Cliff McNish talks to Nikki Gamble about his revivial of the traditional ghost story.

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Cliff McNish was born in Sunderland, but has spent most of his life in the southeast of England. His daughter Rachel loved listening to his stories from an early age. The Doomspell started as one of these. 'But before I knew what was happening,' says Cliff, 'the whole magical world of Ithrea just wanted to come to life in a bigger way. It wanted to live!'

Breathe is a truly chilling traditional ghost story in the vein of M. R. James. It’s quite a departure from The Doomspell and Silver Sequences. Where did the idea for writing a ghost story come from?

The story came about for two reasons. First of all, my wife Ciara, said “You’re always writing these really dark, horrible, fantasy novels, why don’t you write a proper scary story? Why don’t you write a ghost story?” That set off a chain of thought. When I was visiting schools I started asking the children if they wanted to write a ghost story. And every time I suggested it their eyes lit up. They loved the idea of a dead spirit, haunting somebody. When I asked what good ghost stories they knew, they couldn’t think of one. Obviously at the turn of the century there were writers like M R James who wrote ghost stories for adults there’s a tradition since Leon Garfield up to Robert Westall in the 70’s of ghost stories for children.. But today, while I have found plenty of funny ghosts, the Scooby Doo type of ghost, there are not many traditional ghost stories. I realised that there was an appetite and a market for that type of story.

Around the same time, I read Coraline by Neil Gaiman, which made me realise that his Other Mother character is really scary because she is potentially your mother. The most frightening thing we can imagine is not a three-headed dragon monster from Venus, because you could always run away from that, but a dark version of your mother. It’s psychologically frightening. There’s always a very fine line between genuine love and obsessional love. My ghost mother is entering this murky territory because of what has happened to her in her past - and her guilt.

In her forward to Dread and Delight, Philippa Pearce says that the ghost story for children is a relatively new genre. What is the essence of the ghost story for you?

 I think a dead person who is close to the main hero or heroine is probably the essence of it. They are a living presence but don’t have to talk unless they are going to become a character. They have to have influence and action. Ghost stories often gravitate towards the Victorian house setting. The English ghost story is steeped in Dickensian England, with backstreets and dark places. It doesn’t quite work in the modern apartment building, although I’ve read a few Japanese ghost stories where modern settings work.

But ghost stories are often about more than sensation and suspense. They usually bring about some sort of change….

I suppose that’s true of most stories that deeply appeal to us - the characters are transformed in some way. The agent of change in the ghost story is usually the ghost. I think one of the reasons ghost stories can be very powerful is because the influence of the past is often devastatingly powerful without people realising it. Dead relatives are always in the background, and the parents’ hidden lives means that children are not always aware of their past. One of the things that I’ve realised about most great stories is that there is a sense of loss in them, the loss of something important, not necessarily a life, it could just be loss of dignity. The story is often about the consequences of the loss and the search to find it again.

 The book is called Breathe,  and breathing is a metaphor that permeates the book. Was that idea in the first draft or did you consciously work it up afterwards?

 In the final draft I strengthened a few of the breathing elements such as the idea of the breath on the windowpane. I was trying to think of a mechanism by which an almost weightless ghost can make an impression. They can’t write on a piece of paper, and you can’t hear them but you need to understand what they’re saying. Then I had the idea of using condensation. One breathes and the other writes. When I had finished writing, I realised that all of my ideas were centred on breathing which is when I suggested that we call it Breathe.

Can you tell us about the code that the ghosts use to communicate?

 I liked the idea of a mysterious format. I knew that they had to find a way of communicating with Jack without the ghost mother knowing, and what other better way than by a code? One of the ways to keep the reader interested in a story is to change their way of thinking and this is a new way of thinking about a story. Breathe is very suspenseful. Was it difficult to sustain that through a full length novel? I have a theory that there aren’t many ghost stories of novel length, because ghost stories, are about suspense, noises and things that are half seen. You can sustain that easily enough in a short story. But when you get to novel length the stakes have to become higher and it has to become an action adventure at some point. If you don’t change the mode of writing from suspense it becomes boring.

