Author Interview: Scott Westerfeld

Anna Fischer, 2014

Today I have the absolute pleasure of welcoming Scott Westerfeld, author of the Uglies series, Levithan trilogy and the brand new novel, Afterworlds, to answer a few questions.

1. Darcy’s introduction to the world of publishing seems to be very rosy, and seemingly ideal. How much of it was lifted from your own experiences?

She does get lucky, but in the hottest part of the YA boom a few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon to meet debut novelists in her position. Six-figure advances were flying around then (much more than now). Pretty much all her experiences, from the big money to an editor asking her to deliver a happy ending, are based on something that has happened within earshot of me.

2. Afterworlds combines both a paranormal story and a contemporary one effortlessly. Was it difficult to unite two potentially clashing genres?

I’ve always wanted to write two stories that were in different genres, and yet which were interwoven with each other at the level of plot and theme and language. Everything in Darcy’s real-life world has an effect on her novel, because she’s just left home, and so is growing up and learning an re-writing her novel all at the same time. She bases her novel on her mother’s childhood, on her parents’ religion, and even on her friends’ unpublished works in progress! It’s sort of my 150,000-word answer to the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” From all around. And as Darcy’s experiences make their way into her novel, hopefully that weaves the two strands together.

3. Through Darcy and Lizzie you touch on a lot of big, and often sensitive, issues. Do you think that there’s a limit to the number of subjects like terrorism, death, divorce that you can explore in one novel?

My favourite thing about the novel as a form is that it scales so well. You can flit about the whole world (as in Brooks’ World War Z) or keep yourself contained to a single room (as Donoghue’s Room mostly does). Likewise, you can go big with issues, or very small. This is perfect for teenagers, who spend a lot of time thinking about both big and small stuff. They have a lot of specifics to deal with, as well as the whole world to inherit.

A few quick ones!

4. Favourite world?

The real one. It’s so much gnarlier and more complicated than any fictional world.

5. Fictional universe you’d like to live in?

Anything with personal flight. Hoverboards, dragon mounts, superpowers – I’m there.

6. Current read?

Matt de la Pena’s The Living. A tidal wave in California, from the perspective of a cruise ship cabin boy. All the codes of wealth and power turned upside down, and a great adventure novel to boot.

Thank you so much Scott! Make sure you check out my review of Afterworlds and then race to your nearest bookshop to buy yourself a copy – it’s out today!

Sophie

Blog Tour: Sarah Rees Brennan's Writing Tips

Today I have a wonderful, wonderful post from Sarah Rees Brennan on her Unmade blog tour giving us her best writing tips. Unmade, the final book in the Lynburn Legacy trilogy is out tomorrow (25^th September) and it is most excellent. 
 

TO THE YOUNG WRITER...

All writing advice may be basically useless.

(I sure wouldn’t like to teach anyone about encouraging openers to posts on writing tips. It is clear I have no gift there.)

Every writer gives the tips that work for the writers they are. But for those listening-they don’t know what kind of writers they are or will become. And the important thing to remember is that the tip-giving writer does not know either.

Nobody gets to decide what kind of writer you are going to be but you.

Stephen King, Nora Roberts and Anthony Trollope all talk about getting up VERY EARLY to write, and doing it every day, as a writing tip. Cool story, Stephen King, bro! Personally, I will not get up early unless forced out of bed at gunpoint. No publisher has as yet been that desperate for me to meet a deadline.

Ernest Hemingway wrote drunk. Charles Dickens wrote at parties, so I think it’s a safe bet he wrote drunk as well. (Edgar Allen Poe wrote a poem at one of those parties about Charles Dickens’ pet raven. Was he sober at that time? The world may never know.) For readers under twenty-one in America and under-whatever-teen in-whichever-elsewhere you happen to be: do not tell outraged parents/teachers/guardians that a writer totally told you to get twisted in order to be a great artiste.

Some writers wrote under the influence of cocaine. (Every day, I come closer to just being straight-up thrown out of YA fiction. But they did!) I am not saying, get drunk. I am definitely not saying, try the cocaine. I’m not even saying, get up early in the morning. If you’re the kind of person who likes that kind of weird thing, with the natural light and the birds tweeting and maybe not even needing caffeine... I mean, I don’t understand it, but more power to you. Chances are you already know when your brain works best. It’s your brain: you’ve had it your whole life.

I think people stress about writing tips so much because we have this idea of writing as something very new that we need to take up, like learning an alien language and trying to find the trick of it, and the context for it.

One writer friend of mine said that she didn’t ever think of herself as starting to tell stories: it was just that everyone else around her stopped telling them - stopped playing games, stopped playing with dolls, stopped whispering tales of ghosts at sleepovers. I think that’s encouraging: that telling stories is part of all of us. All you have to do is decide never to stop.

That’s something to bear in mind. You’re not trying to do anything strange, or impossibly difficult. You’re just trying to find the best way to tell the stories you have to tell.

The worst thing that I see happening to writers is when they get stuck in patterns that don’t work, because this is how they think writing should go. I know someone who makes detailed charts of all their characters’ backstories and future stories and worldbuilding and-she is not writing the actual book. I know someone who always falls down on her endings because she does not plan the books, and does not have the instinct for structure that makes the endings come out okay, or know how to edit the book to put a structure in place later-say by taking out the ideas that seemed like good ideas at the time, but which forced the story out of shape. These are writers who are trying things that don’t work, and they are not giving up.

