An Interview with Daniel Blythe

An Interview with Daniel Blythe.

Please tell us everything we need to know about your most recent book! Tell us how it fits in with your ongoing work. Is it a part of a series?

Exiles is, broadly, a Young Adult science fiction novel. The characters in it range from 17 down to 12. It’s quite gritty and grim compared with the previous books I have done for young readers, and so when it comes to my school visits, I usually only talk about it in secondary schools, not primary. The setting is a young offenders’ prison world, The Edge, a harsh planet light years from Earth, where the fifty young inmates are expected to set up a society and look after themselves – and frankly, Earth’s government doesn’t care if they end up killing each other. Their resources and technology are limited, but somehow, through sheer determination and willpower, they’ve managed to hold things together!... Then, into this society comes our heroine Beth, the outsider, who falls from the skies into their lives – Beth, the girl in the escape pod, who is a member of the Chapter of Continual Progress, escaping from disaster into the skies. And Beth has to learn the way of life on The Edge pretty quickly if she’s going to survive. But around the same time she arrives, weird things are happening – sabotage, power-drains and mysterious attacks. And, of course, there are those who think the newcomer is somehow responsible. Things get worse – much worse…

I started writing Exiles as a stand-alone book, but before long it became clear to me how I could continue to explore the wider world in which it is set, and make that a trilogy. So that’s what I’m working on doing. Broadly, it’s about what happens to humanity when all its assumptions about what is safe and normal and reliable are removed – I can’t say too much more!

How would you define the genre that your book falls into?

I suppose it has to be science fiction! People have different ideas about what that is, and what it means, but for me it’s just a means to put the characters in total isolation. I’ve also seen sci-fi described as being about the relationship between humanity and technology, and between humanity and its environment, and that’s definitely explored in the book too. But it’s also a thriller, a whodunnit, and oddly, a kind of space Western too, which I only realised halfway through writing it. I’m not even a fan of Westerns! (It’s an odd term, Western, isn’t it? Why are all those Nordic crime thrillers not called Northerns? They should be.)

Why did you fall in love with this genre in the first place, and which books / authors / series would you recommend?

I just wanted to write a story about young people, finding their way in the world – in the galaxy! – but freed from the assumptions about young people in today’s society. Contemporary fiction for young readers can date very quickly – not just because of the technology, but also because of attitudes and contexts and so on. So, in a sense, I didn’t set out to write a science fiction novel. As a teenager, I read a bit of sci-fi, but perhaps not as much as you might expect. Robert Silverberg was one writer who left me completely shocked and stunned – sci-fi is allowed to do this? There’s an orgy in The Masks of Time, for goodness’ sake! You didn’t get that with Terrance Dicks! I felt I had to hide the book from my mum!...

But in my teens there wasn’t really any ‘Young Adult’ as a genre, and so you progressed from children’s books to adult books. So at 15, 16 years old I was reading things like The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Wasp Factory and mentally taking notes about what novels were allowed to do.

Who do you read for pleasure?

It’s very easy to fall back on comfort reading like Doctor Who, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I am always on the lookout for new fiction people have recommended to me. But I actually went through a stage of having a bit of a break from fiction a couple of years back, and started reading really interesting historical stuff like Ruth Goodman’s How To Be A Victorian and Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guide history books, which really bring history to life. Another great one I keep coming back to is Lacey and Danziger’s The Year 1000, which taught me all sorts of things I didn’t know. As light relief, over Christmas I read Nicholas Parsons’ book on the history of Just A Minute, which is equally fascinating in a different way!

You’ve worked in all kinds of different genres. How important is it for you to take a zig-zag path, exploring all these various kinds of story-telling?

I was always very clear that I wanted to be a writer – I never grew up saying I wanted to be any sort of writer, just that I wanted to write. As my career has gone on, I have become aware of the necessity of this – writing all sorts of things to survive! The Encyclopaedia of Classic 80s Pop, for example, was my first non-fiction work, and one which was teased out of me by the editor David Shelley, who started talking to me about ‘cheesy’ films and rapidly realised I was more interested in the soundtracks – which was why I got commissioned to do a light-hearted, non-specialist music book.

Dadlands came about because I was a father for the first time in 2000, and again in 2003, and I noticed the books we had got on the subject were all about all the stuff that’s aimed at the mother – pregnancy, breastfeeding, etc. – because of course only the mother can do that! But I wanted to do a friendly, approachable book for new dads. And that did OK – it ended up being translated into French, Finnish and Arabic!... The most frightening experience in my life happened as a parent, when my daughter had a febrile convulsion at the age of 14 months – when you see one, it looks like the worst thing in the world, and it’s quite common to think your child has actually died. We had it all – the tears, the terror, the midnight dash to A&E. But she was absolutely fine – a febrile convulsion is actually not very serious, and it’s just a seizure from having a high body temperature, with no lasting effects at all. There have been other terrifying moments too – they’ve both had radiators fall on them, which sounds horrifying when you say it like that, but is actually quite funny in retrospect. They’re now both very strong, determined, healthy young people of 17 and 19, studying hard, and enjoying life as people that age should… But you never stop worrying about them. So I suppose, in a way, wanting to write a book about parenting with a lightness of touch was a reaction to some of that terror! One day, I’ll do the sequel…

