t know how long we were going to have to stay there. So all those years later, those feelings, and that fear, went into the ‘What if?” game that writers play. “What if you were sheltering under a really big rock? What if you got stuck there?” And then the other writer’s question: “Why & how did that happen?” 

In the end I let the real rock into the story too, because it made a good warning for what happened next. It’s nice to have little warnings that the reader sees, even if the character doesn’t. It’s like the creepy music in a movie – as soon as you hear it you know that person is in trouble: you want to shout at them, “Stop, go back! Something bad’s going to happen!” But they can’t hear you or the music so they keep on going, and the bad thing happens.

Even though the idea started with climbing the real Pikes Peak, that’s not the mountain I used in the story. I wanted something further from civilization, so I moved it up north to the Canadian Rockies. And once you’re up there, you’ve got bears. You might hike for two days and never see a bear ­ – but you never hike in those mountains and forget about bears. I remember going camping with my cousin and her boyfriend, lying out under the stars in our sleeping bags – so beautiful and peaceful… until the boyfriend mentioned that a grizzly bear had taken a camper right out of a tent a few weeks earlier.

So I set my little town, Jenkins Creek, about there, near the ranch where my cousin kept her horse, and put Raven’s mountain another couple of hours up the highway from there. There are lots of mountains and lakes up there – no one’s going to mind that I’ve stuck another one in.

Actually bears aren’t the only thing to be afraid of in the Canadian wilderness. There aren’t many snakes up that far north – rattle snakes live further south – but you’ve still got cougars, bobcats, coyotes and wolves. So apart from the hail shelter rock, the only other true story in the book is:

In the end we turned Coyote Girl into a game. All through July, the three of us walked around the block after dinner, as late as we were allowed, howling like coyotes. We imagined people running to lock their doors so the wild animals couldn’t get in. We felt wicked, and brave.

 But one Sunday Jess’s family took us for a picnic at the river park. We wandered away from the flat greenness to explore the ravine: it was wild, steep and bushy. We crouch-ran through it, hiding and howling.

Somewhere down the river, a cougar screamed. 

We didn’t play the howling game much after that.

And because people always wonder, especially once I’ve said that I’ve used these two ideas from my childhood, whether I’m Raven: no. If anyone in the book is me, it’s her friend Jess, the bossy one who wrote the Coyote Girl play and organizes the howling game. Raven’s actually a very normal kid, except for the bad luck of being named after a black bird when she’s got red hair – and that’s her mom’s fault, not hers. This is what Raven says about herself and her friends: 

We’re all squished on together, Jess in front because she’s smallest, Amelia in back because she’s tallest, me in the middle because that’s the way we are. I’m not as smart as Jess or as good at sport as Amelia: I’m the middle bit that joins two long sides of a triangle, practicing handstands with Amelia and writing plays with Jess.

This is why Raven’s different from Nim. Nim was raised on her island; Nim is incredibly brave and resourceful, but she’s actually been raised to be that way. Raven’s grown up in a safe, small town; family picnics at the river are about as far into the wilderness as she’s ever been before.  So I actually think Raven’s even braver, because everything she has to do is so entirely out of the world she’s lived in.