Along with other young writers in the UK, I attended the Wicked Young Writers' Awards in June. It was a fantastic afternoon which inspired me to kickstart this blog -- albeit it took me a while! Luckily, some of these talented writers agreed to let me interview them to get an insight into their motivation and aspirations. Finalist entries can be found here: http://www.wickedyoungwriters.com/downloads/Wicked_YWA_2015_18-25.pdf . And Sugar Scape finalists can be found here: http://www.wickedyoungwriters.com/downloads/Wicked_Sugarscape_Award2015.pdf
Interview with Amelia Roberts
Tell me a little about your writing journey.
When did you start? Why? How many pieces have you written so far? Have any of
these been published? Where are you hoping your writing will take you?
I started writing sometime between being able
to hold a pencil and learning how to spell – my parents have kept evidence of my earliest
written storytelling attempts, which range from the moving tale of the
"fat robn" who ate a "hol apl", to the thrilling adventure
of The Green Bananass Hunt. I haven't
stopped writing in one form or another since (although I like to think my
spelling has improved). In the attic, there are boxes full of notebooks
containing stories I wrote growing up, and there are over a hundred Word docs
in various folders on my laptop, which are comprised of everything from
abandoned song lyrics to example pieces of different genres for the creative
writing classes I taught to years two, five, and six pupils last year. I think
learning to read, and loving to read, from an early age played a big part in
why writing has always been such a compulsion for me.
I’d certainly hope that your spelling has
improved too! How did you get into teaching creative writing classes to primary
school pupils? Is that something you’d be interested in the future?
I volunteered as a creative
writing tutor in primary schools while completing my A-levels and this position
was an extension of that. It's definitely something I'd be interested in
continuing in the future; being able to witness and contribute to these
children becoming more confident in their own talents, playing around with
different writing techniques until even the most wary of them found something
they enjoyed, was just amazing.
Could
you tell me a little more about your own published work?
My first short story published,
"Bring in the Clowns", was distributed in an anthology of young
people's work, The Write Stuff, as the result of a series of writing workshops
led by the brilliant Mal Peet, in association with Brighton's Jubilee Library.
Since then, I've published a few non-fiction articles online and was most
recently published as a finalist for the 2015 Wicked Young Writers' Award. I
write because it's a fundamental part of me. It's what I've always done, but
it's also what I love doing; anything more than just the sheer satisfaction of
it is a massive bonus.
What kind of topics did you cover in your
workshops with Mal Peet? Do you think it’s had a positive impact on your work?
There was one initial workshop at
the Jubilee Library and we then continued working with him via e-mail. A lot of
what we covered was individualised around our own writing; we each wrote a
piece to send to our respective writer (Anne Cassidy and Nicky Singer also led
workshops at other locations), who would annotate it and send it back for
discussion and revision. The most positive impact it had on my work was simply
giving me the confidence to continue writing at a more serious level. Seeing my
work published for the first time at such a young age was what made me realise
that this could be more than just something I did for fun.
Where did your inspiration come from for your
WYWA piece?
The piece I wrote for the WYWA
was a poem called Achilles, written from the point of view of his lover,
Patroclus. It wasn't actually written for the competition, but for an
experimental writing class I took as part of my Creative and Critical Writing
MA this year. The exercise set for that particular week was inspired by Oulipo,
a group of mainly French-speaking writers from the 60s onwards, who practised
constraint-based writing. For this exercise, we experimented with picking a
name and writing a poem using only the letters in that name. Although I had
chosen the name mainly because I had recently reread Madeline Miller's
wonderful novel, The Song of Achilles, and was anticipating struggling mostly
due to the constraint on the writing process in this case, "Achilles"
turned out to be a very versatile name in terms of the letters available, and I
hope I was therefore able to convey his and Patroclus' journey and relationship
in what had to be a short, limited poem, without relying on the expected (you
can make the word "heel" out of the name "Achilles").
That’s a really interesting technique, and it
sounds really difficult! Do you write more poetry than prose, or is it equal?
Which do you prefer and why?
It was really fun! I'm usually
solely a prose writer, so it was also a great challenge. Hybrid styles that
aren't strictly one or the other have caught my interest lately too - I loved
Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, a novel written in verse that doesn't quite
read as poetry.
What’s your favourite thing about the piece?
