ACHUKA Special Guest ~ Julie Bertagna

1. What music were you listening to during the writing of Soundtrack (do you listen while you're actually writing)?

The idea for incorporating music in the text came about because I listen to loads of music all the time and kept coming across tracks that fitted the action and emotion of the book so perfectly it was spooky. I thought it would add another dimension if the reader could go off and discover those tracks, that it would open up the whole landscape and soundscape of the book, and the 'inscape' of Finn, the main character. I would have loved that as a teenager - in fact I'd love it now. An audio version of the book that includes the music or an accompanying CD would be great. For me, music is a really good 'warm up' for writing. But there's a point when it starts to intrude and irritate. As soon as that happens, I know the real writing (as opposed to fiddling about) has begun. The music is off and the computer on.

2. The Contents page of this novel, listing the chapter titles, is like the track listing on a double CD. Was that intentional? The chapter titles ('Doom Eager', 'Mermaid Kiss, Siren Calls', 'Jingle Bells, Jellyfish, Junk' etc) clearly ARE as carefully wrought as the title of a song or poem. Many novelists don't bother with chapter titles. Why do you?

Nobody else seems to have noticed - though I suspect a teenage reader will get it. That was the idea. Also, I enjoy it. I enjoy the wordplay as a writer, and as a reader I find it much more interesting to have intriguing 'signposts' along the way. Writers using numbers as chapter headings is a weird concept.

3. I've heard you talk with biting irony about going into an Our Price shop on one side of the street, seeing it teeming with teenagers spending pounds and pounds on CDs, then walking across the road to a branch of Waterstones, finding the Young Adult section tucked away in a corner opposite books on breast-feeding, copies of Soundtrack on the shelf, but not a teenager in sight. As a writer of teenage fiction, how does this make you feel, and what do you think is the answer?

Deflated, demoralised, depressed is how I felt that Saturday morning.....then I had a cup of coffee and started planning the revolution. The answer is simple: marketing. Get the books into the places where teenagers go (HMV, etc) and get the teenagers into bookshops by catering for their tastes with as much care and flair as we expect for young children and adults. Gardening gets more space and presence than Young Adult fiction. Get an Internet site in for Saturday morning author link-ups, or put the Young Adult section in the music/video/CD department that most of the large bookstores now have. There are loads of things that could be done, now. Above all, get teen fiction away from Spot the Dog (much as I like him) and the breastfeeding titles. It's just not cool.

4. Have you liked the covers for The Spark Gap and Soundtrack? Anne Fine has spoken out against what she sees as "the growing obsession with covers". In the music industry, record/cassette/CD covers have always been considered a vital aspect of the marketing package. Do you think this makes the book covers of teenage fiction especially important?

I've just heard Anne Fine rant most entertainingly on book covers, among other things, at the Edinburgh International Bookfest. I'm with her on most of the other stuff but on book covers - no. Of course you shouldn't judge a book by its cover but this is a visually-dominated culture - visually-sophisticated - whether you like it or not. The cover is a pretty vital part. I think it's the polystyrene cup concept (champagne in a polystyrene cup - no thanks.) I'll buy a good book with a bad cover, but I prefer a good one. Good text, layout and paper quality also add to the reading experience. It should be an all-round good experience. 21st century teenagers consume all the other visually-sophisticated aspects of teen culture (CDs, magazines, etc),. You have to take that on board if you want them to relate to books.

5. As far as bringing 'young adult' fiction into the mainstream of teenage culture is concerned, do you have any special ideas?

The kind of approach mentioned in question 3 would be a start. At the moment books are separate from the other aspects of teen culture - they are ghettoised. There is so much that could be done. There is a teenage market. Many teenagers are - or could be- into books in a much bigger way than they are now. I meet them all the time. It needs the whole publishing industry to revolutionise the way Young Adult books are published and marketed. These books are missing the very people they are meant for. Instead of shrugging and muttering that there is no teenage market we should get sophisticated and analyse how other aspects of teen culture hit their market (music, fashion, sport, even crisps). Books should be right in there - at least as important as crisps. Writers such as Keith Gray and David Belbin have important things to say. ACHUKA is the very place to begin the debate. No, let's think big: the revolution.

