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I was recently invited for an interview by Brittney Breakey over at AUTHOR TURF. Brittney has really accomplished a lot with her site. It’s worth checking out. She’s recently interviewed Holly Goldberg Sloan, Sally Nicholls, Gennifer Choldenko, Jo Knowles, Kathryn Erskine . . . and my great pal, Lewis Buzbee.

For me, that’s a double-edged sword. I’ll be honest, I’ve always hoped to be the kind of person who somebody wanted to interview. It’s an incredible compliment. And a true honor.

In my career, some of the first work I ever did was interviews of authors for promotional brochures. I think Ann McGovern was my first interview, back when I worked as a junior copywriter for Scholastic. Or it might have been Johanna Hurwitz. I don’t think I saved them. This would have been in 1985, I guess. Life went on and I’ve interviewed some talented authors and illustrators over the years.

You’d think I’d have learned some things along the line, but my basic feeling is usually one of disorientation, a sense that I have no idea what I’m doing, most likely saying the wrong things, awkwardly. Oh well.

I do have lucid moments, times when I think, “Okay, not terrible.” But in general I can’t read things like this without wincing, without twitching and blinking too often. I don’t know, it’s weird. I try to be honest, authentic, and hope for the best.

Below, you’ll find a brief excerpt of a much longer interview. Click here for the whole shebang.

What’s the worst thing you did as a kid?

It’s interesting you ask this, because I recently wrote about it in my journal. A theme that I’m exploring in the book I currently writing (or should be writing), which is a quasi-sequel to BYSTANDER. I have superstitions about talking about books before they are finished, but I’ll say this: In the summer between 7th and 8th grade, a girl in my homeroom died unexpectedly. I didn’t know her well, and wouldn’t call her a friend. When I first heard about Barbara’s death, I was with a bunch of friends –- I can picture it vividly, a bunch of us lounging around — and I said something dumb, snarky, immature. Of course, the death of a peer was completely new to me, a big deal, and I didn’t know how to react. I still feel a sense of shame about it, across these forty years, that one dumb thing I said that no one else even noticed. I’ve been reflecting a lot about identity lately, the idea of self not as a revelation, but as a made thing. Something you earn. Bryan Stevenson gave an incredible presentation for TED Talks -– everyone in America should Youtube it -– and he said, “I’ve come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” That’s a huge, complicated, controversial idea –- and it speaks directly to the topic of my next book. [NOTE: I've embedded Stevenson's talk, below.]

Was there ever a time in your writing career where you wanted to seriously give up? If so, how did you find the motivation to continue?

Yes, I’ve wanted to quit. Absolutely. Mostly because it’s hard, and because I’ve felt (and still feel, though less so) insecure about my own ability –- that I was a pretender, a self-deceiver, a fake. Also, it’s a bunny-eat-bunny business that can crush your soul at times. As a husband and father, I’ve worried about my ability to provide for my family, to keep paying the bills. But that’s life, right? You have to keep getting up. You can’t just lie there on the canvas. That said: Every day I feel blessed that I can do this for a living. The hard is what makes the good.

What’s your favorite writing quote?

It’s not a quote, so much as an attitude about doing the work, a sort of blue collar distrust of pretentiousness. In a phrase, shut up, sit down, and write. Or not! But either way, shut up. It’s hard, writers are told that we need to promote ourselves, we need to “have a presence” on the web, we need to “get out there.” And I just keep thinking, we need to write great books. That’s all that matters.

Is there anything you find particularly challenging in writing? What comes easily?

The whole thing is a challenge. One thing about having published a bunch of things over a long period of time is that I’ve come to understand that each book is its own, self-contained thing. You write the story that’s in front of you. Then you write the next one. And the next. You don’t control what happens after that and, on good days, you accept that plain fact.

Season of Secrets
By Sally Nicholls
Arthur A. Levine (an imprint of Scholastic)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-545-21825-2
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

Sally Nicholls is not a household name here in America. She is possibly not even a name that most children’s librarians, booksellers, and teachers would recognize right off the bat. This, in spite of the fact that her previous book Ways To Live Forever was a stunning success. Folks became quite fond of that story about a boy with a terminal disease, and I suppose they expected Ms. Nicholls to do more of the same. That’s the trouble with starting off your career with realism. Move into fantasy and you’ll find that the fantasy fans don’t really know who you are and the realism fans are disgusted that you haven’t produced more of the same. Separate Season of Secrets from its predecessor, however, and what you have is a hearty little novel about a girl learning about the cruel war between the seasons, in the midst of her family’s own personal tribulations.

