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Mary Billing: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. Your first career was in nursing. Can you tell us how that has influenced your writing?
JC Burke: I think it's influenced my writing in that it put me in the position to observe the human condition and of course you're not consciously
observing it but you're seeing it every day in terms of people being in these incredibly intimate situations of death, of fear, of great darkness,
of perhaps great joy and hope and in terms of seeing the way families often splinter, often really unite, and really just incredible things the way
humans can hang on for, to have an interaction with another human that perhaps they haven't had for 20 years or perhaps, you know, it's some terrible
conflict that they haven't resolved.
And because I was an oncology sister and I worked in leukaemic units I was always very much on the coal face of life and death.
It must have had an influence on my writing although I can't specifically pinpoint what it would be.
Mary: Where do you get your ideas from? Do you test them out on your friends?
JC: No. Oh no, no, no, I never, I don't really talk a lot to my friends about my writing.
I talk to my dad, my father's a writer. I talk to him about it.
I might talk to my sister.
My daughter who's 15, I talk to her about some ideas I may have because very often I am writing about the things that happen in her world.
But I don't know where I am when I come up with that idea.
I think sometimes it can be as simple as watching a person cross a road.
And I always say that to the kids when I do the creative writing classes is, watch the person and I almost start to play hypothetical in my head where,
why are they walking like that? Why are they holding their hands like that?
Just say this is happened, just say that's happened and then often from there a story begins to grow.
But I really can't pinpoint exactly where I am and what I'm doing and how that idea comes to me.
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Mary Billing: How useful do you think fiction is as a tool for exploring teenage behaviour and do you try to get a message
across to your teenage audience?
JC Burke: I think fiction is very important, in terms of the novel.
I think that they are so visually over-stimulated that they're almost desensitised.
I just, you know, in terms of the films they see and the PlayStation games, etc.
But in terms of fiction in the form of a novel, I think the written word is very powerful because I think it just stays
somewhere in the subconscious and you're not necessarily fully aware of it but I think there are times where you recall something that you've read that
is fiction so therefore it gives you that safe distance from it in that it's made up, so I think that maybe teenagers
are more prepared to kind of dive into it because it is made up as opposed if it's something that's real.
And I think that often the written word is very powerful and it just might lie there in the back of people's minds.
I've certainly found that with 'Tom Brennan' that it seems to have had that effect.
Mary: How has your reading influenced your writing?
JC: I don't read a lot of young adult work. I like to really lose myself when I read so I don't want to read
something that I might be continually comparing my work with or feeling totally intimidated that I never want to write another word as long as I live.
What I have done with my new novel which I read in 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver and it
fascinated me as a technique was to write in the different voices of characters and each character to narrate a chapter which I've just finished doing.
Apart from that I'm not sure.
I guess I love to read about characters that have that incredible depth to them and the ability for writers to be able to weave a past into a present.
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Mary Billing: What do you do before you actually start writing?
JC Burke: I have a little book, every novel I have, which I always bring and show to the classes, is a little workbook.
Sometimes it's an exercise book, sometimes a lecture pad. Sometimes it's something that's a bit fancier.
And I start to just write down all my initial ideas in that. I don't do that until I have thought it through.
The process happens in my head first. For instance, at the moment I'm thinking about a new novel. I'm not ready to write anything down yet.
I perhaps will be in a couple of months and then I'll buy the exercise book and I'll start to jot down some points,
maybe some ideas about characters, plot, research.
And then when that book is really, really happening and I'm writing in it every day and it's the first thing I think about
when I wake up in the morning and the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night and when I wake up in
the middle of the night I'm still there, trying to work things out, that's when I know that I'm ready to actually
open up my laptop and start the first page.
Mary: How do you work with an editor?
JC: We often discuss what we call the structural points that aren't working. Again I'll use the example of 'Tom Brennan'.
But the thing with 'Tom Brennan' was that it had to be Tom's story and there was the temptation to tell
everyone else's stories because they all had their own very, very big stories as well.
So we would discuss how we could just put the focus on Tom and how we could make the other stories important
too but really to the point where they only are there to contribute to Tom's journey.
So we'll discuss ideas.
And she's very good because if there's something that I'm struggling with, she'll pick it up.
She's very good at pulling out the things that I was finding difficult when I wrote, and we will discuss these
ideas and then, usually it's, well always it's up to me in terms of what I want to change, and then she'll actually
give me a structural report where we'll document in point form what needs to be looked at and I'll go back into the chapters and start to work on that.