6. Coming back to Soundtrack... what made you decide to write it in the continuous present?

Originally, the story was told by Finn's sister, Cathy. But it just wasn't working. I couldn't get it right at all and came within a hair's breadth of binning the whole thing - seriously. I was sitting staring out of the window one day, totally demoralised, and there was a kind of flash, some kind of electrical charge hit me. Finn began speaking and I grabbed a pen. Really weird. As soon as the story became Finn's, it worked. Cathy was brutally killed off - she doesn't exist now. Then came the thudding realisation I'd have to rewrite the entire thing.....

7. Laggandall Bay, where the novel is set, is fictional. You won't find it on a map. While I read the book I pictured the Sutherlandshire coastline near Melvich but one of the strengths of the book, it sees to me, is the sense of 'this is happening somewhere/anywhere'. In The Spark Gap, on the other hand (incidentally written in the conventional past tense, not the continuous present), the sense of place is specific (Glasgow). Were these differences in narrative style and setting things you consciously aimed for when embarking on your second novel?

Yes. Although The Spark Gap is set in Glasgow, I hoped the reader could imagine it as 'their' city - there are homeless teenagers and tower blocks and Big Issue sellers and Marks & Spencer in every city. I had to give a flavour of a Glasgow accent or it just wouldn't have been authentic but it's not too heavy because I didn't want it to be off-putting for non-Scottish readers. So I did have this intention of a somewhere/anywhere setting. In Soundtrack I took it a stage further. Laggandall is recognisably Scottish to any Scot (or anyone who knows Scotland.) But it could just as easily be a small fishing community in Cornwall or off the coast of North America. Disasters of all kinds hit communities of all kinds - as Scotland well knows. What I had in mind was the wonderful spin Kenneth White (Scotland's exported philosopher) gave to the poet Hugh MacDiarmid's comment that what is important is not the Scottish moment but the universal moment. Why, asks White, can't the universal moment also be a Scottish moment?

8. You use many different words to describe sounds in Soundtrack, from the 'shimmery, sizzling techno storm' on a Walkman to the 'shush' between gusts of wind and the 'drow' of the sea. While you were writing the book did you make conscious efforts to seek an extended vocabulary of sound, or were all these words already part of your writer's armoury?

The only conscious effort I made was to get right inside Finn - and even that, as I've said, came about by the workings of the unconscious. Once I 'got' Finn, the voice and the words followed. I'm not pretending it was easy - I felt like a hard-working 'medium'. But the sound vocabulary grew out of the character and how he experiences his world - as a theatre of sound. I enjoy experimenting with language and it often seems that as you write you recover the words and images from your unconscious, or they fall in your path, just when you need them.You are tuned in to be receptive to what you need.

9. It strikes me that you take great care with your writing and that you don't write quickly, or, if you do, what you write is carefully honed afterwards. Although your style is rich in analogy, especially in Soundtrack, it is also a very clean, crisp style. No sentence is longer than it need be. Every paragraph is carefully modulated. I won't ask how you do it, but could you say something about how the writing process works for you?

Here's E.M. Forster on the question of analysing a creative process: 'People will not realize how little conscious one is of these things; how one flounders about.' That's how it is. I flounder. How I get from floundering among a chaotic mess of ideas and scribbled notes to a coherent narrative is a bit of a blur. There's obviously a lot of hard graft along the way. It feels precarious. I suppose it's like sculpting. You keep working away at a formless blob until some kind of form emerges. What keeps you working is the certainty that there is something in there - even when I almost binned Soundtrack I knew there was something in there. What was defeating me was how to get at it. There is a point quite late on in the process when I think the right and left hand side of your brain meet up and I love this bit. Your blob has form; in fact the blob has become a large part of your reality, and you are trying to perfect it as much as you can, to make it live. Your tools are words and so there is a lot of intense working around with language - to describe it would make it sound quite clinical and technical, yet it feels very intense and riveting.