And so it went on – each different book was born out of its own particular circumstances. Shadow Runners was my first book for children, and it was bought by Chicken House, but the first Emerald Greene book had actually existed in some form for a while before that, even though the Emerald Greene books ended up coming out afterwards. And then I ended up doing the ‘reluctant reader’ stuff for Badger Learning, because I just approached them and said I thought I’d be quite good at it, because I’d done all this work in schools with reluctant readers. And they gave me a go, and I ended up doing eight books for them! The key to it, I found, was to write like Terrance Dicks – simply, clearly and never patronisingly.

One unifying factor is that people say I am quite good at writing women. It’s true that I often have female protagonists, and most of my books have a female narrator or female third-person viewpoint. This may be a conscious attempt to distance myself from my characters. As a man, I can’t ever know what it is like to be a woman, can’t ever feel it – all those years of lived experience, of decisions that have to be taken regarding health, personal safety, whether to have children, having to work hard to be recognised in your career and being criticised for it… All of that. But I can work hard to imagine it, to make it seem as if I know it… And that’s a great challenge for a writer.

You’ve written for pre-existing franchises over the years. You’ve been trusted with some really famous properties. How do you find working with other people’s creations, and making your mark in those worlds? Is there a franchise you haven’t written for yet that you’d like to?

To be honest, Doctor Who is the only one I know well enough. I’m happy to do my own stuff and the occasional bit of Doctor Who. There’s another Who thing coming, which I’ll mention in a bit! It’s a great honour to be, as you say, entrusted with the mythology for 250 pages, and it’s quite a relief when it goes down well! My second book for Virgin rather divided people’s opinions, but by the time I came back for Autonomy, I like to think I was more of a mature writer and had a better grasp on the idiom. Plus, of course, the remit was simply to do a story like TV Who! Which I think I did, and enjoyed doing, and other people seem to have enjoyed it too.

Is there a genre you couldn’t imagine ever writing in..?

Probably romance. I mean, romance as part of something bigger, sure, and romantic relationships of all sorts figure in my books. But a book whose sole purpose is romance, probably not. It has a great following and there are people out there doing it brilliantly, so I’m not about to knock it!

What’s the most wonderful thing about being a writer..?

A child in a school recently asked me the most wonderful question – she was only 7. I was doing a quite rare Q&A with a Year 2 class, who are only 6 and 7 years old, and this little girl asked: ‘Why is your job important?’ That really made me think! Why is what we do important? I think it’s because you are in charge of your own world and you create things which haven’t existed before. That’s incredibly powerful. What we are asking readers to do, if you stop and think about it, is actually very odd – we are asking them to care about people who don’t really exist, doing things that didn’t really happen. It’s part of the challenge of being a writer to make that seem real and make people care. You give people permission to use their imaginations. It should never be forgotten how important that is.

And what’s the most challenging thing about the novelist’s life..?

Back in the 1990s, I remember reading the phrase ‘signal to noise ratio’, and it’s one that has stuck in my mind ever since. Some people make very small signals that create a lot of clamour, while others, like me, can be frantically gesticulating, ‘Hello! I’m over here!’ and feeling, well, ignored, really. I know a lot of writers like me, who are in middle-age now and have been doing this for as long as I have, say 20 years, feel increasingly frustrated that it seems to count for very little these days. (Oh dear! Now I sound rather pompously like the Duke of Forgill in Terror of the Zygons.) I know I’m not the only writer with 20+ books out there to get incredibly fed up, even offended, at being treated like a new writer sometimes!

But with changing direction every so often, you do need to re-invent yourself. I’m lucky that my agent, Caroline Montgomery at Rupert Crew Ltd., is very indulgent of my sometimes unfocused ideas and my urges to keep doing different things, and thankfully she has been very good at selling me in all these varied contexts. Going into schools is a great way to feel wanted and loved as a writer, because kids and teachers like to tell you how wonderful they think you are!

Longhand on actual paper, or straight onto the computer..? How do you write that first draft?

I write incomprehensible notes in terrible handwriting, sometimes hundreds of pages for each book – not continuous narrative, but odd scraps, fragments, ideas, and so on. Writing the actual manuscript is done at the computer, and I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Each time I sit down to write, something I wrote before gets changed. I can never understand these people who count their drafts – I totally lose count!

What is your readership like..? Do you meet them at events, and get letters and email from them? You’ve done many school visits and readings for your YA books. Tell us about those!

Yes, schools are great, and festivals too. I started going into schools in 2007, before I even had a new Doctor Who book to talk about, and when I didn’t really have a clue how to work in school or what to do. I gradually built it up over the years, to the point where I am doing 25-30 school visits a year. That feels like a lot, to me, but I know some people do more! And the money is very helpful. I now have a very informative 12-page information pack which I send out to schools, with testimonials and press reviews in, details of all my books, and options for all the different workshops I do.