Since Molly and Hannah’s mother died they’ve been handling it as best they could. Their father, however, has not been handling it well. Not a jot. So distraught is he by the loss of his wife, in fact, that he sends his two daughters off to live with their grandparents in the country. One night Molly is witness to a frightening vision of a man run down by a pack of dogs and a horned man on a horse. In the ensuing days she tries to tell others, to no avail, then discovers the man in a nearby shed. She cannot nurse or help him, but she can learn as much as she can about him and what exactly he is. As she does, her father is drawn more and more into her life with her sister, though it takes him many tries and many mistakes before any progress can be made. The return of her father and the eventual destruction of the man come together in such a way as to give rise to winter, and the ensuing, beautiful, spring.

I’ve been reading so many books lately that don’t give a fig for beautiful language. Coming across Ms. Nicholls felt like a gulp of cool water then. I wasn’t two pages in when Molly let loose with the descriptive, “Hannah is one and half years older than me, yet she takes up about one and a half million times more space.” And later, “My dad’s shirts are always stiff and clean and white; you button him up all the way to his throat and there he is, locked up safe and going nowhere.” I love a book that gives everyday descriptions real personality and flair. It’s the signature style of Ms. Nicholls. It’s something you can count on in every book she writes.

And then there was an element to this title that I found simultaneously clever and frustrating. Age. Here we have a tale of two sisters, one older, one younger, and there’s not a moment in this story when we’ve a clear sense of how old they are. This is frustrating to a reviewer like myself since you judge how believable you find a character based, in large part, on whether or not they accurately act their age. I would have thought that Molly was acting a bit young for her age at quite a few points in the story, except that for all I know Molly could be seven or she could be ten. My suspicion is that Ms. Nicholls gave Molly a younger age, but then realized something. If you write a middle grade novel for 9-12 year-olds and you make yo

The new edition of Season of Secrets is out this month - hurrah! It's a story about a child whose mother has died, and whose grief cycle mimics that both of the seasonal year, and of the battle between the Oak King and the Holly King - pagans gods who rule over summer and winter, and do battle at the spring and autumn equinoxes.

When I first started writing children's books, all of my stories were realistic. My first book, 'Ways to Live Forever', is very realistic. I'm interested in people, paricularly damaged people, and there seemed to be so much interesting stuff to write about in the real world - love, death, happiness, unhappiness, abuse, loneliness, families, friendships, sex etc - that I wasn't really sure what the point of adding fairies was.

But I've always been fascinated by the Oak King. Like Eliot's Fisher King, he brings life and health to the land as he grows. And when he is killed in autumn, death comes. The plants die. The summer vanishes. It's winter. And then, in spring, he's born again and the life comes back.

It was the Oak King's damagedness which interested me. Here is someone so powerful that they change the world just by existing - yet each year they go through this painful and destructive cycle of death and rebirth. I wanted to write about him, but I wanted to do it through the medium of a real child.

How would this child's story be connected to the Oak King's? The idea that emotions affect the physical world is another old one - Demeter, in Greek mythology, brings winter through her grief for her stolen daughter Persephone. And winter is a good metaphor for grief, because although the spring does come back, winter is never truly gone - the sadness and the happiness will always be part of your life.

The myth became - not a metaphor, exactly - but a way of exploring Molly's grief for her mother. And because stories are much more interesting and fascinating than metaphors, it became a way of exploring her feelings towards her absent father - and a way of figuring her father. It's been described as a love story, and though that isn't what I intended when I wrote it, it's become that as well.

Aren't stories great?