10. You've said that you found the idea for The Spark Gap, your first book, published in 1996, "in the world outside my classroom window; I grew characters out of the ones inside the classroom." But you were a primary school teacher weren't you? Did you mean you projected those younger lives into the older ones you thought they might become?

I was teaching a very streetwise bunch of 11 and 12 year olds, a (mostly) lovable lot in an urban wasteland, who had already seen the hard side of life. I didn't have to project too hard.

11. The opening sentence of that book broadcasts your talent for analogy. "Great drops of rain burst in the shape of fried eggs and streamed messily down the tall windows that ran the length of the school gym hall." Yes, the reader, thinks, that's exactly the shape raindrops make when hitting the window. Why haven't I ever thought of describing it that way? Do you have a notebook for storing away these verbal ingenuities? Do you sometimes steal and reuse analogies that you've come across in other writers' work?

Most writers, most artists of any kind, are scavengers. Shakespeare did it. Finn does it with his junk machines in Soundtrack. You scavenge the world for what you need, the building blocks necessary for your creation. By the time it has all been rehashed, re-created and integrated into your creation, whatever you have scavenged has transformed into something utterly new. 'Stealing' doesn't work. It feels false. You have to transform and make it your own. There are occasional exceptions: George Mackay Brown's 'starswarm' was too brilliant not to steal and preserve in the original! (To kind of repay the debt, there's a character called Tain in Exodus, the book I'm currently writing, who bears a remarkable likeness to George Mackay Brown). You also have to develop your own singular vision of the world. Glaswegian raindrops are like splattery fried eggs.

12. Did you complete The Spark Gap before finding a publisher?

Yes, I sent the completed manuscript to an agent, Herta Ryder, Judy Blume's agent, who sadly died just three weeks after she placed it with a publisher. She called it her last 'misssion' and, however trite it sounds, at low points I remember that remarkable act of faith and get my head together.

13. Both your teenage novels have been widely and justifiably praised. I'd go so far as to say that they are the best-written teenage novels of the decade. But as we all know, the number of books sold is sometimes in inverse proportion to the quality of the writing, and (partly for reasons addressed at the start of this interview) good teenage fiction often sells as poorly as poetry. It is wholly understandable, therefore, to see good writers of teenmage fiction, such as Keith Gray and Alan Durant, diverting their energies to younger fiction. You have written younger, shorter fiction yourself -- a Blue Bananas and a Barington Stoke. I suppose the question this is leading up to is, What kind of a writer to you see yourself as?

Adaptable and hard-working, as you have to be if you want to earn a living as a writer. I've now written a handful of younger books, and I'll do more. It's good to turn to something shorter and lighter after a longer novel and it makes sense financially - they are quicker to write and the sales are higher (because the industry knows how to sell books to children but not to teenagers). I was a freelance journalist before I wrote fiction and I still do the occasional piece. I'd love to try screenwriting and I might get the chance as there is film interest in Soundtrack. There's a blob of an idea for an adult novel , slowly taking shape. I like variety, different challenges, the feeling of risk every time you start something. That precariousness has its downside - I don't know what my bank account's going to look like from one month to the next!

14. When you go into schools as a visiting author, what kind of a profile do you find Young Adult literature has?

It's so variable. As an ex-teacher I well know the power that lies in the hands of teachers to fire up young minds with a good book. I've been in schools recently, talking up the magic of great books like Skellig or Northern Lights, and look up from interested young faces to the blank faces of the teachers. On the other hand, it's only five years since I stopped teaching and there wasn't the interest in author visits and Book Weeks that there is now. There is a growing interest and awareness in children's books. But Young Adult literature gets lost or overlooked - because it's not children's literature. And it's not quite adult. All it needs is a different strategy: a tribe of writers for Young Adults to get teen bookfests going, Book Weeks that focus on Young Adult books, teen culturefests that promote books as part of teen culture, more book prizes like the Angus Award where teenagers choose the shortlist and vote on the winner......

ON THE NEXT PAGE JULIE BERTAGNA SPEAKS FURTHER ABOUT HER LATEST TITLE FOR YOUNGER READERS, 'DOLPHIN BOY', AND HER NEXT TEENAGE NOVEL, 'EXODUS'...