My favourite thing about the
piece was the unexpected freedom I found in the writing process; the class
really encouraged me to try out techniques and styles I would never have
imagined even existed, let alone had the guts to try out before. This also meant
that I thought to experiment with visual style, and the aesthetically pleasing
circle the poem appears in is the result of that, and a result that I'm pretty
fond of.
So why did you decide to enter poetry to the
contest?
Entering the competition itself
was almost an accident! I was submitting a collection of stories written by the
children I taught this year and at the last moment thought there was nothing to
lose in including my own work too. Two of my pupils - Toby Bailey and Millie
Broadrib - attended the awards ceremony as finalists, and their excitement at
becoming published authors was really the most amazing part of the whole
experience for me.
It’s really sweet that you found seeing your
pupils so excited so rewarding. How did you come to learn about the contest in
the first place?
I've been a fan of the musical Wicked for a while and read the book it
was based on last year, but it was actually my mum who let me know about the
writing award! She's a teacher and one of the literacy mailing lists she's
subscribed to mentioned it; she forwarded the e-mail to me and I suggested
basing a few writing classes around stories the children could submit to it,
thinking it would be an exciting experience for them.
What do you think are the main problems you
face when writing? How do you combat this?
Just finding the time to sit down
and dedicate a decent chunk of the day/night to writing is the main problem I'm
facing at the moment. Between working and studying and living outside of
working and studying, time is scarce and, as I have a long-term illness called
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, it's often a toss-up between writing and sleeping!
Having something involving a
deadline to work towards really helps in combating this. Classes at university
where creative writing forms part of the coursework are fantastic for producing
short pieces that I can then continue to develop or edit outside of school, as
are competitions like the WYWC. I find actively scheduling time to write helps
too, instead of passively waiting for the ever-elusive inspiration to strike,
as does writing collaboratively, even if that collaboration is something as
casual as roleplaying your favourite characters with a partner on Tumblr.
Basically, outside pressure or commitments are massive motivators in making
time for an activity that can often be quite isolating.
The
problem with waiting for inspiration to strike is that it never strikes when
you want it to. It either gets you in the middle of the night or when you don’t
have a pen and paper, then by the time you find a pen and paper, it’s gone.
Outside pressure works for me sometimes, but then sometimes it’s a case of
finding the time to fit anything in between work. How do you juggle other
commitments with writing?
Exactly! I don't have any
fail-proof method. It's really just a matter of prioritising school and work
deadlines - which is fantastic if writing is part of that - and then squeezing
in whatever I can around that. I'll very soon have a year off studying before
my PhD starts next year, which is a lot of spare time I'm really looking
forward to filling!
What are you working on at the moment?
My MA dissertation! Very briefly,
I've been researching different forms of male friendship and love in 19th
century Paris, and using that as a foundation when analysing the relationship
between two of the student revolutionaries in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and
its adaptations, including the musical and the 2012 film, but also stuff like
fan fiction and fan art. I'll be continuing my work on this next year with a
PhD in English.
For the past few years, I've also
been writing a novel called Feint of
Heart, the first 5000 words of which were shortlisted for Myriad Edition's
2015 First Drafts Competition.
Wow,
your dissertation sounds really interesting. Have you read Les Mis in French? I
found reading it in French really difficult, but I was really interested in the
difference between my translation and official translations. It didn’t really
change the deeper meaning of the novel, but it there was a difference in the
mood of certain passages.
Thank you! I've loved working on
it. I'm far from being fluent in French but I've managed to work my way through
the sections of the novel relevant to my dissertation, and comparing the
original French with its various English translations has actually added a lot
of depth to some of my arguments. I've found that the Isabel Hapgood
translation is probably the most literal, so a pretty good substitute for the
original, but I'd love to be able to read the whole novel in French one day.
What is Feint
of Heart about?
Feint of Heart is about a lot of things and it's tricky to
describe without giving everything away! It's focused around four characters: a
soldier and the man he meets very soon after being medically discharged from
the army, and two women, one of whom was an army medic, who are working
together in a number of different ways. It started out as an experiment in
focalisation, but I'm also really interested in morally ambiguous characters,
and in subverting and undermining prevailing narratives about marginalised
groups of people.
Is writing solely a hobby, or would you like
it to lead onto something else in the future?
A bit of both! It's what I've
always done and what I always want to do, whether that's in the same capacity
as I write now, or something more public. As long as I'm tapping away in one
form or another, I'm happy.