Then it goes through what's called a copy edit which, it just might be small things.
It could be something as basic as a sentence that's not working or a chapter that needs to end earlier and begin at a different point.
And then we'll go through the proofreading stages, which is what I'm up to now with my new book, and that is where you need to read it.
And it's very important to read it very carefully because when you get it as a proof sheet it's in a different font.
It's in what it will look like in novel format, but on big pages.
And it's almost like the story takes on a new set of clothes because things that you are looking at just in a
normal word format jump out at you because you become a bit desensitised because you're reading these sentences over and over again.
Then when you see it in that different format, you all of a sudden, you get that real cringe factor happening where,
oh my god, I can't believe I wrote that. And that's when you really need to change things and you see
all kinds of things, you know, from typos to just sentence construction that's not working to words, etc, that kind of thing. And then hopefully
the last one you do is just a pure read just to check that everything is in order and then it goes off.
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Mary Billing: You say that your house was full of colourful characters. Your parents were journalists.
How has this assisted you in the creation of characters?
JC Burke: Well I think that perhaps my powers of observation were quite good because my father's also a steam train fanatic and an Antarctic man and
I think that people that follow steam trains would have to be probably the more unusual people in society.
And when they came over they would chat to Dad, and you know, whatever, they'd be gone and within five minutes I would be impersonating them.
So perhaps then I liked to watch people and I wasn't conscious of it but I started to take them off and perhaps just those memories of watching people
helps me to paint the characters that I write about.
Mary: 'The Red Cardigan' has a female protagonist and 'The Story of Tom Brennan' has a male.
How do you get inside the heads of your female, and more particularly, your male characters?
JC: It's interesting with 'The Red Cardigan' because I chose to write third person present tense which has quite a distant sound to that voice which
I did intentionally because Evie is quite detached from herself as well as other people in her family and her world.
So in that way I didn't want to go too far into her head.
With 'Tom Brennan' and with 'White Lies' where I write as boys, I don't know.
It's just a matter of getting to know them and I don't think the gender thing is as important as people would think because I think that whether
you're male or female you still have the same fears and hopes and pain and love and all of those types of emotions.
Obviously you express them in different ways but it's more like I have to get to know this person and then their voice comes to me.
I start to hear them.
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Mary Billing: 'The Story of Tom Brennan' uses a first person narrator in a series of flashbacks.
What was your purpose in structuring your novel in this way?
JC Burke: I think the important thing with 'Tom Brennan' is that it actually depicts a very short space of time.
It's really only about I think 10 months or something in Tom's life.
And I think in order to communicate with the reader the incredible loss that Tom has suffered and his family has suffered I needed to show what he had
before so the empathy could start to develop for Tom and a real sense of what he had lost.
And I realised that I could do that simply by just putting in a sentence every now and then about, whether it was something that his mum used to do, or
something that he's smelled that reminded him of something.
The actual accident itself is broken up into flashbacks as a tool to get the reader to keep turning the page and to really sort of stimulate their
curiosity on what's happened, you know, there's something not quite right in this story.
So the accident flashbacks are really to get the reader to keep reading.
But the small snippets of what Tom's life was like before is really for the reader to build that empathy with the character and his family and the
circumstances that they find themselves in now.
If they don't know what he had before then I don't think that they care about what he would have now.
Mary: What other literary techniques do you use when you're writing?
JC: The big one which I will, I tell, I teach the kids all the time because I think it's so important is not to dictate everything about what's
going on, not to let them know that the character's happy, that the character's sad, the character's frightened, but to show this and to show
it in terms of word pictures and how that's a much more interesting thing for a reader to read.
And it also allows a reader to make their own decisions about what is going on.
And I think it actually adds a little bit of suspense and tension to the reading as well.
That would be possibly the main technique I use, as well as never really answering everything.
I want the reader to come up with their own conclusions about things and I want to unsettle them many times too.
I try, very much in 'Tom Brennan' I tried to unsettle the reader, to throw them into quite a conflict about how they would feel if they were
in these particular situations.
Mary: What advice would you give to our aspiring young writers?
JC: I would say read, read, especially the genre that you're interested in, the type of style you're interested in.
Read a lot and watch. Become a busybody, become an eavesdropper, and watch people.
Watch people and start, just to try and start your own story about the observations that you make of a person.
But I think you really, really need to take a very kind of quiet seat down the back of the room and watch people.
Mary: Terrific. Thank you very much for talking to us today.
JC: Thanks Mary.
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