Meeting the young readers is fantastic, and there are always kids who want to show you stuff they have written – I always make time for them. They are often the shy ones. Even a couple of minutes of encouragement will, I hope, stay with them and give them the boost they need.

Something people often don’t understand outside the writing world is that a visit to a school is not promotional, unless it is something your publishers have arranged (and that only happens very rarely). It’s a structured day of working with the kids. My typical day in a primary school would be a talk, with video and slides and so on, followed by question sessions, a team quiz, writing workshops and a book-signing. My workshops have different themes like Openings, Characters, Descriptive Writing, Ghost Stories, Science Fiction, and so on. I take books into school to sell, and only make the tiniest profit on them, because, of course, I buy them at author discount, and I then try and pass on that discount to the school as much as I can, so the kids get to buy a book a pound or two cheaper than it would be in the shops. One or two parents and teachers can look a bit doubtfully at this author sitting there apparently raking in the fivers from a queue of kids – if only they knew how little we actually get paid!

And you do get follow-up correspondence – sometimes from entire classes, with pictures too! Some schools want me to do answers to questions on a video, which I’ve also done.

How did you get into writing in the first place, and how did you first get published..? Has it been a long and difficult road, or has it been relatively straightforward?

From the age of 16 or 17 I was ending stuff out to publishers, and getting some nice ‘no, thanks’ responses – I think that’s everyone’s experience at first. My big break was the New Adventures with Virgin – Peter Darvill-Evans gave me that chance to be published at the age of 24, and I will always be grateful to him for that. I thought I was ‘in’, then, but it wasn’t a leg-up into publishing – I still had to work hard, and so did my agent, to sell my novel The Cut to Penguin. Most literary publishers and editors don’t care that you’ve been published in genre fiction. There is a snobbery about it. So I was treated as a new writer by Penguin, and promoted as such, even though I had four or five years’ experience by the time The Cut came out. I can’t complain, though, because it did very well, and was promoted and reviewed to an extent which, now, just seems amazing to me – I didn’t appreciate it enough at the time. It got a big review in the Times! It’s one I still quote! Then they did the follow-up, Losing Faith, as a trade paperback with Hamish Hamilton, and things didn’t go quite so well with that, and disappointingly they didn’t do what they said they’d do in the contract, which was a B-format paperback a year later – I think that could have been its natural home, but what do I know? If people want to get hold of my old novels, The Cut, Losing Faith and This is the Day, they can do so by getting hold of the digital reprints which Endeavour Media have done. I’m still especially pleased with This is the Day, which is my thirtysomething young-mid-life crisis novel, all about family commitments and that particularly Mumsnet kind of middle-class snobbery and angst over houses and catchment areas and so on. It’s supposed to be a satire, which I think a lot of people missed at the time!

What are you going to write next..? Are you going to be working in the same vein? What can we expect to read.?

Rather excitingly, I’ve done my first Big Finish audio play – I actually wrote it about a year ago, and it’s being recorded and released this year. I don’t know how much I am allowed to say about that right now, but it was great fun to do, and a great privilege, and very challenging, in an enjoyable way. I’m not a scriptwriter, at all! But I think I rose to the challenge. I’m also working on the sequel to Exiles, and a middle-grade historical book which I hope becomes a series too. And there are always other ideas buzzing around, formed to some degree or another. That’s the problem – I have too many! That questions writers always get asked: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ If only people understood that this is not the problem! It’s having enough time – and living long enough, and not being distracted by the business of life. We live in uncertain times, horrible times, our lives dwarfed by these obscene people and these horrifically moronic decisions which just seem so wrong, so self-evidently stupid, and it’s hard not to exist in a state of continual worry and low-level depression. Life is running to stand still a lot of the time, and it’s very hard to be creative in that environment.

It might seem morbid that I say ‘living long enough’, but I don’t mean it to be – it’s just matter-of-fact. I turned 50 last year, and I’m looking very carefully at my own health. I’ve been lucky in that respect, but never take anything for granted. I’m well aware that I’ve got friends only a few years older who are already eyeing up their retirement, while I don’t think I will ever want to retire, or be able to! I’m far too young! I still feel like a new writer, a young writer, learning stuff every day.

Finally… tell us something surprising about yourself that your readers might not already know..!

I used to be a magician! Yes, for years I was a member of the school’s ‘Magic Circle’. The secrets of the tricks were passed down from the older members, and we took our little magic shows out on the road to hospitals, schools and old people’s homes. One of my fellow Maidstone Grammar School magicians was Stuart Miles, who went on to Blue Peter fame.

There were a few on-stage disasters, but I think we weathered them. Looking back on it, I really don’t know how I managed to do it – I am such an introvert, and I think I’d hate it now. But it was fun at the time!