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Julie Hearn: Questions & answers |
On Dartmoor - Merrybegot territory! (photo: Phil Beer)
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Ever since I can remember. When I was five I wrote stories about elves and rabbits on scraps of paper and sewed them up the middle to make little books. I wrote diaries too - pages and pages every day - and if nothing exciting had happened I made stuff up. My teenage diaries are shocking, but a pack of lies from start to finish.
I still wanted to write when I left school so I became a journalist. And that was great fun, for a long time, although when it came to making things up, there was only so far I could go!
What kind of things did you write about when you were a journalist?
All kinds. I started out as a news reporter on the Slough Express where I never knew, from one day to the next, what kind of story I would be covering. My 'patch' took in Iver Heath, Colnbrook and Richings Park so anything that happened there, from a murder to a church fete, was for me to write about. I used to dread being sent to interview the relatives of anyone who had died tragically. It was always a relief when nobody answered the door - I never dared go back to the office and pretend there had been no-one home in case a reporter from the rival newspaper turned up five minutes later and "got the story."
I remember spending hours with the elderly parents of a young woman who had been found dead in her bathtub. It turned out that this woman had suffered for years from anorexia, and that she was so weak that she fainted in the bath and drowned. I remember how difficult I found it to condense that sad story into ten factual paragraphs.
In Australia, where I worked for a daily newspaper in Sydney, I knew so little about the country's politics, culture and legal system that I was next to useless in the news room. I should have been sacked, really, but the chief of staff was a big softie so let me write mostly features instead. I loved writing features because there was more scope for being creative - I could describe people's feelings, or the way they looked, and I could use figurative language to add a bit of zest. Much more fun!
Where did you get your inspiration for Follow Me Down?
I got the idea around four years ago, while I was studying for a masters degree in women's studies at Oxford University. I was having to write some very difficult and, I have to say, very dull stuff at the time and wasn't enjoying it very much. I'd thought about writing my thesis on female freaks in Victorian sideshows, so had started researching that subject. In the end, I wrote something completely different, with the scary title: Teetering on a Soapbox: Women's Activism and the Patriarchal Backlash (aaargh!) but something I'd found under 'freaks' in the Bodleian Library - an 18th century handbill about a "Changeling Child" being shown at Bartholomew Fair - stayed in my mind. I kept thinking about this tiny person who, according to the handbill, never spoke and had no teeth but was 'the most voracious and hungry creature in the world'. I kept wondering who she had been and what had happened to her. So as soon as I'd finished studying for my master's degree I decided to write her story.
In Follow Me Down the bits set in the past seem very real. Did you do a lot of research for that?
Masses. Absolutely loads. I practically lived at the Bodleian Library for six months, reading up on everything from the mechanics of grave-robbing to the history of Bartholomew Fair. I read dictionaries of 18th century slang, so I could use words like 'muckworm', 'glimsticks' and 'arch-rogue' knowing they were right for the time. I filled a thick notebook with fascinating facts about London life in the 1700s, and nearly all of them got woven in somewhere.
Do you ever suffer from writer's block?
No. I suffer from late nights, long lie-ins and lazy afternoons - and then pretend it's writers block!
Does being happy or sad affect the way you write?
Brilliant question! And, come to think of it, yes it does. I get the most done when I'm neither particularly happy or particularly sad, because then my mind is calm, and receptive, and I can concentrate. If I'm deliriously, mind-blowingly happy I tend to waste a lot of time gazing out of the window with a stupid smile on my face. If I'm sad, worried or angry it tends to seep through into whatever I'm writing - which is sometimes appropriate and sometimes not.
What kind of books are on your bookshelf?
All kinds, from The Feminist Companion to Mythology to Stig of the Dump. I keep meaning to sort them into categories (reference, children's etc) but, for now, they're all jumbled up - which leads to some interesting juxtapositions (I see, for example, that I've got Morris Gleitzman's Bumface next to Victorian Household Hints, and The Slang Thesaurus rubbing shoulders with Wuthering Heights!
When and where do you like to read?
In my garden, on a summer afternoon, lazing in my hammock... or on the train going down to the West Country.
Do you ever use your friends/family as models for characters in your books? If so, do you tell them?