Sally's website: www.sallynicholls.com
Buy 'Season of Secrets': http://www.amazon.co.uk/Season-Secrets-Sally-Nicholls/dp/1407105140/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264596528&sr=1-2

My first book is going to be made into a film.
Actually, that's something of an understatement. 'Ways to Live Forever' is being made into a film right now.
Somewhere up in Newcastle there are about fifty people standing around in the cold holding esoteric job titles like Best Boy and Continuity. There are two women whose job it is to pick clothes for my characters. There are people with clapper boards and three full-time drivers and a catering van and a whole team of producers and even a tutor for the child actors, like something out of Noel Streatfield. And all of this attention is focused on one or two of the actors for something like an hour, in order to produce thirty seconds worth of film.
It's bizarre.
The whole thing is, of course, very, very exciting. Imagine watching a troupe of grown men and women acting out scenes from the back of your imagination - taking silly things you scribbled down on a back of an envelope deeply seriously - playing with lights and colours and camera angles absolutely seriously, to capture something that you only put in to dig yourself out of a plot hole, or to fill in the gap between two important scenes. I've seen some of the early rushes, and the whole thing is going to look gorgeous.
On another level, it is of course not my imagination at all. Nobody looks exactly like I imagined them (although the boy playing Sam comes close) - everyone else looks more like film stars. The house is bigger than I pictured it, and the emphasis has been placed in slightly different places, which makes it very definitely the product of the very talented people making the film, rather than me.
In some ways, this makes it much more interesting to watch. When I was first sent the script, I was too frightened to open the attachment in case the story was very different from my book. When I did read it, the problem was almost the opposite - the film is very faithful, and so much of my dialogue has been used that reading the script was like hearing your own voice played back to you on tape - too raw to enjoy.
The best parts of the script-reading experience were seeing my jokes taken out of context, or visualised, or exaggerated in ways I hadn't expected. I describe one character as looking like a French spy, for example - in the film he's spotlighted, fedora down, in dramatic silhouette.
Another throwaway line nearly made me cry reading the script. A character in the novel remarks that once Sam - my narrator - is dead, he's going to steal all the royalties from his book and go to the Caribbean. It's a funny line in the book, nothing more. In the film, the little scene ends and Felix switches on the film camera and delivers the line face-on. It's unexpectedly poignant, because you know he isn't going to survive the film either.
Seeing someone else make something completely different out of my story is like standing ten paces back from it - almost like approaching it as a disinterested reader. I noticed mistakes in my writing that I never spotted while editing. But the director's characters touched me in a way my own never did.
I can't wait to see the finished thing.

Click here to see the young actors preparing for their roles,

Here to find out more about the film,

And here for my website.

When I was a child, I valued truth in my reading matter. I wanted to read about children who behaved like the children I knew. I wanted their maths books to look like our maths books, and their arguments to sound like our arguments. It infuriated me that children who found secret passages and mysterious fairies didn't run immediately to tell everyone they knew (I would have done, and so would all the children I knew. Children love sharing exciting details of their life with adults. The old 'I didn't think anyone would believe me' argument never really washed with me.)

When I wasn't trying to make books work like real life, I was trying to make real life work like books. I wanted secret societies that didn't collapse after half a meeting because no one would listen to the chair and someone's little sister wanted to play 'tag'. Passwords worked really well in the Secret Seven books, but people either forgot them or said disturbingly logical things like "You know it's me, let me in," which made you wonder why the Secret Seven bothered. I could never understand families which only consisted of parents and children - I had hundreds of aunts, uncles, family friends and distant relatives who swooped in in times of crisis. Even at 8 I thought it was lazy writing when no one seemed to have siblings - all my friends had siblings.

As a writer, I'm starting to understand. Why waste words introducing aunts and uncles that serve no purpose other than to make your character more realistic? If your child does show her parents the magic fairy, how does it remain her story? If your children aren't allowed out on their own or are too scared to go out alone at night, how will they do all the things they need to do?

I err more on the side of realism than my stories probably suit, mainly because I'm aware that I'm writing for ten-year-olds like me, and because I want that younger me to recognise herself in the books, rather than throw them down in disgust. I can still remember getting excited aged 11 reading Jacqueline Wilson's 'The Suitcase Kid' because the characters watched Neighbours like my friends kid. If I'm not writing for that little girl, how can I call myself an honest writer?

Just a very quick cheeky blog to say that I've started a competition on my website to name my main character's cat in Book Three. The winning cat namer will be able to read about a cat with the winning name, and will be acknowledged in the acknowledgements of the finished book.

