Keith Gray was born and brought up in Grimsby and knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer. When he received 0% for his accountancy exams he decided to pursue his dream. He has since gone on to win the Angus Book Award and the silver medal in the Smarties Prize. He has twice been shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booktrust Teen Prize, the Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. Rave Keith was a judge for the Blue Peter Book Award, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Bookstrust Teen Prize and reviews regularly for the Guardian. He is full-time writer living in Edinburgh.

In this interview Keith Gray talks to Noga Applebaum about masculinity, friendship and the importance of story.

You have stated in a few interviews that you were a reluctant reader until you read Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners. Do you write with reluctant readers in mind? Do you consider any particular elements of storytelling to be especially attractive to such readers?

I write with me in mind, me when I was 12-15 years old. I’m still a fussy reader: there are many books that I refuse to read, or I’ll get two or three chapters in and then put the book down. But I am trying to prove to teenage readers that reading is entertainment. A good story will inform at the same time. When I visit schools, I can’t believe that I need to prove this point – it’s crazy. The notion that books are homework is a nasty rumour spread by teachers.

I don’t write books to help people pass exams; I’m writing to hook readers. The way I try to do this is by having a high concept idea, which you can tell in one or two sentences, like ‘a bunch of friends trying to steal their dead mate’ or ‘garden creeping’ or ‘die hard in a school’ in the case of Malarkey. Through that big idea that you can hook readers with, you can slip in bigger themes underneath – it’s dual-layered storytelling. People will pick up Ostrich Boys and think it’s about stealing a friend’s ashes but it’s actually about death and suicide and friendship and loyalty. I’m sure lots of books and movies work like that but I set out to do it quite consciously.

On the subject of influential authors, In Malarkey the protagonist, John, mentions a book he read where “a sadistic secret society had met in the storeroom next to the gym” (81) – is this a reference to Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War? Is Malarkey  your response or homage to Cormier’s work?

I was thinking much more about the first Die Hard movie, Raymond Chandler and Ian Rankin when I started writing Malarkey. I’d been reading a lot of detective and crime fiction and thought to try it in a younger setting. As I was writing the book, I suddenly remembered reading The Chocolate War when I was younger. It had a huge influence on me, so must have been in my subconscious. I wrote the whole of Malarkey and then reread The Chocolate War to make sure not too many subconscious references sneaked in. Since I was sure people would still pick up a couple of parallels, I decided to reference it directly.

So the books you read as a teenager, and those you read as an adult, influence your writing?

 I think so. I’m writing for me as teenager, so I’m trying to write my own Chocolate War, my own Grinny ( Nicholas Fisk) or Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury) and books by Stephen King.

Your books explore what it is like to be a boy – do you feel that perceptions of masculinity are changing? Is the masculinity you present in your books any different than in the books you read as a teenager?

I don’t know. Young men have a tough time at the moment because there are many different role models. My dad was a teenager in the fifties when John Wayne represented masculinity – a black and white idea of what a man was, ‘get on your horse, drink milk and don’t speak much’. Nowadays it’s all shades of grey. Is masculinity strength? Or looking good like Beckham? The metro-sexual using moisturiser and wearing designer labels,- is that masculine? Or a durggued up Pete Doherty - is that a role model of masculinity now? It's hard to choose which role model to follow. I don’t know how much that has changed since I grew up though – in the eighties we had Adam Ant and Morrissey as possible role models.

I remember being in my early 20s working as a waiter in pizzeria and I was waiting on this table and there was a little girl told off by her mum for acting up, and the mum said ‘if you don’t stop messing about I’ll get this man to throw you out of the restaurant’. This was the first time I was called a man and it shocked me. In a lot of ways I’m still not – I’m 37 and not married, I don’t have children – some people wouldn’t think of me as a stereotypical man. I’m still exploring.

Quite a few of your male characters are good readers, yet often they are outsiders – do you see this as a cause and effect? Do you think that boys who love reading often struggle to fit in with their peers?

No, I have my characters as good readers because I want to promote books and reading.

