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| With Marcus Sedgwick at ALA Annual 2014 |
Whenever I start
talking books with English teachers, I inevitably find myself raving about Marcus
Sedgwick. His books have huge potential for use in the classroom. Marcus writes with elements of classic
writers past. He has a distinctive style
that contains echoes of Poe, Steinbeck, Dickens and Hemingway, but with a
relevancy for modern readers. He brings
to life old world monsters, haunting emotions, and characters caught in the
complexities of life. While his work is
technically categorized as “YA” it could sit comfortably on the adult
shelf. Even though he tends to write
about dark subjects and characters, there is a stark beauty to his
writing. It isn’t trendy or trite. They
are books that won’t grow outdated upon the shelf, that I can envision handing
to my grandchildren one day and having them find just as much enjoyment in them
as I do. Marcus writes the sort of books
that book lovers and collectors crave for their coveted hard copy
collection. I know about that feeling
from personal experience -- my signed hardbound Marcus Sedgwick collection has
grown to fill a fairly extensive section of shelf in my home.
One of the
qualities I find admirable in many of the authors I meet is how humble most of
them remain even after they gain awards and recognition. Marcus is a perfect example. Despite having won a multitude of awards over
the past dozen or so years, he remains humble, kind, and very accessible. Between the year 200 and 2014, he has been
awarded the Branford Boase Award for Floodland, received an Independent Reading
Association Award nomination and Portsmouth Book Award nomination for Witch
Hill, been shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Blue
Peter Book Award for The Dark Horse, received a Guardian Prize nomination and
been shortlisted for both the Sheffield Book Award and the Edgar Allan Poe
Award for The Book of Dead Days, made the Booktrust Teenage Prize shortlist for
The Foreshadowing, awarded the Booktrust Teenage Prize and nominated for the Calderdale
Book of the Year Award for My Swordhand Is Singing, made the Costa Children's
Book Award shortlist for Blood Red, Snow White, made the Carnegie Shorlist for
The Dark Horse, My Swordhand Is Singing, Revolver, White Crow, and
Midwinterblood, received a Michael
L. Printz Honor for Revolver and Michael L. Printz Award for Midwinterblood. Impressive by any account! But despite the accolades, Marcus was more
than willing to spend time talking with me about his work at conferences and to
do not just one interview with me in 2011, but a second one a few weeks ago. This is what we talked about…
Suburban
Barnyard:
Every author
dreams of becoming the award-winning international superstar that you have
become, but I’m sure fame has its downside.
How crazy has life become since winning not only repeated Printz
recognition but multiple British book awards?
And how is it that you still seem to remain so humble and approachable
with all of that attention being thrown at you?
Marcus Sedgwick:
Well at the risk
of saying ‘yes, I’m so modest, aren’t I?’ I would just say that you do meet
authors who have become too big for their boots (not often, but it happens) and
I tend to think that they were probably already like that (or potentially like
that) before people started telling them how great their books are. And to be
honest, the thing that I care about more than anything else is the writing
itself. By the time a book has come out and is being criticised, my imagination
has (usually) moved on to something else - and that’s the thing I care about.
Lot of my writer friends agree with this - it’s nice to hear nice things, but
you must never let yourself forget that the most important thing is to stay
connected to the writing itself. That really is all that matters.
Suburban
Barnyard:
We talk a lot in
the library world about YA as a genre -- and one that really seems to foster
strong camps of "love" and "hate" -- but so many of your
stories, while marketed as YA, feel like they could be just as comfortable on
other shelves to me. I guess my question
is, why YA?
Marcus Sedgwick:
It’s a big topic
and a somewhat mystifying one too. The blunt answer is that it depends on who’s
published the book. I started out as clearly a children’s author, but as my
books slowly slid older and became more complex there have been times (as with
Midwinterblood, Revolver and now The Ghosts of Heaven) where people have felt
the books could just as well be on the adult shelves. And for me, they could
be. I don’t mind WHO is reading my books, and I don’t mind that much about
where they sit on the shelves. The only thing I hope is that someone
understands what I’m trying to do. The film world has less trouble with these
things - it’s a product of the unavoidable way we classify books, in order that
people can find them, but it can feel a little limiting at times.
Suburban
Barnyard:
I recently read a
reprint of a speech by John Green in the Horn Book Review where he said he and
the staff at Booklist “used to joke about that old cliché that novels only have
two plots: a stranger comes to town, and our hero goes on a journey.” He went on to talk about novels begetting
novels begetting novels. On your blog,
you write about old stories begetting new stories and the search for the
original story. I was able to read an
ARC of The Ghosts of Heaven and loved the central theme of spirals and “the
first story” evolving over time. What do
you think about the idea that there really are no new stories, just new ways of
telling them?