If you're interested in entering (or would like to pass on the competition details to any children's writing groups/book groups you are involved in) please leave a comment on my website. The competition will run for about a month, or until I finish my third draft, whichever is sooner.

Now go and read Karen's post (below).

Pace is, quite simply, a pain in the arse.
Pace is how fast a story is being told. It's annoying because it's not easy to explain WHY something is paced too fast or two slow. The only way to figure it out, as far as I can tell, is to read a lot of books, then print out your manuscript and read it like a book, noting down the places where the story is getting boring (pace too slow) or you blink at half a year's gone by (pace too fast).
With my last book, 'Season of Secrets', my pace was mostly too slow - mainly because I set myself targets like 'write a thousand words in a day', with the result that I frantically wrote a load of rubbish to meet my deadline. Editing then mainly became cutting, which is a wonderful process - my target then became 'delete a thousand words a day', which is frankly easier and gives one a wonderful sense of freedom as the story emerges from all the dross, shiny and streamlined. I've deleted about 20,000 words from both of my first two books, neither of which is longer than 37,000 words in total.
With the latest book, however I set myself the target of finishing sections - write two sections per week, I told myself. This has resulted in lots of ridiculously short sections, which are paced far too quickly.
I now just need to add stuff - which I have no idea how to do. Aargh! Help would be gratefully received!

Like most writers, I occasionally procrastinate. This is probably a bad thing. This is why, today, I am bringing you my sure-fire method to avoid procrastinating when supposedly writing your novel, otherwise known as Use The Procrastination. It Is Your Friend.
Confused? Read on.
The method is simple. First, find something very important and very difficult/dull which needs to be done (preferably on a computer). This can be anything from tax returns to Scout Club minutes to essays (I learnt this technique while studying for a Masters). This works best when the thing is urgent and overdue, but it does need to involve your brain, or at least more brain than your novel.
Then ... turn on your computer. Stare at the screen. Say to yourself, "I really must do that tax return". Whistle. Think, "Oh, I'll just write a few paragraphs of novel first."
Suddenly, novel stops being Work and Difficult and becomes Procrastination and Fun, and you wake up at the end of the day to discover that you've written 1000 words (hurrah!) and ... er ... not done that tax return (less hurrah).
I probably shouldn't admit to how useful I find this method ...

PS Yes, I was interested, Penny. Today I have spent the whole afternoon reading a proof copy of Girl Meets Cake by Susie Day, which is utterly hilarious and well recommended. Out in April. Also reading Dangerous Liasons, for fun (and it is fun too, makes me want to be a libertine), In Bed With ..., a collection of erotic short stories, for research (because I'm going to have to write a sex scene for the work in progress, and I'm terrified) and an envelope full of short stories for work (I'm a competition judge).

Why do you write for children? is a question I get asked every now and then. It's a good question. Here are some of the good reasons why people do it:

1. You love children’s books, and always have.
2. You have recently discovered children’s books and been blown away the amazing things writers are doing in this field (if you answered no to both of these questions - for shame! Go and read some Philip Pullman/Hilary McKay/Rosemary Sutchcliff/Mary Norton/David Almond immediately!)
3. All of your ideas are for children’s books. You aren’t sure why.
4. You have very vivid memories of being a child - many of the most significant things that ever happened to you were in childhood.
5. You are halfway through your epic fantasy about a little girl who finds a magical kingdom at the bottom of her sock drawer, and friends have suggested that it might not be suitable for adults. (This isn’t as unusual as you might think - Michael Rosen, Mark Haddon and Meg Cabot all started out thinking their writing was for adults).
6. You have no idea. You recognise it is probably an insane ambition.

And here are some of the bad reasons:

1. You’ve read some of the tosh that gets published and you can do better than that. Really? I sympathise with the desire to write something easy - when I was a little girl I wanted to write alphabet books on the same basis - but just because something looks simple, doesn’t mean it is.
2. You’ve read Harry Potter and it was utter tosh - you can do better than that. If you think Harry Potter is tosh, you’ve missed all the reasons why children love it - the humour, the read-aloud writing style, the vibrant characters, the plot twists and the deeply complex world-building. Children want to go to Hogwarts because it’s clear that J K Rowling does too - if you think what you’re writing is tosh, they will recognise this.
3. Children’s authors are loaded, right? Cue hollow laughter. Most authors earn less than minimum wage - around £6000 a year. And that’s just the ones that get published.
4. You want to be a writer and children’s books are easier than adult books. Probably true if you’re a celebrity and can afford a ghost writer. Otherwise, bear in mind that while you have to get everything right that you would in an adult book - plot, character, motivation, language etc - you also have to be aware the whole time that you are writing for people who are fundamentally not you, and come with their own needs and expectations. Not easy.
5. You’ve written a story and your children loved it. Children love attention, they love stories and they love anything created especially for them. It’s great that your kids liked your story - but this in no way means it is publishable or has any wider appeal.