The outsider, I think, is really attractive to young men. We all quite like the idea of Clint Eastwood walking into town as the Man with No Name, or James Dean, the loner, outside the norm. Men like to believe that they are misunderstood – it’s a romantic ideal. I felt a bit different at school, I had friends but I felt a little aloof.  I was never part of the in-crowd, so I find the Clint Eastwood, Batman, Philip Marlowe kind of character appealing.

In many of your novels it is often the sensitive boy who gets the girl, and the confident, self-obsessed one who loses her – is this wish fulfilment or an encouraging message to your readers?

Wish fulfilment! Well really, a bit of both. Writing is a mixture of wish fulfilment and trying to tell a good story. I wanted to be a rock star, and it was never going to happen in real life, so I wrote Happy about kids who try to be rock stars. I’m also trying to give the sensitive boys out there a bit of a boost. Sensitive doesn’t have to mean you’re a wimp; you can be a strong person as well as having sensitivity and empathy for the world around you. Maybe that’s how masculinity changed. We used to see it as a physical thing, and emotions were bottled up, but maybe now masculinity means it’s ok to talk about your emotions, to admit to certain things as well as being able to fill a room with your presence and being able to handle yourself.

A recurring theme in your work is escape; characters are on the run from dysfunctional homes or from pursuers. Why are you particularly interested in this theme?

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t realise I was until someone else pointed it out to me. It’s completely subconscious. I come from a close family. Maybe when I was young I had moments when I felt nobody understood me but I guess that’s normal teenage feelings. One of the clichés of children’s writing is getting rid of the parents so the children can have an adventure. I guess I just push the kids to escape for that reason.

The friendships you describe between boys – Lem and Canner in Warehouse, Danny and Will in Happy, Jamie and the narrator of Creepers and of course the four boys in Ostrich Boys – are very strong but also competitive and laced with betrayal. The question that often arises is how much these boys really know each other. Do you feel this is a common attribute of male friendship?

There’s a lot of competitiveness in male friendship, but the strong friendships can cope with that. I’ve experienced competition with my close friends, but it never became nasty – it’s just the alpha male thing. The hardest betrayals are by the people you love the most and thousand of really horrible, tear-jerking karaoke type songs have been written about that.

I hope that in a lot of my books betrayal is something that can be overcome by the friendship, even if I don’t say so explicitly. I believe in forgiveness. I don’t like these black and white depictions that all friends are great and you love them forever - there’s more depth in friendship than that. I’m friends with people not only because I like them but also because they like me; it’s two sided.

However, most boys don’t express their feelings confidently, or don’t feel they have the space to do so, whether it’s because of modern society or the fear of being called a wimp. The lads don’t know each other perfectly. Girls tell each other secrets, but then use these secrets as currency. Boys don’t seem to do that. Many of them can’t even name a ‘best friend’. I was lucky because I had two or three incredibly close friends. We didn’t exactly tell each other secrets but we shared things like getting into trouble at school – which our parents didn’t always know about – and garden creeping, trespassing through people’s back gardens, which was a secret because it’s illegal. We were a kind of a gang – with its own rules, obligations and loyalties.

It’s definitely different from girls’ friendships but it isn’t weaker or worse. The bond in boys’ friendships runs deeper than just ‘I know who you fancy’ or’ this is who I want to snog.’ In my books I say it’s ok for a bloke to love his best mate, it’s a brotherly bond and affection that most 15 year olds will never admit to. I had deep love for my friends, and they are still my friends. In my books I’m saying your mates can grow with you and support you. If family isn’t really there, your mates could be your family. Of course friendship isn’t perfect, and many of my characters get betrayed and hurt, and have to come to terms with that.

In many of the books they don’t get to resolve the betrayal and put the friendship back together in real life – in Creepers and in Ostrich Boys it only happens after the friend is dead for example. In Happy you also don’t get the sense that Will and Danny will remain friends.

I can’t answer 100% why these things happen. I guess that on a certain level there is some cynicism on my part about friendships which worries me. Maybe I’m frightened of being betrayed, but let’s not start analysing me!

