A Thousand Words Festival

 

I just want to note that this is the first phone interview I’ve done for a while, and I was between recording devices, so although I’ve tried to transcribe my conversation with Marcus to the best of my abilities, there are no doubt words I’ve missed or misquoted. You’ll be pleased to know that I have a brand new dictaphone, and I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I enjoyed talking with the lovely Mr Sedgwick. (I should also note that the questions are a bit out of order, because the conversation took a different path than I had expected.

-Bec Kavanagh

You have a series for younger readers as well as your series for young adults. How does your writing change depending on the age you’re writing for?

I think it’s a mistake to think too much who you’re writing is for, and with young adults especially. I try to write the story that I need to write. It’s very patronising to write ‘for’ an audience. If I was trying to guess what a teenager around the world might think or want to read I feel that’s quite a patronising way of doing it.

For the younger series, it’s a different type of job – more like telling a story. I’m more conscious of the writing, but it’s easier because I can hold the whole story in my head.

Would you call Midwinterblood a young adult book?

I think writers are not the people to ask that type of question! I’m sitting in my little shed and then my book ends up in people’s hands and I don’t care if they’re 14 or 34 or 84. I just write the story that I want to write. It’s in the launch list of Indigo - a new imprint of Orion aiming to narrow the division between adult and young adult books.

Do you ever feel limited by the YA genre?

I know I’ve got a lot of adults reading anyway because I get quite a lot of emails from them through my website. They usually start “I know I shouldn’t be reading your book” to which I reply “I’m thrilled anyone is reading my book!”  But writing for teenagers you can really write anything you want. Wheras adult books are much more genre or trend limited and it’s harder to write ‘outside’ genres.

A lot of your young adult books are quite dark, what are your thoughts on this years discussions surrounding the Wall Street Journal’s article on young adult fiction being too dark?

That debate crops up here every 18 months or so. Occasionally it gets as far as getting to the media. I kind of go back to saying what I was saying earlier about being patronising. I can remember what it was like, not exactly, but maybe this is why people write YA, because I can remember what it was like and I can remember what I could cope with and what I couldn’t cope with. I think it’s really patronising and it’s very easy to forget what it was like to be a teenager. And yet when you spend a lot of time talking to teenagers you know they’re interested in this stuff. And that’s why they’re called Young Adults – because they really are. It’s a squeamishness almost. It would be really doing them a disservice to patronise them and to not write about what they may well think about or be interested in.

Regarding the Wall St Journal – it is right that these arguments  crop up because it does show that we care about what people are reading. Which brings up an even more fundamental question which is “Isn’t it better that they’re reading something?” If it is slightly the wrong thing, children are very very good at self moderating. It’s much easier to stop reading a book than it is to stop watching a film. Even the worst that you read in a young adult novel is nowhere near as graphic as some of the things you see in horror films.

White Crow and Midwinterblood are quite modern, even futuristic, but they have a real sense of old gothic stories, is this intentional? How do you choose the timing and maintain such a delicate balance?

White Crow is interesting from that point of view. My whole reason to write that was to see if I could write the modern version of a gothic novel. Generally the novels I prefer to write are historical novels. White Crow was a bit of a challenge. In a way it was a bit of a cheat because the two girls have mobile phones and are texting each other but are both so isolated which forces them together and the things that happen –  tragic heroines is pure classic gothic novel territory.

In Midwinterblood especially you write in a lot of different times, each with quite a stylised voice and yet it still seems so natural – did you research the tone and writing style of various periods to write the book?

I’m really glad you felt that because it’s one thing that I was aware of but I couldn’t go over the top with. I wanted all of the seven parts to be different, it’s one of the things that you want to be able to do as a writer, to be able to write a story that you’ve been living in the world of your head. And there are so many nuances in language- it’s all kind of fake anyway. All of the dialogue in novels is fiction trying to fake reality in a way that is believable. With the viking part, there’s a lot of alliteration. And the reason I did that was because Scandanavian verse form was quite alliterative. They use a lot of ‘Kennings’ (which are like the viking puns) plays on words used to describe the seas or the sky rather than naming the object directly. There’s a lot of internal rhyme. And that was quite deliberate.

