Graham Joyce is the author of adult novels and has won numerous awards for his writing, including four British Fantasy Awards and the 2003 World Fantasy Award for The Facts of Life. His young adult fiction includes TWOC, Do the Creepy Thing , Three Ways to Snog an Alien and The Devil's Ladder. He teaches creative writing at Nottingham Trent Univeristy and lives in Leicester with his wife and two children.

In this interview he talks to Noga Applebaum about his books and writing for teenagers.

You are an established and award winning novelist for adults, what made you decide to write for teenagers?

The reason was that I was approached by Julia Wells at Faber who read one of my adult books “The Tooth Fairy” years ago and was now a commissioning editor. She asked if I would write something like that for them, but for teenagers. I was quite busy at the time, and thought I wouldn’t be able to do it, but then I read something that Martin Amis had said when asked if he would ever write children’s book. He said, ‘not unless I got a severe blow to the head’ and I thought that’s plain wrong. I can’t imagine why any writer would say that. Then I started wondering if I could do it in an interesting way that would still satisfy the things I want to talk about when I’m writing but aimed at different peopl,e so I ended up writing TWOC. I really enjoyed it.

Having written for both audiences, how would you define the difference between writing for children and writing for adults?

Writing for teenagers, I felt unburdened, like the pressure to be worthy occasionally or seek some elusive notion for deep meaning was taken away because I could concentrate on what you would find within the narrative to make a meaning. I could trust the story more rather than what I’d want to bring into the story as a writer. Having said that, I think I learnt from writing for children not to do it in my adult books, and I think my adult writing became better. Trust the story, the narrative, the characters – if there’s anything to say, it would emerge from the narrative and not from smuggling in a philosophy or trying to pack in a point of view about the world.

 How did you approach writing for a younger audience?

I started by reading a lot of contemporary books , but the problem was that I started with the prize winners , the books that won major awards. They were beautifully written but I felt that they were carrying the burden of worthiness and I could feel writers in there straining, as if they wanted to be ‘real’ writers. I took this as a lesson of what not to do. I re-read some classics – my favourite book of all time is Treasure Island, which is a great example of letting a character speak for itself. I also looked again at Peter Pan, which I love, but is a very odd book with some disturbing stuff in it;  I’m not at all sure it’s appropriate for children.

Children’s literature has to be more than solely entertaining, because children want to learn something about life from the stories that they read; they need to instruct about morality and about how people behave. Not in a ‘Pollyanna’ sense of the world, but by offering portraits of the kind of people you are likely to encounter. For example in  Treasure Island – the blurred edges of Long John Silver – what an incredible character – he is a rogue, he is not to be trusted, and yet Jim is fascinated by him. The thing is about this story that you really want Long John Silver to get away with his plot. Robert Louis Stevenson is saying that the world is not black and white and these people are not trustworthy – they can enchant you and seduce you in different ways.  Although it's not just about entertaining,  I stress the importance that the writer needs to let the story instruct  rather than the author’s voice intruding on the story 

You featured young characters in your novels for adults (Sam in The Tooth Fairy and Jessie in Stormwatcher, for example). In what way are they different from the young protagonists of your novels for teens?

In the adult novels they are far more passive. The agenda set by the adults and the teens have to respond Whereas thecharacters are much more proactive int he teen books. They try to take control over their lives, although they don’t always succeed. There’s a technical problem when creating a passive protagonist, as the reader usually gets bored by the story, so you have to activate and motivate the lead character in a completely different way than you would if they were supporting children characters in an adult book.

Aren’t you, then, telling children something that is not completely true? You tell them they are in control, but when you write for your peers you show what it’s really like – children are really under the influence of adults?

It would be true if the protagonists were successful in the actions they took, but if you look at all my books, they try to take action but it always gets unpicked; they are failing. They make the effort, but life isn’t so easy that they can make it pay off in a way that they want it to.

Your first three books for teenagers all present fantastical situations yet these situations could have logical explanations and could be interpreted as figments of the protagonists’ imagination. What attracts you to the blurring of reality and fantasy?