The books do approach friendships in different ways. Will and Danny’s friendship is very different than the one in Creepers where the narrator basically wants to thank Jamie for pulling him out of being a loner. Danny never asked Will about his dad, there was always a competition between them and the friendship isn’t as invested in as Danny would like to think. By the end he may have realised what he has missed out on.

In the last scene of Creepers, the narrator hooks up with the girl at his best friend’s funeral. In your other books, girls often come between two boys, and are a source of competition and a reason for betrayal (Amy in Warehouse, Beth in Happy, Nina in Ostrich Boys, and to an extent Becky in Malarkey). Do you feel that the move towards romantic relationships in adolescence somehow signals the end or the loss of ‘true’ bonding between boys?

There is a moment in Ostrich Boys where Blake says something along the lines of ‘we were all getting on so well until the girls arrived’. There is a stage in life where you start to recognise how fantastic girls are and how much more they can offer you than what your mate can offer, and it breaks down the innocent pure friendship that lads can have. Before that stage, you compete on football or computer game scores but when girls are involved the competition is on a different level, it becomes about strong emotions. Blake’s words in Ostrich Boys are tongue in cheek but there is truth in them – there is a change as you step towards adulthood.

The girls you describe in your books are often very strong, opinionated and independent characters who won’t be messed about. Is this a conscious decision to include such characters in books that are primarily for boys?

Partly. I want to have strong female characters in the books, and they also facilitate my stories in a way that girls with fairy wings sniffing flowers would not. The lads in Ostrich Boys are quite mouthy and arrogant, and I wanted somebody that can stand up to them. I want feisty female characters that can really face up to the male characters. It would be terrible if they were window dressing or wallpaper. My favourite people are argumentative, passionate people and I try to write people I like. I’m saying to lads ‘aren’t these girls great’ and to girls ‘it’s great to be like that’. Becky in Malarkey is one of my favourite characters and in hindsight, if I could go back and rewrite, there would be a little more to her. Malarkey completely missed out on her because of his arrogance. The boys don’t always know how to deal with these girls, but deep down aren’t all men petrified?

I can think of only one example, Warehouse, where you told a story from the perspective of a girl, and that was ‘sandwiched’ between the point of view of two boys – is this because you are expected to write about maleness, or is there another reason?

I guess that when Creepers was published everyone said ‘what a great book for boys’, and so many schools still use it to hook in male readers. That made me feel that maybe that is what I write best. So consciously I don’t put too many girls in my stories so as to not put off any male readers. I don’t feel pigeon-holed or branded as a boys’ author.. I didn’t set out to be one, but I realised I wanted to become one. The books that misfired were those in which I forgot that. I envy authors like Kevin Brooks who can write a whole novel from a girl’s perspective – the heroine of Killing God is my favourite character of his. She’s really engaging.

What is the significance of the title Ostrich Boys – are the boy’s heads in the sand because of evading responsibility, self delusion or plain apathy?

I think its self delusion. It’s not being conscious of what’s happening around you. I attempted suicide when I was eighteen. Although the book is not about me, and I’m not any of the characters in the book, my experience has helped with the writing. When I attempted suicide there was only one person who didn’t say to me ‘I didn’t expect that from you Keith’, and that was my best friend. Everybody else thought I just wasn’t the type. My parents, my teachers, my ex-girlfriend,  all thought that. And I couldn’t believe it – I was so miserable, why didn’t they notice? Ostrich Boys comes from that – how come we don’t notice sometimes.

 Also, when you type Ostrich Boys into Amazon, it’s the only book that appears!

Ostrich Boys is very much based on the conversations between the three main characters – it defines them but also drives the plot. Dialogue is also convincingly used in your other novels – is this an element of writing that you feel the most comfortable with? Do you use any techniques to help you switch quickly between the different voices?

I struggle with dialogue. I enjoy writing it when I get going, but I do find it hard. I suppose that in each book I try to push myself and do something new. In Warehouse I wanted to try the girl’s point of view. In Malarkey I wanted to write a book which wasn’t about friendship and  in Ostrich Boys a book which was primarily dialogue. The first draft was almost like a screenplay.