Marcus Sedgwick:
Well I have
sympathy with the idea that there are no new stories, that they are finite. But
because there are always new ways of telling them, they are effectively
infinite too. And that’s enormously exciting. I often look at the keyboard of
26 letters and a few dashes of punctuation and think ‘wow, I could do ANYTHING
with that little lot. Anything at all, it’s just down to me to find it.’ There are, after all, only 8 whole notes in
the musical scale, plus the semitones, and yet with that, you can create any
music ever devised (within the Western canon at least). I’m sure composers
sometimes think, well, what now? And yet, we keep trying and both writers and
musicians keep coming up with new stuff. In The Ghosts of Heaven I very
deliberately wanted to have an ‘old story’, and here I’m therefore riffing on
the kind of tales that must have been the very first things that we told each
other by the fireside. A cave has been found - it could represent shelter, but
there may be a wild beast inside, a wolf, lion or bear. Someone must go inside,
into the underworld, to find out what lies inside. They may die, or they may
return a hero. This is my candidate for one of the oldest stories of all time -
and we have seen variants of it told over the millennia - Orpheus in the
Underworld, Theseus in the Labyrinth, etc. It’s wonderful to feel the weight of
these kinds of tales under your fingertips as you type.
Suburban
Barnyard:
You tend toward
the macabre in your writing. Some of
your characters are deeply disturbed and disturbing. Why do you think human beings are so
fascinated with dark, haunting stories?
Marcus Sedgwick:
That leads on from
the above, I think. Who hasn’t felt the sense of threat that entering a dark
space evokes in us? It’s a truly primal response and one that I guess we are a
long way from evolving away from as yet. It’s inevitable that since life is
rounded off by death that we view the two things as inextricable. We both fear,
and are fascinated by, the darker side of life, and fiction is a safe and even
entertaining way for your mind to consider such things without facing them for
real. We cannot help but look into the dark, just as Orpheus couldn’t help
looking back into the dark for Eurydice, even though it sealed her doom.
Suburban
Barnyard:
Despite the
general trend toward dark stories, your stories themselves are really all over
the place in regard to setting and character.
You’ve developed stories that are set in just about every time period
from prehistory to the future. How do
you come up with your ideas for your stories?
Marcus Sedgwick:
Ideas evolve from
anywhere, and I do mean anywhere: objects, dreams, conversations, and so on,
but very often, as a novel is starting to form in my head, it will be a place
that will bring it alive. I might have deliberately visited somewhere, or it
might be by accident, or even just by reading about it (because sometimes these
places do not actually exist anymore, they are from the past) but however it
happens, I find place is a very strong catalyst for ideas to appear. I don’t
exactly know why, but it works, time and again - I start seeing actions,
hearing characters (not literally, you get locked away somewhere nice and safe
for that) and I jot these things down into my notebook. Lots never gets used,
some I keep, much of it is transformed by other ideas in my head, almost to
have changed from what I originally saw, but place is very important to me and
a resource I often turn to if I’m feeling stuck.
Suburban
Barnyard:
She Is Not
Invisible doesn't have the same dark overtones found in many your novels, and
yet I loved it all the same. I
absolutely fell in love with Laureth and her brother Benjamin. You really captured the idea of
blindness. I particularly loved the
interaction between Michael and Laureth.
How were you able to wrap your head around creating Laureth’s world so
well?
Marcus Sedgwick:
This book is a
little different from most of my others. It’s my ‘happy book’ though I use the
term loosely. I couldn’t have created Laureth myself - to truly represent someone
who’s blind, to even begin to do that subject justice, to do it authentically,
I knew from the start that I would need the help of blind people themselves. So
I spent a year or so going in and out of a blind school here in the UK - it’s a
very special place - the only place of its exact kind in the country in fact. I
made lots of friends there, I asked lots of stupid questions, the sort you
think you should never ask (but I needed to know) and they students there, who
ranged from 11-18 were all, and without exception, absolutely amazing. They
were articulate and honest and so very generous. And I really could not have begun
to write the book without them.
Suburban
Barnyard:
One of the
greatest challenges I personally find when I write is parting with ideas,
facts, and thoughts that I love, but that end up sounding contrived or awkward
in whatever I’m writing. My dad often
laments over being “stuck in running down rabbit holes.” While it’s great fun to explore ideas and
information, sometimes those rabbit holes can really muck up a writing project. They can become a distracting haze that
clouds the point of a story. How do you
force yourself to cut extraneous juicy tidbits and do you ever save them for a
different project?
