Sally Nicholls was born in Stockton, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. Her father died when she was two, and she and her brother were brought up by her mother. She has always loved reading, and spent most of her childhood trying to make real life work like it did in books. After school, she worked in Japan for six months and travelled around Australia and New Zealand, then came back and did a degree in Philosophy and Literature at Warwick. In her third year, realising with some panic that she now had to earn a living, she enrolled in a masters in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa. It was here that she wrote her first novel, Ways to Live Forever. Sally is now living in a little flat in London, writing stories and trying to believe her luck.

Sally is interviewed here by fellow graduate of the MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University, Marie-Louise Jensen, whose book Between Two Seas was also published this month.

You are very young, at 24, to get a book published. Have you always wanted to be a writer?

Pretty much, yes. When people used to ask me what I wanted to be, I used to say, “I’m going to be a writer”. When I was in my final year at university, I had a poke around the careers’ office looking for a proper job, but I couldn’t find anything else that excited me the way that writing did. So I thought it was worth giving it a go.

There was a lot of publicity around your book deal and the subsequent foreign sales. Was this a surprise? Did you have any idea you had written a book that was going to have such an impact?

 It was very much a surprise. I wrote the book on the MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa, and the comments I used to get on the manuscript were ‘This is wonderful, but who will ever buy it?’ Nobody thought anyone would want to read a children’s book about a dying child. I fully expected to have to fight to get it published. It was a shock when Scholastic seemed to expect it to be a bestseller.

I was very impressed with the authentic child’s voice in your book. Did this come naturally to you or did you have to work at it?

After all, you’ve never been a twelve year old boy. I did have to work at it, yes. Everyone who read my early drafts thought Sam was a girl! My first version of Sam was called David and he was much more passive and thoughtful. My workshop group thought David was boring compared to Felix, so I made him more active, and gave him a few boyish hobbies like Warhammer. After that he felt like such a different person that I changed his name to Sam. He did used to take control a bit when I was writing. He’s much more militarist than I am – he’d get all excited about nuking people or dropping grenades on nurses and I’d be like, “Hang on, war isn’t the answer!” But ultimately it’s his book, not mine.

Ways to Live Forever is about a boy with terminal leukaemia. What made you choose this subject to write about? Have there been tragic incidents in your life that inspired this?

I’m not really sure why I wanted to write about it. It was something that had been at the back of my mind for a while – I had a friend whose mother died, and a couple of other friends who were ill. There are a lot of books written about death, but most of them are about grief, not mortality. I wanted to explore what it would be like to be a young person and know that you only had a few months left to live. I started doing some research about children with terminal illnesses, and the more of their stories I read, the more I realised that this was a story I really had to tell.

Did you set out to make your readers cry, or is that a side effect?

 It’s very much a side effect. The whole time I was writing, I was aware that the book would be read by young people, so I was working to keep the tone light, to add plenty of jokes, to make it something that was interesting rather than depressing. I’m pleased that it does make people cry, as it shows that they relate to the characters, but if anything I was working to achieve the opposite effect.

You have clearly researched the illness and its progress. How did you set about this?

 It must have been a very sensitive subject to tackle. I read as many books as I could find about what it feels like to be dying and I read what fiction there is written from the point of view of dying children. Some of the best of these are listed at the back of Ways to Live Forever. Then I went and talked to CLIC nurses, hospice nurses and social workers at my local hospitals – people like Annie who works with children with cancer.

What was the initial spark that gave you the idea for Ways to Live Forever? Did it start with the character or the illness?

 I thought, ‘I want to write about a child who’s dying. How on earth I am going to do that?’ Sam’s character came from all the things I needed him to do – I wanted him to be able to look death straight in the eye, so I made him logical and scientific, I wanted the book to be funny, so I gave him a sense of the ridiculous, I wanted people to care about him, so he cares about people too.

How do you approach writing a book? Is it a linear progression?

Very much not. I very rarely think in finished stories. I think in scenes. When I started writing Ways to Live Forever. I thought, ‘This is going to be a scrapbook sort of book. There’ll be lots of lists’, and I wrote some lists. Then I thought, ‘Maybe there should be stories too’, and I wrote some stories. Then I thought, ‘I should probably work out how it’s going to end’, so I wrote the ending. Ways to Live Forever’s plot is very simple. I knew roughly what was going to happen, and I had a rough idea where every chapter I wrote would fit. I got ideas for scenes and subplots as I wrote. One day it snowed and the world looked so wonderful that I wrote in some snow. Another day I saw a programme about Dr Duncan MacDougall and decided to put him in too.

What was thehardest thing about writing this particular story?

Probably the tone. Keeping the tone light and making sure it was funny and interesting enough. It was a very difficult book to write, in lots of ways. I loved writing all my patchwork scenes, but I had an awful time trying to sew them all together with something approximating narrative thread. I think I wrote twelve entirely different opening scenes, for example, before I found one that I liked. Other problems included getting all the medical details right and having it address all the philosophical and emotional questions that I wanted it to address, without putting off my readers.

 Scholastic have decided to market the book at adults and teenagers instead of your intended 9-12 audience. How do you feel about this?

 Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that, because Scholastic UK are marketing it at teenagers and adults, Scholastic America are marketing it at 9-12s and adults and Scholastic Book Clubs are marketing it at 9-12s and teenagers. I’m not sure what I think of it. On one hand I’m a bit sad, because I really wanted to write a book for 9-12s and I can’t help feeling that I’ve failed. But I think Scholastic have a point that the emotions in the book are fairly complicated for this age group. I love the fact that adults like it, even adults who don’t usually read children’s books, and I think it’s a real compliment that Scholastic still wanted to publish it when it doesn’t easily fit into one category.

You are a graduate of the MA in Writing for Young People at the Bath Spa University. How did the course benefit your writing?

The course was enormously helpful, in lots of ways. It was a real gift to have a year to do nothing but write, and a real validation of writing as a sensible thing to spend your time doing. The other writers would read my work and comment – which means I basically got ten unpaid editors. I also got a much clearer idea of how this whole being-published thing works, which was wonderful.

 Do you think it helped you to get a publisher?

Well, it helped me to get an agent. Rosemary Canter, who’s a literary agent with United Agents, offered a £500 prize for the most promising writer on the course, which I won. She also wasn’t sure if anyone would want to buy a book about a dying child, but she agreed to read the whole manuscript. Three days later she rang me up saying she wanted to represent me. And through her I found my publisher.

Would you advise other aspiring writers to do a course like this?

I found it very helpful, yes. It gave me the motivation I needed to actual write a novel. It’s no guarantee that you’ll get published, though, and it’s certainly not for everyone. One of the benefits of the MA is the critical readings of your fellow students.

Do you still meet with any of them or are you writing alone now?

 I’m still good friends with the other students on my course, but I live in London now, so I don’t see as much of them as I’d like. I do have one friend from the MA who’s also in London, though, and we do a lot of writing together.

 I understand you have just finished drafting your second book. Can you say a few words about this next project?

It’s called The Midnight Hunter and it’s based on the pagan myth of the green man. He’s a forest god who’s born in the spring, grows through the summer, dies in the autumn and is reborn in the spring. This myth is reflected in the real-world story of a girl called Molly, whose mother has just died. The fantasy element is new for me, but it’s also very much based in real life.

Thank you Sally Nicholls for talking to Write Away