 There has to be a counterpoint of suspense too - the surprise. And you do have surprises in Breathe. For instance, when Jack first meets the ghost mother she is sitting on his bed. The scene is quite cosy and she’s apparently benign. Then she screams and suddenly things change. That scream took me aback, it wasn’t what I was expecting.

You have to have lots of surprises and twists and turns, especially because the setting is so static. The book has a very gradual revelation of the back stories of the ghost mother and the ghost children. So there is scope for surprise there… I liked creating the character of Oliver, he’s quite a feisty boy. I had to have somebody who stands up to the ghost mother, even though it gets him into trouble. The good thing about that is that he puts himself in threatening positions. Hopefully all the way through you think I was going to set up the ghost mother – that he was going to defeat her. But then out of nowhere she just grabs him and just takes him. I think that would shock a lot of kids.

Some of the imagery in Breathe is very Christian. Were you conscious of using Christian symbolism?

 You’re probably reading it from a background similar to mine - western civilisation. Whether or not an Egyptian would read it in the same way is another matter; they’d probably see something else in it. The idea for the nightmare passage came from a book by Algernon Blackwood. He was writing ghost stories at the same time as M R James. Most of the stories aren’t very good, but he wrote one story where a child is sitting in bed and there is a corridor that links his bedroom and to his uncle’s bedroom. He calls it the nightmare passage and in his imagination it is filled with all kinds of horrors. It stuck in my mind. I’m not thinking of it in a Christian sense but it’s the antithesis of the other side. I never say there’s a God and you don’t know what’s on the other side – but it’s a warm place. You’d be treated decently there.

 But, they do go to the nightmare passage when their souls have been taken away….

They do. But I also make it clear that they’re not dragged there because they’re guilty and for some terrible sin. They’re just unlucky.

What was it like, kind of, moving from writing trilogies and sequences, to writing a standalone story?

 Oh, it was great. Having done two sequences, I had quite enough of writing about the same characters. I really wanted to move onto something else. The big problem with sequences is that people think it’s going to be easy; you’ve already got a list of developed characters and all you have to do is stick them in new situations. But actually, what happens is that firstly you get bored with the same characters, and secondly, you want to move the story in a different direction, and you can’t. With a series each book has got to somehow be self-contained, and also, each book theoretically should be better than the last, and the last book in the series has got to sum everything up - there should be an epiphany feeling at the end. That’s hard because you’ve got to remember all of the things that have been going on throughout the whole sequence.

Do you think children prefer closed endings, or are they just enculturated into preferring them because of the types of stories they are told?

Well, that is a really interesting and deep question, but I haven’t got an answer. I suspect that children’s minds are, irrespective of cultural influence, wired a bit differently from adults. I think they see the world more in black and white. If you ask children what is right and wrong, they nearly always give you direct answers. They don’t see grey areas like adults. I think they prefer to see stories which reflect that. Authors often talk about the importance of making sure that if you create a villain to give them a nicer side, and justify their behaviour in some way. That’s something you hear from adults but I’ve realised from talking to kids that they like to know where they stand with the characters. You know, one of the reasons children like the Harry Potter books is because Draco Malfoy is an out and out villain. He hasn’t got any redeeming qualities. Children know that they can dislike him, and they don’t have to think about his poor background or his difficult childhood. Remember the bit in Prisoner of Azkaban, where Hermione punches Draco Malfoy? When I saw the film, that was the bit the entire audience erupted in laughter, it got the biggest reaction from the audience. They couldn’t have enjoyed that unless Draco Malfoy was an out and out villain you were allowed to hate so you could enjoy the punch. They love to hate the character.

 But Snape is a very ambiguous character….

Well, from an adult perspective, Snape is the most interesting character in the Harry Potter novels. But if you ask kids about Snape they’re always unsure, the younger kids in particular. They are not taken with his ambiguity.

But it doesn’t mean it’s wrong to write characters like that in books for children….

It doesn’t, and I’m glad Rowling has done that because you can’t just have out and out villains all the way through, especially if you’re creating six or seven baddies.

That clear delineation of good and evil comes from traditional storytelling, the archetypes, that help us develop shared values ….

I guess that’s true. I think kids like to have those archetypes, and it’s not bad writing to quote archetypes. And it’s not bad writing to create out and out villains, just as it’s not bad writing to create villains that also have almost seamless complex edges.