I give you permission to give up.

If you have been trying to do it one way for longer than a few months, stop. Try it a different way.

Try all the writing advice you can think of, but do not be afraid to throw the tips that don’t work for you in the rubbish. Try writing every day. Try taking weekends off. Try writing in silence. Try writing in front of the TV. Try making a writing plan. Try writing with no idea what will happen next. Try writing chronologically. Try skipping ahead and all around. Try first person point of view. Try third person point of view. Try second person point of view. Try omniscient point of view. Try showing people your work. Try keeping it secret and keeping it safe. Read a lot in the genre you want to write in. Read a lot outside the genre you write in.

Nobody knows better than you. You’re on a voyage of exploration: you’re on quest, and maybe some people you meet while on the quest will be helpful, and maybe they won’t. Keep questing on!

Try everything.

... Except cocaine. Don’t try cocaine.

A huge thank you to Sarah and S&S for the post and asking me to take part in the tour.

Now we’ve whet your appetite, flee to your nearest bookshop, gobble up Unspoken and Untold and lie in wait for Unmade to hit the shelves. You won’t regret it, I promise!

Sophie

365 Days of Wonder, RJ Palacio

Pages: 427

Publisher: Bodley Head

Release Date: 28^th August 2014

Edition: UK hardback, review copy

Other Titles by this Author: Wonder, The Julian Chapter (e-novella)

August Pullman stole the hearts of over one million readers in the bestselling, award-winning Wonder.

365 Days of Wonder is a beautiful companion to the novel: a collection of quotes and wise words, one for every day of the year.

It includes funny, insightful, inspiring thoughts from Wonder fans, from authors and personalities – Roald Dahl to John Lennon, Anne Frank to Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien to Popeye – and form the novel itself. It is a book to be shared, treasured and enjoyed again and again.

This book is a collection of precepts collected by Auggie’s fifth grade teacher at Beecher Prep, Mr Browne. Interspersed between the words of wisdom, which are displayed in a myriad of fonts and designs, are notes from Mr Browne. They could be correspondence with the children from his class delivering their summer precepts and explaining why they choose them, or just continuing their connection. It was a really nice way to connect the quotes directly to Auggie and Wonder as well as pull them all together as a collection.

Here are my favourite precepts from 365 Days of Wonder:

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who do not believe in magic will never find it.”

ROALD DAHL

“When you come to the end of your rope, tie and knot in it and hang on.”

THOMAS JEFFERSON

“Making a million friends is not a miracle . . . the miracle is to make such a friend who can stand with you when millions are against you.”

UNKOWN

“We must be willing to LEt go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

EM FORSTER

“What makes night within us may leave stars.”

VICTOR HUGO

365 Days of Wonder is a wonderful book that is the perfect gift or keepsake for fans of Wonder, collectors of precepts and, actually, just everyone.

Thanks to Bodley Head for the review copy.

Sophie  

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel

Pages: 353

Publisher: Picador

Release Date: 10^th September 2014

Edition: NetGalley e-proof, review copy

DAY ONE: The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb. News reports the mortality rate at over 99%.

DAY TWO: Civilization has crumbled.

YEAR TWENTY: A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world of every survivor has tried to rebuild.

STATION ELEVEN: Moving backwards and forwards in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charters the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: famous actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan – warned about the flu just in time; Arthur’s first wife, Miranda; Arthur’s oldest friend Clark; Kirsten, a young actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-claimed ‘prophet’.

Thrilling, unique and deeply moving, this is a beautiful novel about art and fame and about the relationships that sustain us through anything – even the end of the world.

For the last few months the literary world has been all a-buzz about Station Eleven and I just had to find out what all the fuss was about.

It’s unusual for a dystopian novel to be set so close to the apocalypse. Station Eleven tells the story of the Travelling Symphony in year twenty, two decades after the Georgia Flu brought civilisation crashing down. It was so refreshing to hear from characters you remembered the world before and could compare it to now, but there were also characters born after the collapse and the idea of a world with electricity, planes and fast food. I loved the contrast between them and how those who never lived in or don’t remember the old world marvel at what used to be possible while the others lament it.

The Travelling Symphony keep parts of the old world alive as they travel the territories of North America performing Shakespeare plays and orchestral symphonies in towns and settlements that never thought they would hear them again or had never heard them before. The idea of art, words and music surviving the end of the world, and helping people to survive the end of the world is wonderful.

Although I loved all of these elements of the novel, it didn’t blow me away like I was expecting it to. There were so many characters and they all come in at the same time; I honestly struggled to keep them straight in my mind and match them up to their relationships with each other and their experience of the collapse. Each character felt equally important in the narrative; there was no clear main protagonist, but that also made me not connect to any of them in particular. I just drifted between the perspectives aimlessly. I kinda feel like a I missed or misread something to not fall in love with Station Eleven.

This is a novel about love, family, friendship, art and hope in the face of the end of civilisation and although I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to, I reckon you will.

Thanks to NetGalley and Picador for the review copy.

Sophie