No. I would be too nervous of upsetting someone, or of being sued for libel! When I began writing Follow Me Down the character of Catherine, the single mother, behaved a lot like me right from the start, so I deliberately gave her a son - Tom - instead of a daughter because my own daughter, Tilly, was 11 at the time and I didn't want the book to turn into a thing about us.
I do use real men, women and children as characters but they're usually long dead, so that's all right! In Follow Me Down the Changeling Child, the Gorilla Woman, the Giant, and the Bendy Man are all based on people who were shown as 'monsters' several hundred years ago at London's Bartholomew Fair. In The Merrybegot a very unpleasant man from the seventeenth century swaggered into my story and insisted on staying; then a boy - a famous historical figure - turned up on the moor. The man is Matthew Hopkins, the Witch Finder General from Essex. The boy is... well, I'm not going to tell you. It would give too much away!
Which literary figure would you most like to meet?
The Scarlet Pimpernel. He was my first crush!
What's the best thing about being a writer?
Being able to tell incredible lies without getting into trouble
And the worst thing?
I'm not sure if this is a bad thing or not, but I have a tendency to treat my life a bit like a story - by which I mean I can be very objective about things that happen, as if I'm an observer and not really involved. And I definitely get cranky if things aren't going my way... if I don't feel in control of the plot!
The writer Anais Nin once said that her compulsive diary-writing was a way of distancing herself from certain things that happened to her and re-arranging them into a more bearable shape: "I was telling myself the story of a life," she said, "and this transmutes into an adventure the things which can shatter you". I completely understand that.
Why did you decide to write children's books rather than books for adults?
I suppose I'd had enough of writing for adults - first as a journalist, then as a student of English and women's studies. I wanted to give my imagination free rein in a way that didn't have to be clever, or cynical, or have a great wodge of footnotes at the bottom of every page to explain things!
One of the joys of writing Follow Me Down was it made me feel a bit like a child again myself - getting all excited about what might happen next and truly believing, for hours at a time, in the magic of pink drinks, time travel and being invisible.
Do you know everything that's going to happen when you start writing a novel or does the plot develop as you go along?
I planned Follow Me Down with mathematical precision, on a graph, with the high points the lulls and the tying up of loose ends all mapped out. That graph looked like the kind of chart you see at the foot of hospital beds, measuring heart rhythms or birth contractions! The plot thickened once I knew my characters better, and I went off on a few tangents, but the basic storyline stayed the same.
My plan for The Merrybegot was nowhere near as detailed and I had only the sketchiest idea, to begin with, of where I was going with Ivy.
Diving into a book without much of a plan feels both exhilarating and terrifying to me. It's as if, after ten years as a journalist, then four spent writing essays for my degree courses, I'm not comfortable writing something I haven't researched and made pages and pages of notes on!
How did you get your first book published?
I sent a copy of Follow Me Down to the Felicity Bryan literary agency in Oxford then kept everything crossed, hoping they would like it and decide to represent it for me. Thankfully they did. Catherine - who is my agent and absolutely superb - sent copies to various publishers, three of whom wanted to publish it. I chose to go with Oxford University Press because I felt I would be able to work well with Liz Cross, my editor there, and for the very practical reason that it is close to my home.
Where is The Merrybegot set, and what is it about?
It's set in the West Country in 1645, during the time of the English Civil War. And it's about a couple of teenage girls behaving very badly and getting a third girl into a lot of trouble. It was easy to get someone in trouble back then. You just called them a witch. There's a lot of folklore in it... a lot about piskies and fairies, and spells. But it's all in the past - no leaping between centuries in this one.
Is Hazel a follow-up to Ivy?
Hazel is Ivy's daughter, yes, but she's a very different kind of girl - rich, for a start, and incredibly naive about the ways of the world. There'll be a third book, set during the second world war, in which the main character will be Ivy's grandson, Rowan. I'm writing that one at the moment. Each book will stand alone but, as with most families, a lot of behaviour, and the results of that behaviour, are heavily influenced by the past. Ivy, for example, is pretty inadequate as a parent, which is understandable considering how traumatic her own childhood was. Also - I shouldn't be giving anything away yet but I will - a family secret I touched on in Hazel is about to have serious, possibly even tragic (I haven't decided yet!) implications for Rowan.
Do you ever worry that you'll run out of ideas?
Actually I worry more that another writer might have had exactly the same idea, at exactly the same time, and is writing a much better story about it than me AND will be published first! I had a dream along those lines once and woke up sweating!