Book Talk

Book Talk provides authors’ perspectives on libraries, books,technology, and information. If you have any suggestions of authors you would like to see featured in Book Talk, or if you are interested in volunteering to be an author-interviewer, contact Kathleen Hughes,Editor of Public Libraries, at the Public Library Association, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611; khughes@ala.org.

Responding to the Nightmare: A Conversation With Alexander Gordon Smith

Alexander Gordon Smith has carved out a unique niche in the YA world with his "Furnace" series, which depicts a dystopian world where adolescents are sent to a nefarious prison on trumped up charges. In addition to his writing, he has founded a children's publishing company, Inkling Studios, and a film studio, Fear Driven Films. Smith will be speaking at the "Young at Heart: YA Books With Adult Crossover Appeal" panel at the PLA 2012 Conference, March 15th, 2012, 8:15 - 9:30 AM in Room 120 A-B-C at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Public Libraries: Where young readers today are more familiar with violent images from movies and video games, how do you meet the challenge of finding unique and surprising ways to scare them?

Alexander Gordon Smith: Yes, scaring kids these days is tough! They have seen everything. That’s what always surprises me when I do school and library visits: children as young as eight and nine often tell me they’ve seen films like The Exorcist and Saw and played games like "Resident Evil" or "Silent Hill." I love scary films and video games, but the horror there is often superficial – either pure violence and gore, or shocks and scares as spectacle. It doesn’t really get under the skin.

Books, on the other hand, do. When reading a scary book you are exposed to the horror at a much deeper level. You are involved in it, enveloped by it, as if it is happening to you, because you are so invested in the characters. A good horror story can stay with you for life. That’s the power of words, they tap right into your psyche. It’s like a fairground ride: watching a movie is like watching a roller coaster and thinking ‘that looks scary,’ but reading a book is like being right there in the front car as it rattles down the slope at breakneck speed.

Horror isn’t really about violence and gore (though I admit that my books tend to have their fair share of both). Those things are shocking, but they aren’t truly frightening. Lovecraft claimed that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” For me, the greatest horror evokes our instinctive terror and mystery of the unknown. That’s what I tried to do with "Furnace." By creating that mystery you let readers scare themselves because they generate their own sense of horror and anticipation. The fact that kids have seen it all before, the violence and the gore, makes these things known, familiar, and therefore no longer scary. You have to do something else if you want to tap into their fears.

The most important thing, though, is that at its heart horror has to be about heroism, humanity and hope. You never see so much of those three things as you do in horror – books, I mean, rarely films – because when things are at their very worst, I truly believe you see people at their very best. That’s why I write horror, that’s why I think horror is so vital for teenage readers, because that’s what horror does: it makes heroes out of us.

PL: When writing a series, do you have an endpoint in mind? Do you ever find yourself writing something that totally surprises you and takes the story somewhere unexpected?

AGS: I’m not a great one for plotting and planning, especially with the "Furnace" series. I wanted to see what Alex would do inside the prison, how he’d respond to this nightmare, because his spur of the moment choices would always seem more genuine than any rigid destiny I might have prescribed for him. I realized that if I knew in advance what was going on in Furnace and, more importantly, how (and if) Alex was going to escape, then the book might lose some of its dramatic tension. If I wrote like this then I’d know how he was going to get out, and therefore so would Alex, and I think some of that awareness, that relief, might leak into the story. Readers would know that everything was going to be okay because it would already be written into the text, invisible but unmissable.

So I just rolled with it, I just started writing. I threw myself into "Furnace" the same way Alex had been thrown in. I was the ghost in his cell. Because I’d done it like this, I felt as desperate as he did. Time was running out for him because the Blood Watch and the gangs were closing in. Time was running out for me because I was getting through the book and I still didn’t know how he was going to get out. I didn’t even know if he was going to escape! So yes, the decisions he made were often complete surprises, as if somebody else was yelling them inside my head. I think writing like this – writing at the speed of life – is what gives the books their relentless pace. I didn’t slow down when I was writing, I was living events alongside Alex so the story never lets up for a second. I love writing this way, because so much is unexpected!

PL: You’ve led a lot of writing workshops and wrote the writing guide Writing Bestselling Children’s Books. What do you enjoy about mentoring aspiring authors?

AGS: It’s a great place to steal ideas… Only kidding!! I love to see people writing – I truly believe that anyone can write a book, a great book, if they’re willing to put in the time and energy. When I do school visits so many of the kids assume they can’t write, that they just don’t have that ability, then you give them a few fun exercises to do and suddenly their imaginations are on fire, they’re filling page after page with ideas and before they even know it they’re already writers. The best thing is when kids email me a few weeks or months later with the first few chapters of their book, and it’s brilliant, and you know that if they carry on writing and reading and learning then one day they’re going to be published.

Confidence is hugely important, you CAN do it! Patience is vital too, because writing takes work. The most important thing, though, is passion: write the story you want to write, the book you want to read. I love mentoring, and I love being mentored too. I honestly believe that every writer, no matter how many books they may have published, is still an aspiring author. You always want to get better, to improve the stories you tell. There is always something new to learn.

PL: Has your background in publishing poetry affected your writing in any way?

AGS: Yes, definitely. I started publishing poetry (not my own, I might add, I can’t seem to write poetry as I never know where to put the line breaks and it always end up becoming prose) when I was studying at the University of East Anglia in 2002. I have always loved making books as well as writing them. When I was a kid I used to make little folded books with front covers and bar codes, and as a teenager I wrote and printed a few absolutely dreadful magazines about music and football, handing them out at school and even to strangers on the street. At uni I really wanted to get into publishing, so I started up a writing magazine called The Egg Box (the idea being that new writers are fragile eggs about to hatch, and we were giving them a safe, nurturing platform in which to do so). I published three issues then started publishing poetry collections. I was a gentleman publisher, really, only I was using my student loan to fund it! Egg Box is still going strong, although I handed over the reins a while back. Setting up Egg Box at university made me realise that if you have a dream, you have to go after it, you have to chase it. Everyone has dreams, goals, ambitions, and yet so many people put them off because they’re waiting for the right time, or they’re nervous about doing something new, or just scared of failure. But at the risk of sounding like a total cliché, the only sure path to failure is to not try it in the first place. With Egg Box I just went for it, and I did the same with the writing. Writing was something I loved, something I have always wanted to do, so I devoted myself to it, I threw everything into it, and thankfully it worked out. Human Beings are amazing creatures, we’re all capable of incredible things, every single one of us. If you’ve got a dream, go for it – whatever happens, you won’t regret it.

PL: Your next series, "The Fury," is completed in two books, rather than the "Furnace’s" five. What appealed to you about telling the story of a series in fewer books?

AGS: I should confess that although "The Fury" series is only two books, each one is roughly twice as long as a "Furnace" series book, so it kind of works out about the same length! Actually, when The Fury comes out in the US next year I think it’s going to be one huge book, which is cool as I have always been a fan of doorstop thrillers. I didn’t really write "Furnace" as five separate books, it was always a single epic story in my head that got broken down into five chunks (it would be a whopping 1500 pages if it was published in a single volume, although I’d love to see this happen as a special edition). I guess a story is as long as the story needs to be, then the publisher decides how it is packaged.

And as for "Furnace" being a five-book series. . . I’m already desperate to return. That’s the weird thing about creating a world and populating it with people who feel more real than your friends and family: you can never leave it, it never really lets you go. That world and those people will be there inside your head forever, haunting you, waiting for you to show them what comes next.