Summary:
Watch the video and think about your answers to the questions.
Captions:
Music
Kelli McGraw: Welcome Meg. Thanks for coming to the interview today. How has your reading influenced your writing?
Meg Rosoff: I was just talking to a bunch of kids and telling them that I am not very good at plot.
So a lot of my plots come from the books that I read when I was a kid.
In fact I didn't even quite realise it but the story of How I live now, which is the cousin, the city cousin going to live with the cousin she has
never met, comes from a book called 'The good master' by Kate Seredy and then there are just bits and pieces of other books that I really loved
as a kid that kind of find my way, a bit of Enid Blyton, you know, and then you make it your own and suddenly it's a much darker book and nobody
ever quite recognises what's influenced you.
Kelli: How do you decide if an idea that you have for a book is worth pursuing?
Meg: You have to get that feeling sort of at the back of your neck, you know, that an idea just feels like something you are interested in
and it's almost, you have to almost ask yourself, 'Is it something that I can dig and dig and dig and keep finding more
and more material as I explore it?'.
And actually, in a funny way you almost, you know you have the themes that will come out almost in any book.
And so you can start out writing a book about, you know a boy who likes to ride buses, and all the things that you are interested in, war and mortality
and you know, whatever fate, will find their way into that story.
Music
Summary:
Watch the video and think about your answers to the questions.
Captions:
Music
Kelli McGraw: You've had a lot of different jobs. At what point did you start thinking of yourself as a writer?
Meg Rosoff: I think I have always thought of myself as a writer but I never thought I really could do it.
I never thought I could write a novel because I was never good at plot.
It took me a really long time to realise that there are people like Dan Brown who write the 'Da Vinci Code' which is all about plot, and then there are
other people who write books that are hardly about plot at all and that are much more about character and it took me a very, very long time to realise
that I could write books that were about character.
Kelli: Is writing always easy for you?
Meg: I would say yes and no. I am not one of those people who finds the actual mechanical process of writing difficult.
I actually love writing and I love playing with words and I find it very easy really to make sentences and I like exploring ideas
and all that kind of stuff.
I do get stuck sometimes when I have written half a book and there's still no story.
I always say I've got characters wandering through a landscape and nothing much is happening to them.
So that's the bit I find difficult and sometimes my husband will say, when I have been looking really absent for a few days, you know he'll say
'So obsessed with plot again, are you?' And that's what's hard for me.
Music
Summary:
Watch the video and think about your answers to the questions.
Captions:
Music
Kelli McGraw: How do you develop a character? Do you develop them fully before you start your book or do they evolve as you write?
Meg Rosoff: A little bit of both, I think. For 'Just in case', well Daisy in 'How we live now', emerged fully formed.
She was there in my head and it was like she was pushing my brain out of the way and saying 'Me me me I want to talk'.
It was very easy because people say, and you hear writers talking about it all the time, but it is almost hard to believe, but it was true that it
was almost like taking dictation to write down Daisy's story.
Justin was a whole different question. Justin in 'Just in case' was, I started out with him much more of a cipher, you know, he was kind of a blank
almost and I wanted to surround him with lots of interesting characters who could see the world clearly in a way that he couldn't and it was my editor
who said you can't have a void at the middle of a book and so I had to really build him up again.
Kelli: What experiences do you draw on when you are developing a character?
Meg: Everything. I think that is the real fantastic benefit about starting to write when you're in your forties.
You know I have had four or five careers, I've had lots and lots of jobs, lots of relationships and I've had a child now.
Everything that you think is a terrible waste of time somehow eeks its way into your writing which is a really wonderful feeling because, I mean,
I worked in advertising for almost 15 years and I really hated it.
It just never agreed with me and I thought, I kept thinking if I live to be a hundred and I work in advertising for ten years
it will only be a tenth of my life.
But when I started to write I realised all those years weren't wasted at all and everything I learned was a fantastic apprenticeship.
Music
Summary:
Watch the video and think about your answers to the questions.
Captions:
Music
Kelli McGraw: In your book 'Just in case' you let the reader in on the thoughts of Justin as well as his baby brother Charlie and of 'fate'.
What do you think it adds to the story having all of these different perspectives?
Meg Rosoff: That's an interesting question.
I think, it's what makes writing in the third person much more difficult, I think because you've got to really communicate to the reader the
states of mind of lots of different people and that can be very difficult because you're looking at the world from four, five, six, seven directions
all at once but in a way what that does is, it lets you have a completely unreliable character who sees the world in a completely peculiar,
fragmented way and then you have another character who sees it in a different way and eventually what you can do is let the reader put the picture
together for themselves and make their own conclusions which is always a nice way to write, I think.
You know, somebody once said if you give the reader two plus two and let them add it up they will be grateful to you for ever.
And I like to do that. I like to make the reader do the addition.
Kelli: Your first chapter is just one paragraph long. How do you think that having different chapter lengths can engage the reader?
Meg: I have a fairly short attention span.
I can never get my books ... I hear that people write books that are 170,000 - I even know of someone who wrote a 700,000 word book.
My books always have around 50,000 words which is fairly short for a book, which, you know, I suppose I could have really long chapters in a short book
but basically I sort of think in fairly smallish chunks and I just have a kind of feeling for when I have said enough just then
and I want to slightly change tack.
Personally because I never have enough time to read I always like a book with short chapters because then you can kind of finish it and go off and
make dinner, or, you know do the laundry or whatever, come back and read another chapter and whatever.
Also I live in London and I am taking buses everywhere and so it is really depressing to get off the bus in the middle of a chapter.
Music
Summary:
Watch the video and think about your answers to the questions.
Captions:
Music
Kelli McGraw: What type of reader do you hope will enjoy your books?
Meg Rosoff: I think I need a fairly good reader. I think I need somebody who likes to engage with ideas.
I don't think they are the simplest books around.
I don't really write for kids particularly. I don't have an audience of say fourteen year olds in mind when I'm writing.
I just write with the kind of full force of my powers and then whoever reads the book reads it as far as I am concerned and I think that may be
why the books appeal to slightly older kids and also to adults
'cause there's a lot of challenging ideas and a lot of challenging language.
I had endless battles with my American editors, you know, saying children will not know what this word means and I think fine let them look it up
or let them skim over it.
There is no point in pretending that the people you are talking to only have a two hundred word vocabulary.
Kelli: What do you see as a general message that runs through your work or do you think that there isn't one?
Meg: No there definitely is one. You know, I think it is a question that is always being asked authors. 'Is what you write autobiographical?'
Almost all authors will say 'No, no, no, no it's not, it's not autobiographical. It is not about me'.
But I always think that is a lie. I think who you are and what you want to say is really all you have to give to your audience.
And so my philosophy comes out in absolutely everything I write and what is that? is another question.
I consider myself a deeply moral person philosophically.
You know I believe you are responsible for other people, you know, we're responsible for the rest of the world.
And it is not enough just to go through life ...
That is why I hated advertising so much. It is not enough to go through life making money and spending it.
And I believe in friendship and loyalty and love and all those sorts of things.
And I believe in friendship and loyalty and love and all those sorts of things. What I don't believe in I suppose is kind of classic ideas of, you know
morality when somebody tells you what's right and what's wrong, you know that ... I've had a lot of criticism for 'How I live now', people saying
'How disgusting! Here's two cousins falling in love', and I think my feeling is, you know love is very hard to find in life and when you find it you
don't ask a lot of questions. And you don't - well sometimes, you have to, I mean you know.
There are limits, I suppose. But I'm very accepting, I think, of where people find love.
Kelli: Thanks very much for being interviewed today, Meg.
Meg: Oh, you're very welcome.
Music