A lot of your books are set in quite isolated places and isolation seems to be a recurring theme. Do you ever feel isolated as a writer? Is isolation specific to young adult characters?

You’re absolutely right, I think I’ve done it in more of my books than I haven’t done it. To be completely honest with you, some of it is for very technical reasons such as it’s easier to justify what’s happening to the characters – Lord of the Flies is a perfect example of this – taking characters out of their natural environment. Partially it’s a simple thing to do, it means that you can really focus on the specific issues.

Whether I feel isolated as a writer? I don’t know, as a child I spent a lot of time just with my brother and my family.

This is not exactly what you asked, but it reminds me. A few weeks ago a librarian asked me “why do I write such dark books” I don’t think I do write dark books at all. I think I write about really gentle people but in difficult circumstances.

What kind of genre do you feel your books fit into?

I think it’s the nice thing about writing for young adults – you don’t really have to worry about that because they’re all grouped together. So its not something I have had to worry about. It’s up to reviewers to decide what your books are. you don’t set out thinking “I’m going to write a horror novel today, you just think I have a story to write today”.

Your books touch on a lot of supernatural creatures, but I wouldn’t call you a fantasy author as such, I’d be more inclined to put shelve you with someone like Poe, for the eerie sense behind your stories, and the feeling as a reader that there might be something over your shoulder but you’re too afraid to look. Do you deliberately try to stay away from the hoards of paranormal fiction (especially paranormal romance) that is flooding YA bookshelves at the moment? Are there particular elements of those books that you steer clear of in your own writing?

I think maybe there is, but I don’t think I’m doing it for that reason. It might sound crazy because a lot of people say that the books I write are broadly fantasy but I don’t think of them as fantasy. I always wanted to write stories that have elements of the supernatural or mythology. But I didn’t want to take fantasy like Tolkein (don’t get me wrong, I loved Tolkein) but the other way of doing it is to take a historical setting and to add a monster. That’s what I’ve always been trying to do regardless of the paranormal romance trend.

Are you inspired by fairytales?

Absolutely. Something I’m doing at the moment, I’ve just been delving around in the original versions of fairytales and finding the most horrific thigns. I said to someone the other day that I would like to publish folk tales or fairytalkes but you can’t really do that at the moment because its not what people want to read. I suppose you could do what Angela Carter did and write updated fairytales but then someone’s already done that. So what I’ve done with almost every book I’ve done is to add folk tales or fairy tales – Midwinterblood is a good example – in part six with the vampires that stems from Icelandic mythology.

When I wrote Blood Red Snow White I was writing the Russian Revolutian as a fairytale and I did it to make it simpler, but it was much more poetic and people really responded to it.

I know that your first published piece was a short horror story – do you still set out to scare people?

Writing horror is a strange thing because it’s really hard to judge what is scary. If you’re making a horror movie, you know it’s not real and when you’re writing a book you know it’s not real but you’re trying to do it in a way that will fool people. And usually it’s when you start getting feedback that you get people saying that there were one or two parts that were really scary. It’s really good fun to write hings that might be scary. It’s just really good fun. It’s important to deliver those punches. Because you have an idea, but it’s important to tell it the right way and that’s why storytelling is so important and that tradition of storytelling  is so important.

What is the scariest thing you can imagine?

The scariest thing I can imagine I actually put into the middle of Midwinterblood, It’s the part where the painter doesn’t want to paint anymore because the scariest thing I can imagine is not wanting to write anymore.

What is the book that you wish you’d written?

The Prestige. Not enough people seem to know the book and it’s superb. When I read it, I just loved it. It was touching on similar themes to what I was trying to do in The Book of Dead Days where you’re not supposed to know what’s real and what’s magic and what’s science and I think Christopher Priest did that so well. I think the film is an excellent adaptation but it does miss things. This is the difference between books and films. The modern story which is left out of the film is actually the end of the book and it’s the creepiest ending I’ve ever read.

Thanks Marcus, and I apologise again if I’ve missed any gems out! It was lovely talking to you, and I cannot wait to read what you’ve got in stock for us next. Hopefully we’ll see you at A Thousand Words sometime