Marcus Sedgwick:
You just have to
be brutal. Do you want to show off your knowledge of 19th century French
typewriters, or do you want to write a good book? You might be able to do both
of course, but any ‘fact’ should only appear in your story if it deserves to be
there, by which I mean it must serve the story, move it forward, have a
concrete position and purpose. Readers are really good at spotting when a
writer has decided to open the encyclopedia of their mind, and the result is
usually off putting and dull. The frustration is of course that you might have
found out all sorts of cool things in your research, but until you come to
write the book you don’t actually know which bits you will need. As for the
stuff left over (around 90% I usually think) you can’t use it unless you find a
way to make it belong. And if not, cut it. You never know, you might find a way
to use it another day.
Suburban
Barnyard:
When you set out
to write, do you create an outline and notecards, or do you just write freely
and let the story develop on the page?
Marcus Sedgwick:
If a book takes me
two years to write, I will have spent one year and eleven months thinking about
it. This is not to say that I plan what’s going to happen on every page, but I
do have an outline in my mind, and an ending. I fill notebooks with thoughts and
with research, I hate notecards but I do use large sheets of paper on which to
scribble plans and maps and diagrams of the book’s structure and shape. This
process varies with each book, you have to be flexible and work with the
demands of the book in front of you. Only when I am desperate to start writing
do I start, and then I write very fast indeed. If I’m working slowly, I know I
didn’t do my preparation well enough, and the results are almost always bad,
whereas, up to a point, the faster I am writing the better the quality is. That
might sound contradictory but I promise it’s true. Midwinterblood, for example,
I wrote in seven days. I’ve never had the intense experience of that book with
any other. Although I’d seen the painting on which it’s based 5 years
previously, the specific idea came to me after all that time never having
thought about the painting again (consciously at least) once. Once I had that
specific concept of seven interconnected stories, I spent the next 30 days
thinking about it, and then 7 writing it. Then it was all over, much too soon
actually, and I missed it. Because the very best bit of writing is when you are
actually writing.
Suburban
Barnyard:
So much of the
time, I find people are trying to pit film against book in a contest to see
which is better. Personally, I love both
mediums and don’t see them at odds. They
are simply different ways of telling a story.
You have mentioned an interest in film multiple times in your blog,
conversations, and speeches, so I am assuming you have a similar love of both
mediums. I recently read your review of
a Kubrick exhibit – well done, by the way.
I’m ready to chase out to its next venue to check it out after reading
your review. Aside from the obvious
brilliance of Kubrick as a filmmaker, what is it that you admire most about his
films, and film in general?
Marcus Sedgwick:
Oh, nice question.
I do love both mediums, very much, but they have differences and work in
different ways. I love the things that film can do that the printed word can’t,
and I love the things that the word can do that movies struggle with. I love
and celebrate those differences. As for Kubrick, I’ll try and keep it short or
I’ll end up writing a dissertation. Here’s one thing about Kubrick; he worked
in so many different ways. He didn’t want to keep making the same kind of film,
he wanted to explore and push and create new types of things every time. I
respect that and respond to that very strongly. In doing so, he made some of
the greatest examples of many different genre of film, not just one. Full Metal
Jacket is one of the best war films ever made (though so is his earlier Paths
of Glory). Spartacus, though not his project initially, is one of the best of
the sixties historical epics. Dr. Strangelove is a great black comedy, The
Shining a seriously symbol-laden piece of unsettling horror. 2001 is without
question the greatest Sci-fi movie ever made (possibly the greatest film of any
kind ever made - I know that some people will be screaming ‘Tarkovsky!' at me now,
but I think 2001 shades it). Kubrick once said he felt limited by the form; he
wanted to make films anew in some way. This was shortly before 2001 and many
people agree that he broke new ground with that movie. To call it a movie
sounds so light. It’s a work of art. But I understand what he meant by feeling
limited. As I said above, we only have 26 letters to work with, and ink on
paper, albeit virtual ink sometimes now. And yes, still, despite those
limitations, the possibilities are endless…
Suburban
Barnyard:
Last time we
talked, you mentioned a film project you and your brother were working on that
digs into our attitudes toward death and the dangers of fundamentalism. I’m suddenly having images from Six Feet
Under pop into my head… So what has
happened with the project?
Marcus Sedgwick:
Still rolling
along! It’s moved to Rome now, and we are hopeful of getting it filmed in 2015.
Suburban
Barnyard:
What do you think
are the greatest differences between your British audiences and American audiences?
Marcus Sedgwick:
That’s a good
question but I really don’t have the information to answer it fully. I’m
guessing that there aren’t many differences between readers in the UK and the
US. Publishers either side of the pond very much act as if there are, but I do
question how they know these things. My experiences of speaking to readers on
both sides of the Atlantic has led me to think we are much more similar than we
are different. Everyone likes a good story, well told and original, right? I hope
so. I very much value my American readers and am delighted to be published in
the US.
More information
about Marcus and his wonderful books can be found at:
