Marie- Louise Jensen's debut novel Between Two Seas tells the story of Marianne, a young girl on the verge of womanhood who promises her dying mother that she will try to find her father. MArianne resolves to leave her home in Grimsby and make the long and arduous sea voyage across the North Sea to Skagen in Denmark. But will she be welcomed?

Karen Saunders, a fellow graduate of the MA in writing for Young People at Bath Spa University talked to Marie-Louise about getting her first novel published.

You did the MA in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa University, which is where you started writing this book. How helpful was the course?

The course encourages students to experiment in writing for different age groups and in different genres. Although I had the idea for my book before I started the course, the first semester confirmed that it was the right direction for me to go in. You also get a huge amount of feedback on your writing from fellow students and tutors. That was quite tough at the beginning, but I really learned to value it. As I hadn’t done much fiction writing before I went on the course, it was a very intense learning experience. Like any course, the more you put into it, the more you are likely to benefit. It was a fantastic opportunity and I wouldn’t have a book published now if I hadn’t done it.

Could you give us a little background on your first book, Between Two Seas?

I wrote this book during the MA in Writing for Young People. I had the idea during a visit to a museum in Skagen. I saw a book about how Skagen fishermen sailed to Grimsby to sell their catch in the first half of the 19th Century, and it sparked off a whole train of thought processes. What if a sailor had an illegitimate child with an English girl? In the end I set the story earlier, because I wanted to Marianne to go to Skagen before the harbour and railway were built, and in the main flourishing of the artist community. I wrote the story in chunks and had to do a lot of rewriting, as I’d never written anything like this before. I used to get stuck on some chapters as well. I’d know what I wanted to tell but not how I wanted to tell it. It was in my mind so much that in the end I’d dream it – then I knew that I was ready to write.

How long did it take to write ?

 It took nine months from the first chapter to sending it off to an agent. The beginning was slow, but I wrote the last eight chapters in two weeks – and didn’t need to change very much by then. Why was writing Marianne’s story so important to you? I have grown up – like Marianne – with tales of life in the North of Jutland. In my case it was my mother who had grown up there. It’s where I spent my summer and Christmas holidays. I idealised it in my mind. I love the landscape, the light, and the 19th century paintings that emerged from that area. The whole history is one of a community struggling against poverty and with the bounty and cruelty of the sea. Fascinating. I myself tried and failed to live there. But it was wonderful to explore through my character (Marianne) how it might have been.

 What was the thing you found most difficult about telling Marianne’s story?

The journey. I wanted very much to portray how isolated Skagen was and to do that, I wanted to describe Marianne’s journey in detail. But it was hard to write such a large part of the book with so little interaction and dialogue. Once Marianne reaches Skagen, the story takes off.

I understand that a lot of the art and situations you refer to in Between Two Seas are based on pictures and real-life events. Can you tell us a little more about this?

I thought I knew masses about life in Skagen at that time. But I still needed to do lots of research. Questions kept coming up. How did they rescue people during a shipwreck? What did they eat and drink apart from the obvious - fish? What did they use for fuel when there are so few trees? And the more I researched, the more I discovered and I wanted to include other details. I used the museums, old newspaper reports, the local archives and a very useful book about that time in Skagen from the local library. The archivist recommended it to me. It was in old-fashioned Danish, of course, but it was also in gothic script. A real nightmare! It was incredibly informative though.

Your second novel, The Lady in the Tower, is due for publication next year. Can you tell us a little bit about this project? Did you find writing this harder than your first, as you now had the pressure of a publishing deal, and did you encounter any other problems with it at all?

The Lady in the Tower was actually started before Between Two Seas. I put it aside while I did the MA and came back to it with a lot more writing experience, which was just as well, because it has been a much harder book to write. But I don’t think it was harder because of the publishing deal. Oxford University Press gave me two years in which to write it, so there was no pressure. In the end, it took 15 months to write.

It’s a very complex story, set at Farleigh Castle in Wiltshire and I based it on real events, which became more and more complex as I dug into them. It’s also not an era I know much about, so I had to research absolutely everything. Costumes, food, customs, jousting, etc. It was lots of fun to write though. I had a good time with the characters and their interaction with each other. There is more humour in it than in Between Two Seas.

Have you always wanted to be a writer, and what made you decide to take the MA?

 I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was about five and I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But I never did anything about it. I was busy with my languages and teaching and I think all the literary criticism I did suppressed my imagination and my creativity. It wasn’t until I’d been at home with my sons for several years, reading to them and making up stories that I started to get story ideas again. When I had the idea for The Lady in the Tower, I decided to embark on a course. I did an adult education course at my local college first. It was fun and I did lots of writing, but you don’t get any useful feedback on a course like that. However, the tutor told me about the MA and I applied almost immediately.

You must lead a very busy life, as you home educate your two boys. When do you get time to write, and how does your writing process usually work?

My life is ridiculously busy. I quite like it that way, but sometimes I wish there were more hours in the day – or that I needed less sleep. Home educating my two boys is a full time job in itself, and I’m looking at ways of delegating some of that at the moment. The ‘s’ word (school) has even been brought up as a possibility. But schools can be so rigid and prescriptive that we aren’t keen. It would also tie us down and we are used to so much freedom. So I end up doing a lot of my writing late at night or in intense spells when the boys are with friends or family. I only have one regular day a week to write, but I usually manage to get a couple more, plus evenings. Sometimes when I really want to progress a manuscript, my wonderful mother takes over for a few days and leaves me completely free to work. It is important for me to be able to immerse myself completely in the story – to the stage of dreaming about it. Only that way does it become completely real to me.

 What are you working on next?

I’m working on a Viking project at the moment. I spent a couple of months this summer in Iceland researching and becoming familiar with the country and its landscape. It was just amazing. Now that was a perfect way of combining research with home education!

What advice would you give to other aspiring authors? 

I only know what was right for me. The MA was fantastic. So of course I would recommend that route to anyone else. It’s a kind of training course! But it goes without saying that it’s no guarantee of publication. The other important thing is to read widely in contemporary children’s fiction. If you don’t know what’s out there, you can’t really judge your own work. It’s no good sending a manuscript off to an agent or a publisher saying “This is like Enid Blyton/Arthur Ransome,” because no one writes like that and gets published these days. If you don’t know that they aren’t going to take you seriously. It’s a hard industry to get into and it is not well paid, but it is lots of fun.

Thank you Marie-Louise Jensen for talking to Write Away