It’s exactly what I do with my adult books. That’s the area in which I work. I didn’t want to make a distinction when I wrote for teens – if it’s an interesting area and I’m constantly exploring these ideas, putting the reader in a place where they have to move between scepticism and credulity, I wanted to keep doing it in my children’s books. I think this represents how I, and most people, apprehend life. Sometimes we seem rational, sensible human beings, and sometimes we are open to magical possibilities. You hear people say ‘what a coincidence’ as if something special happened in their life. We are always on a shuttle between these two places all the time. For me, there is never a rational basis to understanding emotional life anyway. I think children and teenagers live even more in the realm of magical possibilities. Rationality is the shell of maturity that we develop as we grow older – it’s a comfortable myth.

Your most recent novel, The Devils’ Ladder, is different from previous ones in asmuch as you create a parallel world of ghosts and demons which the protagonists have access to through their shared gift of seeing. Is there a reason for this departure?

It does move away a little bit, but there is the possibility that these two kids might be having a dream. The old woman is also part of this strange club, and they all may be deluded, but the story does offer ambiguity to a lesser extent. I wondered if what I was trying to write was too confusing for young people so I tried to draw thicker lines between the two positions in this novel. I had feedback when I visited schools. Lots of kids said they had a good laugh reading my books but they wanted a more definite position – was it in the character’s head or was it really happening. There are also adults who don’t like this ambivalence and I always want to say, ‘it’s a book, it’s not real, I made it so that you would ask this question’ -  I don’t  actually say it because it’s too cruel. Instead I say ‘thanks for asking that question, I wanted someone to ask it, but I’m not going to answer it. When you find the answer, email me’. And they sometimes do. For example, most kids decide that Angela in Three Ways to Snog an Alien is indeed an alien, because of the ending.

Where did the title The Devil’s Ladder come from? The only ladder in the plot was quite ordinary and rather handy.

I have in mind a series for it, so we will be moving up the ladder into an increasingly magical dimension. There’s a reference to the Devil’s Ladder in the manuscript that Sophie and James find.

All your books feature feisty girls who often baffle boys, tackle harassment head on, and usually teach the male sex a thing or two – are you writing about girls you know or girls you wish existed?

That’s a good question. They do exist. I know plenty of girls like that, and they are by far the most interesting, so the answer is both – they exist and I wish more girls were like that. I think today that too many girls are easily seduced by the media to thinking that life is all about looking like Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera, and this is the only appropriate model of being a woman - being skinny and self conscious about appearance. I don’t like that, but I don’t want to philosophise it into the book, so the only way to do it is by showing a fun feisty girl and achieve this through her character. This is a definite position, I do the same in my adult books, to make a different portrait, offer an alternative image of women. I do it because I hope that if boys read these books, they will also prefer that sort of girl.

Do you see yourself as a writer for boys?

Not really. TWOC does look more like a boys’ story because it’s about joy riders, but Do the Creepy Thing has a girl protagonist, Three Ways To Snog an Alien has a very strong female position, in fact it’s all about boys trying to figure out stuff about girls, and The Devil’s Ladder also has a strong girl. I think the problem is that the marketing is a bit unsettled, as the books themselves are, in terms of where they fit in. I’m always handing difficult problems to publishers about where exactly to market my books. Even the issue whether the books are realistic or magical creates problems. It doesn’t create such a big problem in the YA market, but it certainly does in the adult market.

Three Ways to Snog an Alien is marketed in pink, like chick-lit, even though the main protagonist is male. The cover presented the book in a way that certainly made it more accessible to girls, because they may not have read it otherwise, and I do think it is more of a girls’ book. Girls are having a good laugh about this book, but boys are put off by the cover, and that’s a shame. The cover makes a huge impact, even more so with this age group.

Three Ways to Snog an Alien is presenting the theory that women and men are from different planets quite literally – was the book Men Are from Mars Women Are from Venus the inspiration for this novel?