I also read lots of books on which the cover blurb stated ‘great dialogue’. So I read Elmore Leonard who is known for brilliant dialogue. I have lots of notes of three voices talking which never made it into the book. I spent a long time just writing conversations between the boys until I didn’t need to put in ‘Blake said’ or ‘Kenny said’. I cheated a little bit. Sim has a foul mouth, Kenny has a verbal tick (the ‘I’m telling you’ which he picked up from his mum), and Blake is the most articulate, being the narrator– so I made it a bit easier for myself.

The dialogue in your books always seems current – how do you keep up with teen-speak?

 I think I cheat. I try not to use teen speak because by the time the book gets published ‘bling’ is no longer ‘bling’. But while some slang changes, swearwords usually don’t – a bastard will always be a bastard and shit will always be shit! I don’t believe in ‘bad language’; I believe in ‘strong language’. It was invented for a purpose and I will only use it when it is relevant. My editor, Charlie Sheppard understood that strong language doesn’t offend young people. I hate it when in Battlestar Galactica they bypass the issue by inventing words like ‘motherfrakker’ – it’s so patronising. I also don’t like it when people write stuff like ‘get out of here you a-hole’ because I’m sure kids will stop reading at this point.

By the way, a lot of my characters speak in a Grimsby dialect which seems to work. I seem to have cheated the system slightly because the characters speak with a rhythm similar to how I speak, which seems to work for teen fiction.

Your books are very well structured - Ostrich Boys is a perfect example – the unravelling secrets, the progression of the journey, the balance between the humorous and the emotional. How do you approach writing a new book? Do you sketch the plot in advance or do you let it grow and then redraft?

I’m a big re-drafter. I never plan a book. I just write, realise it’s going wrong, go back to the beginning, try again and so on.. That’s because I’m lazy and I find planning tedious. So I’ll get to chapter 9, have a great idea, and will have to go back to chapter 1 to thread it in.

How many drafts were there of Ostrich Boys?

Ostrich Boys is a special case. I wanted to write about suicide. Tthe very first attempt was called Paint it Black (after the Rolling Stones song). It started with a boy called Marcus killing himself on page 1, and then going back in time to show you how he got to that point. It was rubbish. It was about nothing but misery. That took me a year to write and it went through four or five drafts and my editor and I threw it away. Then I rewrote it as a detective story with John Malarkey investigating the death of a young man and discovering it was suicide. That didn’t work either. I was shoehorning John Malarkey into a story where he didn’t really fit. That went through another four drafts and a year of writing.

And then I was sitting in my living room thinking what to do with the book, which was two years beyond the deadline. I wanted to approach the subject of suicide but not to write about myself and then I thought about the film Stand by Me. I liked the idea of the journey, and I remembered how the film made me want to write about young men and friendship. I decided to write my own ‘Stand By Me’ but I didn’t watch it again until I had finished my draft. I knew there was a place in Scotland called Keith, so I looked for another place with a boy’s name and found Ross, also in Scotland. And then it all started slotting into place.

It took about fifteen drafts and three completely different books to get to Ostrich Boys. The only scene which was in all three versions was the bungee jump.

You write in many genres – horror, fantasy, gritty realism and semi-historical – do you find any of these more challenging to write in? What comes first, the story or the wish to write within a specific genre?

The story. I don’t think about genre, I’m not a genre reader either. I’m a huge Stephen King fan but my favourite authors are not writing in just one genre. For example Ian Banks who writes SF but also mainstream stuff that you just can’t classify into genre. I’m not against genre, I just don’t relate to it. However, I do write teen books – I guess that’s a genre. Mainly, I like to think that I write adventure stories of the kind that anybody can have – kitchen sink adventures.

What are you working on at the moment?

The next book. I think it’s called Quibbler. It’s not finished yet. It’s like Malarkey but from the gang’s point of view. It might be my most genre-specific piece. It’s a crime thriller about a lad who gets involved with a gang, but it’s not a social piece about gangs today. This gang is more like ‘Goodfellas’ – not gangsta but gangster. It’s no Bugsy Malone though, no splurge guns.

Thank you Keith Gray for talking to Write Away!

2009-10-04