Jenny McLachlan: I love music, and dancing, and singing (though I probably shouldn’t do it in public!)
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Version 0 of 1. Did you always enjoy writing as a child? When I look at my old books from secondary school, I obviously loved writing stories; I wrote loads and loads and loads of stories and I did enjoy writing, but I did find it quite hard. So I don’t think enjoyed it in the way I enjoyed doing art, and drama. I really loved doing those, but I actually found things like spelling quite hard, and actually writing a lot was quite tiring because I had ideas for stories that were huge and once I’d started writing them my hand would start to ache – that put me off! So I was not one of those people who straight off wanted to be an author, when I was young, but I obviously loved writing stories. And also, I think this probably is as important, I loved playing. I can still really remember playing, making up worlds, playing with my little Sindys and my barbies and all of those sort of things. I think that part of becoming a writer is just making up the stories; it’s not all about writing! Do you have any advice for anybody who wants to write a book? I do. I think that the two things you need are read a lot and write a lot. It’s really funny how often people say “Oh, I’d really like to write a book” and I say say “Oh? What do you like writing?” and they say “I don’t”. But you’d never say you want to be a runner and say you don’t like running! I think the sooner you start to write regularly, the quicker you begin to write to a professional standard. And reading a lot is just about absorbing those tricks and writing patterns. I have to say, even though my book is aimed at teens, I don’t think I would have been able to write it until I was older myself, and had had children, because that is part of the reason I decided to write girls, because I have two daughters, and I really wanted to write books about that stage in your life. I can’t believe I’m saying this because it is so cringey, but when you go from being a girl to a women it’s not an easy transition. I’m sure they will never listen to a thing that I say, but maybe they will read it in my books! If you were not a teacher, and now a writer, do you have any idea about what you could have been? Well, I sort of persuaded my sister to train to become an midwife because I really would have liked to have become an midwife, or a nurse. I cannot imagine any job more suited to me than a teaching – and I think writing is very similar to teaching – because it’s about communicating with people, and its also about a little bit of manipulation involved in doing it! If you’ve got a group of students and you want them to do something, I always found that humour was always the best way. But otherwise midwife, or cook: I love cooking. Do you have a favourite book? Of all time? I think, probably my favourite book of all time is Jane Eyre. I remember when I read it, it was a college night, and I stayed up all night reading it so I really shouldn’t have done that! I’ve always loved romances. But my favourite book when I was younger was Lois Lowry’s A Summer to Die, which is quite similar to The Fault in Our Stars, so I remember absolutely loving that book. In your first book, Flirty Dancing, the main character Bea suffers from self-confidence issues. When you were younger did you go through these same issues and, assuming you were able to overcome them, do you have any advice? I had massive, massive self confidence issues. That is partly why I started writing. But Bea was very like what I was like as a teenager, and when I was at home I could be relaxed, and be myself, and be funny, but when I was at school I just fell silent, and hid my true personality from people for a long time. I saw the students I taught doing something similar (or at least some of them, some of them were very confident), and I noticed that often in books for teenagers the main characters were often very confident. I just remember when I was younger I didn’t even like walking past people in the street, especially if they were other teenagers, I would just walk across the road because I felt so self-conscious, about everything: the way I talked, the way I walked, the way I moved, I thought everything was wrong, absolutely everything was wrong. How did I overcome it? Hmmm... I think that leaving secondary school helped a lot, because I left and went to sixth-form college, and the majority of those overruling personalities suddenly were not around any more or had lost their power. That was the really interesting thing: as you grow up, you just don’t allow yourself to be bullied any more, I suppose. And I think as well a lot of the time I kept my head down, so I didn’t really ever have anything terrible done to me but I saw other people who had awful things said about them and I didn’t speak up, and I felt very bad about that. I suppose it is a very gradual thing, becoming more confident, as you get older, but I think that a lot of it is acting and if you pretend to be confident enough times than it becomes real. Can you tell us anything about your second book, Love Bomb? The second book is about Betty; she’s the opposite to Bea, she’s extremely confident. And it starts on her 15th birthday; she leaves for school late and when she gets to school she jumps over the art block. Her teachers are showing a new boy around the school, and she is struck by how supernaturally good-looking he is, which obviously should set alarm bells ringing in anybody’s mind! She goes home from school and meets her friend Bill, and they both go back to her house and he notices she’s got a letter that she’s not opened – a birthday card – and she says that she didn’t want to open it, it is a letter she always gets from her mum; her mum died when she was two, but she knew she was going die so she wrote her birthday letters and each year she gets one of these letters. Betty has really started to resent them, so she refuses to open them but then her life turns upside down – really, it has been pretty perfect until now, with her dad, who’s lovely, and her friends – she’s been living this great life and then her dad does the unthinkable and gets a girlfriend, and also she discover that first love is way more difficult than she thought. And so she opens her mum’s birthday letter; she knows that it is the last letter she is ever going to get but it has a different tone to the others and tells her about more letters that her mum has written for her about her life as a teenager. Betty reads them, and then the rest of the book is about what these letters tell Betty about her mum and falling in love, all sorts of things really. In Love Bomb music and singing are strong themes. I was wondering if, when you were a teenager, did you enjoy singing or listening to music? I love music, and dancing, and I do love singing (though I probably shouldn’t do it in public!), but I think it’s my husband who has a big influence on me in terms of music. I do listen to music when I write, particular albums. And yeah, in the book there are a lot of references to Betty Swan, who is a relatively unknown singer from the 60s, and I quite like that idea, because, obviously, Betty’s mum is also a mystery to her and I liked the idea of her being able to connect to her mum through music, and I think its very important in peoples life’s. Is there going to be a third book in the series? There is, I finished it last week, it’s called Sun Kissed: that’s actually the only title I thought up, because, by the third one, I realised that was the kind of title the publishers were going for. It’s about Cat and she get sent, packed off, to a tiny Swedish island for the summer because of some very naughty things she does. Her parents are going away and they don’t trust her to stay at home with her sister, and so she’s sent to this tiny, tiny island, thought she thinks she’s just being sent to Stockholm to stay with her auntie. There’s no phone reception, no internet; there’s only one shop and a handful of people, and they always have this endurance race on the island called ‘tough troll’ and that’s the opposite to what Cat would ever want to do in a million years because she’s very heavily involved in her appearance: not breaking her nails, that sort of thing! Anyway you would not be surprised to know that there is a very good-looking Swedish boy on the island… Do you want to interview your favourite author? Join the Children’s Books site and you could be in with a chance! |