 No, not really. I had a look at that book and I didn’t really get on with it. It’s a good joke and makes sense as a joke, but men do try to figure out what they did wrong and what is the right thing to say. That’s life – viva la difference. The website Dating Tips mentioned in the novel doesn’t actually exist, but there are all sorts of foolishness online about the way you should treat women. It’s all about the alpha male story, and showing women that you are alpha male, so you tell her to shut up and order for her when you go out – it’s rubbish.

You wrote a short story for adults which won the James Tiptree Jr. award for gender-bending science fiction and featured a transgender protagonist, will you ever consider featuring such a character in a novel intended for teenagers?

No. I think that the issue of transgender is very sensitive and complicated, and teenagers have enough to think about sexuality and what is their own sexuality – it’s not a world I want to complicate more than it already is for teenagers. It’s not what I do, it would be too much of an issue based novel. That particular story was interesting because I was trying to talk about gender roles, and I think I did OK, but I’d be nervous about making any negative images. You’d try to be positive about it but then you also try to make your character interesting so it might complicate things and you’d end up sending negative messages to an audience that is not ready to deal with the complexity yet. I’m not a good enough writer to tackle this. In all my books I try to put in positive messages about minorities. I get called political correct, but I don’t give a damn; I don’t want to put in another pot of meanness about anyone into any of my books.

However, in my most recent adult book, Memoirs of a Master Forger I do have a minor transgender character, and it is quite a grumpy character. A transgender friend of mine complained to me about it – so you see that it can easily be misinterpreted, even though probably every character in that book is grumpy and complicated and everybody is a portal person in the sense that they are ambiguous or ambivalent in one way or the other.

In all your novels, parents, and especially mothers, are presented as uncomprehending to the point of being thick, and incapable of assisting their children – why? Is that true?

 Doogie’s mother comes through – it’s only Doogie’s perception of her that she is useless. I have a thirteen year old daughter. I was a god up until last year, now I’m miraculously transformed into a peasant. All she ever says to me these days is ‘shut up dad’. If she was to write about me I’m sure I’d be completely useless, feckless, unhelpful, but she does know that when the chips are down, I’d be there to help her. That’s what happens with Doogie. He completely gets the whole world wrong, including his mother.

As for the others (Caz’s drug dependent mother, Lucy’s abusive father, Matt’s ‘out of it’ parents, James’ nonexistent parents), by the time kids’ get to teenage years, they go into a world somehow insulated from our own. You have to reach in very carefully and very forcefully to try and penetrate it, it’s an extraordinary thing. Part of asserting their independence, they revise the way they see parents and realise that they can’t solve everything, so parents are relegated in competence in teenagers’ mind. I try to capture this in a comical sense, but maybe I overlay it a little. I wasn’t aware of this, but I can see the pattern of poor parenting, which makes me now wonder about it myself.

I guess it is also a device to let teenagers in books function – you have more room to develop if the parents are out of the way.

In Three Ways to Snog an Alien the internet offers Doogie misleading information and lead him to dangerous encounters, in TWOC, computer games help Matt evade facing up to responsibility – are these depictions representative of your attitude towards the place of such technologies in young people’s lives?

They might reflect the place of technology in my own life, which is that I spend far too much time on the internet reading unfiltered rubbish, and far too much time playing computer games when I should be writing. They are wonderful distractions in my own life. The internet is an incredible tool for a writer, instant research at your fingertips, but most of my writer friends are now devising ways to be offline while they are writing. I have a friend who has to go down three flights of stairs from his writing computer to read his emails on the networked computer, just to put him off doing it too often. New problems come with magnificent technology – it’s a time suck and I’m still trying to deal with it.

In TWOC your protagonist has tremendous knowledge of different cars and how to break into them – where did you get this information from?

Misspent youth. I used to go joy riding a little bit, but it was more fun just to see if you could get into the car.

So do you have problems going to schools now, with this new CRB check request?