Who are you favourite villains in children’s literature?

 The White Witch from the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe; I absolutely hated her for killing Aslan. That was a very powerful moment. I remember Neil Gaiman saying that although he is inconsistent Lewis does have really powerful individual moments in his books. One thing I do with kids is to make detailed studies of villains and what makes them work. They prefer to concentrate on villains rather than heroes.

When you want to consider the character traits of a hero, you just reverse it. Sauron is very interesting. Did you know that he only appears in a couple of pages in the whole of The Lord of the Rings. He has a brief moment when he talks through the Palantir to Merry or Pippin. He’s trying to find out where Frodo is and he questions them, but Gandalf stops it. Apart from that his only presence is people talking about him. That’s one of the most powerful ways in which you can generate fear of a character - simply by having characters that you trust, talking about them. Through most of the book Sauron is reduced to an ’Eye’, a symbol rather than being a fully realised character. And yet you can create a character out of that. In Harry Potter Voldemort becomes ‘he who should not be named’. He isn’t really in the story until the end; even then he’s in some other form, which is the horror genre. You don’t show the evil until right at the end, and it works extremely well.

You’re obviously very aware of your readers and their preferences; does that awareness feed into your writing?

Not consciously. I think I’ve a fairly good memory of what it was like certainly to be a teenager. I think I understand the way kids think without too much trouble. I’m occasionally conscious that I’m entering psychological areas that may be too complicated. I think that The Silver Sequence was verging on becoming too complex for a lot of younger kids.

 Do you feel that you’re writing has changed and developed since the publication of The Doomspell?

 It’s a really difficult question to answer. Some writers seem to be able to see a very clear continuum in terms of the way that they develop. I am conscious, on the rare occasions that I look back at The Doomspell, of a simplicity of style and construction, but that’s partly what enabled the kids to become so involved in it. The more psychologically complex and stylish your writing becomes – the more you are in danger of alienating yourself from children. Today I’m much more conscious of how I write and the construction. I think my dialogue has improved.

 What advice do you give children about their writing?

 I try to avoid answering how to become a writer because it’s so difficult and professional writers have enough trouble getting their pieces published. So, I prefer to just get them writing and thinking about their own groups and supporting each other. I do quite a lot of workshops and I tend to focus on characters, because you can create interesting stories from most of the characters. I went to see Ann Fine talking with Tony Bradman about writing and she pointed out that the plot’s almost irrelevant, to concentrate on characters because if you create good enough characters you can take them anywhere in terms of plot. I think she’s right. I think that if you fall in love with the story it’s usually the characters you fall in love with.

 I focus on creating problems for characters, and how important it is to have strong desire lines. This is something that I picked up from a guy called John Truby. Strong desire lines that readers can identify with are important. If they’re ones that they can admire they’ll follow them with all their hearts. But negative desire lines are important too. We detest Sauron, because he has a really strong desire to kill our main characters off and to enslave the world in his dark sorcery. We can identify with that and hate him for it. Jacqueline Wilson is just about the most popular writer for girls, and one of the reasons is that she populates her books with characters that are just so desperate for things; desperate for friends, mothers, whatever, and she gets you right into the story. In Harry Potter, Harry is desperate to find out about his parents; Ron’s got a desperate chip on his shoulder to prove himself to his brothers and Hermione’s desperate to be seen as the best pupil in the school.

When you were at school was there somebody that supported your interest in writing?

I went to a fairly basic comprehensive school in Luton. Certainly, I was encouraged to read by my English teacher, Mrs Baldwin. She really got me started reading. Once I reached my teenage years, there was a librarian who knew everything about children’s book. He would regularly get me reading books that I would never have chosen otherwise. So they were formative influences. I was pretty average but I wasn’t exceptionally good. I didn’t take a degree in English, yet, I’ve managed to write books that people like. It’s not because I’ve got a fantastic imagination, or a brilliant vocabulary, you don’t need to have those things. You just need to be patient, and you keep working at things eventually, hopefully, you’ll write something that’s good enough.

Thank you Cliff Mcnish for Talking to Write Away.