A Thousand Words Festival

Hi Jane, congratulations on winning the Text Prize with your amazing first novel. We’re thrilled that you’re taking the time out to talk to us about your first book, the prize & dystopian fiction.

The Prize…

The Text Prize is becoming a prestigious way for emerging writers of young adult fiction to launch their novel. Had you heard of the prize when you started writing The Bridge, and did you write the book with the intention of submitting?

Hi Bec. Thanks for the opportunity to chat. As it happens, I did know about the prize before I started writing The Bridge, but it was a happy coincidence of timing that prompted me to send the manuscript in: I’d just finished my third (and I hoped, last) draft of the story when the prize opened for 2010. I thought ‘what have I got to lose?’ and sent it off.

Given that a lot of our readers are emerging writers themselves, or have a keen interest in the writing process, could you tell us a little bit about your thoughts as a newly published writer on the different ways to get published? What kind of publishing avenues did you consider before winning the prize?

There are so many ways to get stories ‘out there’ these days. People who are web-savvy are using the net in inventive ways – for example, Myke Bartlett, the 2011 winner of the Text Prize, publishes stories in podcasts. There are many online journals (as well as paper ones) that publish short stories and poetry. And of course there are traditional publishers. Taking the traditional path usually involves going through a literary agent and if I hadn’t been lucky enough to win the Text Prize my next step would have been to try to get an agent.

For people wanting to submit their work to any publisher, competition or magazine, what steps would you advise they take before mailing their piece off?

Everyone’s different. What I did was this: I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote until the story was as good as I could make it and I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly make it any better. Then I gave it to someone else to read (not a family member or friend!), listened to their feedback, realised that I could make it better after all, and went back to my desk. I went through that cycle with a full draft three times.

 

It helped that in 2008/2009 I was enrolled in a writing class. The class only met once a week, but it was run by established writers who read my work and gave me great feedback. I didn’t always agree with what they said, especially at first. I’d look over the report they’d given me, then put it in a drawer for a week. That ‘time out’ was important for getting over my first defensive reaction of ‘well, you just don’t understand what I’m trying to do’. But I’d be thinking about it during the week, turning it over in my mind, so by the time I took the report out of the drawer I knew that most of what it said was actually really useful, and I’d get on with the next rewrite. Finally, before I sent the manuscript off I tried to make sure that it was absolutely polished in terms of basics like spelling and grammar – I wanted it to look as professional as possible.

Being a Writer…

How did it feel knowing your words were going to be turned into a book? How did you feel when you saw the cover and the book trailer for the first time?

It was (and continues to be) wonderful. I still find it a bit hard to believe. It’s also daunting, because the book is out there now and I have no control over what people make of it. I’m used to writing non-fiction and publishing in academic journals – that’s my day job.  My non-fiction is backed up by research and data and if people argue with it I can argue right back in the next academic article. But story-telling is a different thing entirely. As for the cover and the trailer – they are fantastic. I think the cover is a genuine work of art and I love it, and the trailer is thrilling and action-packed and conveys exactly the right tone for the story. They both capture the mood of the novel so well. I’m delighted with them.

Where do you write? We’ve been talking a lot on our blog recently about the writing process, and I would love to know if you have a system… Do you have a desk or do you write anywhere? Do you work to a particular writing schedule or word count or are you led by inspiration? And how do you find that inspiration?

I write whenever and wherever I have a spare moment. I have to fit writing around my day job as a university researcher. That means writing at my desk when I’m not working, on my laptop in the evenings and at my local café over a coffee.  Also I write in my head when I’m sitting in traffic jams and when I’m on my daily walk in the hills around my home. If I get stuck on a plot point, walking is a great way to work on this. I ask myself a plot question at the beginning of the walk and it’s amazing how often I know the answer by the time I’ve been up the hill and down again. I think a lot of that has to do with working out precisely the right question and letting my subconscious go to work on it.

 

I’m nervous about being led by inspiration – I don’t have time to wait for inspiration to strike, and in any case I suspect inspiration comes from working, not the other way around. It’s about just sitting down and writing.  Although, having said that – I do get inspired by reading great writing. If I read a wonderful book it makes me want to have a go myself.

Onto the book…

The Bridge is brilliant. I reviewed it a few months ago and I have been thinking about it ever since. It took up all my attention for days and I still feel that it is one of the best dystopian novels to hit our shelves in recent years.

Thank you, Bec!

So much of dystopian fiction is about creating a believable setting that seems frighteningly close to our reality. How did you create your setting? What made you decide on the bridge as a division between the two societies?

I’m a sociologist, which means I study how societies work, and that involves finding out about the causes of poverty and conflict, about what drives global movements of people and about the influence of religion and politics in people’s lives. So when I sat down and thought ‘suppose there was this city in the year 2199….’, a lot of the background was already there for my imagination to work on.  My own city of Christchurch has a small (but beautiful) river running through it, and many of the great cities around the world are cut through by mighty rivers. It seemed plausible that a wealthy society might use its river to control entry from people it considered to be outsiders.

The book starts at a time when society is already divided. When you were writing, did you have a complete idea of the backstory that had led the characters and society to this point or did you just jump in and create the world around a central idea?

I started with that first sentence: ‘We rode to war in a taxicab.’ I didn’t know who the ‘we’ was, why they were in a taxi, or what the war was about. I wrote the story to find out. The backstory grew out of the daily news: globally many societies are already divided, people are on the move, their homes destroyed by wars and climate catastrophes, and they are drawn to places where they hope to find safety. Often that leads to conflict. In The Bridge those divisions are projected into the future onto a landscape and society that cast them into sharp relief. And in the middle of all that is a group of friends – teenagers who have had no part in shaping that world, but who have to deal with the mess adults have created. They rely on friendship and loyalty to get by, and often they see what’s important more clearly than the adults do. Ursula Le Guin calls this kind of story ‘social science fiction’ – it’s not big on future technological change but it is exploring future social change. As a social scientist who loves science fiction, I like that.

Nik is a fascinating character, and the threads of his story weave together tantalisingly as the story progresses. How did you manage his complexities and changing loyalties? Were there any characters that started out on one ‘side’ of the war and then changed or became more complex as you wrote them into the story?

At the start of the story Nik is someone who has been on the margins for most of his life: he’s a scholarship kid in a posh school, he has no family, and he knows that if the school decides to throw him out he’ll be on the street. So he’s learned some survival strategies. For example, he has taught himself to watch people and unfolding events carefully, because if he gets into trouble he has no back-up to help him out. When he and Fyffe set off across the bridge he knows they are walking into deep trouble. But friendship overrides everything for him, so he’s prepared to take the risk, and in doing that he discovers what happens when you meet your enemy face-to-face. His complexities and changing loyalties are grounded in that personal history and that discovery.

 

As I wrote, I was meeting the characters as Nik was meeting them, so my knowledge of them grew as his did. Lots of characters became more complex as I wrote them: Sim Vega is a good example. He started out as the anonymous commander of a Breken road block. When I wrote that scene I thought he’d probably disappear straight afterwards. But then, there he was, crossing the bridge, finding Nik and Fyffe and walking right into the centre of the story.

Finally, have you jumped straight into another piece of writing? Anything you can share with us?

Yes, I have jumped into another piece of writing – a sequel to The Bridge. There was a lot going on at the end of the story and I want to find out what happens next.

Thanks again Jane, I can’t wait to read more of your work, and we hope to see you visiting Melbourne soon!

You can read more about The Bridge and the Text Prize here.