Please note that neither of these lists are exclusive.

Please ignore the picture. Me and Tom are off for an I Capture The Castle weekend in this Landmark Trust property in about two hours, and I'm too excited not to mention it. The brochure even recommends sitting in the kitchen sink to watch the deer.

Way back in October, the awfully patient Jon M asked:

I know there are as many ways to write as there are authors probably but I was curious about something you mention on your website about writing key scenes and then 'filling in the gaps.' Is this a particularly useful approach?

One of the most valuable things I learnt from my MA is that there really are as many different ways of writing as there are people, and perhaps books. Some of my coursemates would plan everything meticulously, others never planned at all. Some wrote three times as many words as they needed and then edited ruthlessly at the end, others worked over each chapter until it was perfect before moving onto the next.

I tend to have a very simple, overarching plot. Then I start thinking of scenes that should go within that. Sometimes these are the key scenes, sometimes I just wake up and think 'There should be snow in this book!' and write that. Often I'll know where in the book these scenes fit, but sometimes it's as vague as 'somewhere near the end' and sometimes I'll have no idea.

I started writing like this because Ways to Live Forever is full of lists and pictures and stories, most of which are important to the plot, but most of which I couldn't place in a larger narrative until I'd ... er ... written one. I found it a wonderfully liberating way to write. There's nothing worse than getting your character home from their battle and realising you have no idea what they do next. Or worse, you end up describing all the dull bits - them taking off their shoes, washing the blood out, eating toast.

Just writing the fun scenes means that I enjoy writing more - if I want to write something sad, or something funny today, I write it. It means that often when I come to piece the scenes together, I realise I don't need the connecting chapters - which makes for a much more interesting, more tightly paced novel. It means that when I come up with a subplot six months in, I can write all those chapters without too much worry. Often I'll write the ending first, so I know where I'm heading. I can discover what I want to write as I go along - and I can avoid writing the difficult sex scenes, for example, until I'm comfortable enough with my characters to be able to do them well.

This approach does lead to a certain type of novel, which I like, but you may not. It means that I write a lot of chapters which don't make it into the final book (although again, I like this, as it gives me permission to be experimental and also, I think, makes it easier to edit the book. I can simply delete the whole chapter, or delete it and rewrite it from the start). It also makes sewing all the pieces together at the end an absolute nightmare. I put them all in an approximate order, read them, weep and wail, delete several thousand words, rearrange them, read it again, weep and wail again, realise I've forgotten to put in a scene introducing Granny, introduce Granny, rearrange again ... I have to spend a long time at the end making sure the thing is paced right, that all the important information is given and that the shifts in tone all work. Sometimes I do end up writing filler scenes - one example of this is the chapter 'Alone in the Night' in Ways to Live Forever, which I wrote to cope with a jump from one difficult scene to another, the next day, with a completely different emotional tone. In Season of Secrets, I ended up writing a lot of chapters with titles like 'November' to cope with the passing of time. It does finally come together, though - I got my bound proof of Season of Secrets through yesterday (hurrah! hurrah!), and was surprised to discover how much I liked the finished product.

This way of writing suits the way I tell and find stories. It works for me. It may not work for you. Why don't you try it and see what happens?

A long time ago (last time it was my turn to blog) I offered to answer any of your questions. Dan Metcalf asked:

Once the publisher says OK, and you do your happy author dance, what then? Do you always agree with the publisher over how the book is going to go out to readers? Or could you cheerfully throttle them some days? Oh, and do you manage your publicy (school visits, readings in shops etc) or do they?

