Jean Ure Talks about the challenge, responsibility and reward of writing for young teenagers

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JEAN URE interviewed by NIKKI GAMBLE

Jean Ure was born in Surrey on 1 January 1943, the daughter of William Ure and Vera Belsen. She trained at the Webber-Douglas Academy of Drama from 1965-8 and uses her experience of the theatre in many of her adult and children’s novels. She married Leonard Gregory, a fellow drama student, in 1967. Jean has been a professional writer all her life, her first book, Dance for Two being published while she was still at school.

Most of your books have particular appeal for girls aged 9 - 12 are there any particular challenges or considerations in writing for that age group?

 I used to write for older teenagers when the bottom dropped out of that market around the end of the 1980s, I thought I ought to try writing lower down the age range. The challenge for me was taking all the ideas I had that were waiting to be written for teenagers and making them suitable, for the younger age group. I discovered that with a bit of ingenuity and a lot of thought it was possible to write about just about everything I wanted to. For instance, I’ve written about two girls running away from home and originally they were going to fall into prostitution. Well, that’s obviously out of the question for the younger age group, but there are lots of other issues to do with running away that could be explored. So I think the main challenge has been adapting to the readers’ level of experience.

Being a teenager today, or a tweenie, as they’re sometimes called, is ‘another country’, how do you keep in touch with your readership?

 Partly you go back in your imagination and you remember what it was like to be that age, and although the outside world may have changed, I think children are still children and they still have the same hopes and fears and everything going on inside them. Partly it’s all the shoals of interesting emails I get from the kids. And partly, I suppose reading magazines and picking up bits and pieces here and there. Language is the worst problem because, it changes so quickly. You cannot possibly keep up with modern slang or the latest buzzword, because it would be out of date before the book was published, so you have to just give a flavour of teenspeak and hope that it comes across as a teenage voice.

Most of your books that I’ve read have been written in the first person, although sometimes other narrative devices such as journals might be used. How easy do you find it to get the right voice and to find the right character for the narrator?

That’s interesting. Usually, I get an idea and until I hear the voice in my head, I can’t get on with developing it. I don’t know where the voice comes from, but sooner or later, I get a voice and if it’s the right voice, I’ll go along with it. Occasionally I might make a false start. There was one book I wanted to write and I was going to have a very, very shy, introverted, sad little girl telling the story but the voice wasn’t right so I had to modify her.

I think humour must be one of the most difficult things to get right in any kind of writing, is it completely intuitive?

Yes humour is just the way I write. I’ve finally given in to it because in the past I struggled to write quite serious books. I think humour is often dismissed. You do have to get the timing exactly right, you have to balance your sentences and know exactly when to spring a certain line to make it funny. And it has taken me years to get where I am today. I can spend half an hour playing around with just two sentences, until they really work.

Do you think your acting and drama background has helped in any way?

Yes, I’m sure it has, because I always read my books out loud; I tell all the kids to read their writing out loud. It does highlight things that are boring, or irrelevant, or just not timed correctly. In that respect I’m sure that a drama background is helpful.

Thank you Jean Ure for talking to Write Away