No, I was never caught! I don’t have a criminal record. It used to be easy to get into a car back then, and became a game to see how many seconds it took.

Early in my writing career when I needed to do other jobs to support my writing I became a legal supernumerary, who is someone that goes to the courts to liaise between the barrister and the client. I was paid by the law office, who didn’t want to pay a full time solicitor to introduce the client to the barrister, take notes of the meeting and fetch files when necessary. I met some car breakers, they were two uneducated men who developed a genius for any car, and they loved it when new technology came out because it challenged them. They should have been paid by the car companies, but the components industries make too much profit off the insurance system, so they’re all hand in glove. They could easily make a secure car, they simply don’t want to. I had a long conversation with them while we were waiting, thinking it would come in handy for a story one day, and it did.

In the same novel, Matt transforms predominantly through his friendship with Amy the rehabilitated fire starter, yet by the end of the novel he still lusts after the gorgeous Debbie Summerhill, why did you decide not to develop a romantic link between the two friends?

I think sometimes as a writer you can see a trajectory in the novel that’s been used too often, and you want to step away from it. I was almost telegraphed that it would happen, so I deliberately didn’t make it happen. It’s anyway a more interesting position if the relationship is more ambivalent, as in The Devil’s Ladder.

The main lesson that Caz picks up in Do the Creepy Thing is ‘accept it’, in the same manner Sophie and James in The Devil’s Ladder also have to come to terms with their gift, is this a your response to the traditional horror novel which views the supernatural as an evil one must fight?

Yes, its’ exactly that. In the traditional horror novel some supernatural event comes into the story, it is identified, and then the protagonist has to fight and defeat it, order is restored and everything is cosy again. Now, most people’s experience of the supernatural, and when you go around asking, hundreds of people want to tell you little stories of supernatural moments, is not of evil intruding into their life but about a moment that can’t be explained. They put it away and get on with life, and it may come up again and again, but nobody really fights it. That’s just a device to make a thriller more exciting. I’ve been trying to say that the supernatural is a flavour, and ingredient in most people’s lives. My own grandma had lots of psychic messages and so on; she would have these episodes and then say, ‘now I have to peel the carrots for supper’. That’s how people treat the supernatural in real life.

I am a fan of the horror novel, but I try to avoid this particular trajectory and be more faithful to how it is in real life. The supernatural enhances life in a magical way, and you can make yourself more open or completely closed to it, and you can probably even regulate the experience of it as a consequence of that.

What is the function of the supernatural in Do the Creepy Thing?

 In Do the Creepy Thing, Caz has the power to see into people’s hearts, and this power can be used in a good or a bad way. The fact is that everyone has certain powers of intuition and the same thing happens – you have to choose how sensitive you are to other people. It’s a metaphor for our normal powers of insight and compassion. I can’t see a point in writing any kind of novel if you can’t show compassion. Anything evil in this world is of human rather than supernatural origin. Even if the character seems evil, you’d still want to explain how they came to be like that, it is not excusing evil, but understanding it.

By the way, why was the title of Do the Creepy Thing changed in the American edition to The Exchange?

 I resisted it and was overruled. They gave it a bland title and cover and I don’t know why. When you sell a book in America, they feel they must work on it in some way or they haven’t earned their money. If they can’t change the narrative, because it was already published as a successful novel in the UK, they will look at the title and cover, thinking they could do a better job, but that’s not always the case. The original title created curiosity. The Exchange sounds like something that you just thought about on a Friday afternoon just before you had to leave. In Faber UK they came up with a cover, and I didn’t like it, so they had a rethink and came up with a much better cover. Different publishers have different

What are you working on at the moment?

There’s a lot going on, I have a diverse career. I just published a nonfiction book about football which made the short list of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. I’m also writing the storyline for the computer game Doom 4. I’m hoping to write a sequel for The Devil’s Ladder, however I just came up with an idea for a new book for teenagers, but it’s a secret.

Give us a clue?

 It’s much more explosive!

Thank you Graham Joyce for talking to Write Away.