OK. When the publisher has said OK, the first thing that happens is edits. You'll go in and meet your editor (if you haven't already done this) and she will tell you everything she thinks needs changing about the book, from big structural changes to smaller line edits.

The amount of editing required varies - with my first book, it was just line edits and a few extra chapters. With my second it was much larger edits which took several months, in two separate drafts.

The editor can't force you to make any change you don't want to make, although she can refuse to publish you. My editor is very good at making the sort of suggestions it's hard to disagree with. "I think the adults need more character." (What are you supposed to say? "Er, no, I like them character-less.") She's also very good at saying thing like, "I think there's a problem here. How can we solve it?" and letting me come up with solutions myself. With line edits, I tend to agree with about three quarters of the things she flags up, and she's happy to let the others slide.

After edits come copyedits, which are spelling and grammar mistakes, consistency errors, repetition and making sure that everything fits Scholastic's style guide (ie changing all my okays to OKs and my alrights to all rights).

At some point in this journey, you should get your contract to sign and then your money, but this can take several months to come through. Don't panic. They will appear.

The cover and the blurb come next. All of the covers I've had have gone through several radically different versions, and it's probably best to let them get on with this. You don't get much say in your cover, although you can set your agent on your publisher if you really hate it, and I have had friends who've managed to change theirs. I've liked two of mine, and disliked one.

Next comes the bound proof, which looks and smells like a book - it's been typeset, it may (or may not) have illustrations and it has a cover which may look like the book's final cover or may be much more simple. Scholastic do very plain, very similar-looking proofs. These are sent out to booksellers, librarians, reviewers, enterprising bloggers, book scouts, prize committees, foreign publishers and anyone else who might help the book sell more copies. You also get one to stroke, take photos of in your bookcase and generally feel like you're a real author at last.

Foreign sales will hopefully be happening at this time as well - either through your agent or your publisher's rights department, depending on whether your publisher bought foreign rights or just English rights. A lot of these come through at Bologna and Frankfurt, the two big international book fairs, but they will also trickle through throughout the year.

Your book will feature in the publisher's catalogue, which is also sent out to booksellers etc. Sales reps will go round individual bookshops trying to persuade the children's buyers to stock it. You may be asked to do some publicity work before the book comes out - I had to come and talk to sales reps and booksellers, for example. Your book will appear on Amazon with your name under 'Author'.

At last, (and for me this was a year after I got the offer, although for some people it's even longer) you get that box through the post with the real, live author copy of a book with your name on it.

Happy days.

In answer to your other questions ... no, I don't always agree with my publisher, but I usually do. I've been very lucky in that Scholastic have worked really hard to promote my books, which has been fab. I know it's not always that easy, though!

Publicity ... there's some publicity (like putting you in their catalogue, sending copies to reviewers, pitching for festivals, paying for you to be in 3-for-2 promotions and submitting you for prizes) that only publishers can do. They've also arranged other things, like talking to librarians' conferences, arranging interviews and printing a lovely sample booklet with the first couple of chapters.

Some publicity I've done myself - I arrange most of my own school visits through www.contactanauthor.co.uk, also through my website (Scholastic made me a beautiful website to promote the book - www.waystoliveforever.co.uk, and I made myself a beautiful website to promote me - www.sallynicholls.com.) I also arranged my own book launch, mainly because I wanted to invite all my friends, and I didn't think Scholastic would pay for everyone I know to drink champagne. Scholastic turned up and helped sell books, though. And I did interviews on quite a few friend's blogs etc, which was nice.

Phew! I think I'll have to answer the other question in another post. Do continue to ask things, though. And other people - please chip in if I've left something out, or if your experience was different. Everyone's is.

March is National Small Press Month, now in its 12th year, a nationwide promotion highlighting the valuable work produced by independent publishers. An annual celebration of the independent spirit of small publishers, Small Press Month is an effort to showcase the diverse, unique, and often most significant voices being published today. The Overlook Press, honored by the New York Center for Independent Publishing in December 2007, and recently profiled in Publishers Weekly, is a small press in its 37th year! Celebrate great writing this month with these new releases: The Wentworths by Katie Arnoldi; Song of the North by Jules Watson, Courting Shadows by Jem Poster, Funny Boys by Warren Adler, The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte by Laura Joh Rowland, and The Better Angels by Charles McCarry.