This post was contributed by Melanie Jones of The Mechanics’ Institute Review. This month the Birkbeck Creative Writing department launched its new website The Mechanics’ Institute Review Online. This year marks a huge success for the Creative Writing MA as ten alumni have novels coming out this year.

To celebrate these achievements we are profiling a selection of the authors and extracts from their upcoming novels will appear on MIROnline. Here, Melanie Jones speaks with alumnus Julia Gray about her novel, The Otherlife (Andersen Press, July 2016)

Read an extract of the book at MIROnline

The Other Life, by Julia Gray

MJ: The Otherlife will be published in July this year, what can you tell us about the novel and the themes behind it?

JG: I set out to explore what a rather amoral child might do if he were put under too much pressure; if the expectations for what he should achieve were too great and burdensome. How we deal with situations that demand too much of us is one theme – addiction, violence and escapism all feature in some way. Coming to terms with death is another.

You call on your experiences as a private tutor in this novel but also mix these with the supernatural and Norse mythology. Can you tell us about the process of mixing experience based writing with myth?

I’ve always been fascinated by books in which everyday life interfaces with the surreal or extraordinary. British fantasists like Diana Wynne Jones, Penelope Lively and Susan Cooper do this especially well in my view, and I knew I wanted to try to create this kind of mixture myself. I used my experiences as a tutor and teacher as a basis for the world in which Ben and Hobie live; I also drew quite a lot on my own childhood education, particularly in terms of the rigorous scholarship preparation that the boys go through. In general, these parts were a pleasure to write, since they involved a kind of rapid downloading of whatever memories happened to surface as I went.

The mythology, in terms of how the boys first encounter it, was also based on experience, in so far as I used the stories I’d written (as homework) when I was a child – sometimes word for word – as part of the text. Later, though, I had to do a lot of reading and research: learning a bit of Norse grammar, poring over dictionaries, tracking down esoteric translations in Senate House library. This was also pleasurable, but much slower. I’d say the process of mixing the two was the hardest part, since it was here that the plot became key to the architecture. The other challenge was to manage the incredibility of the supernatural elements; I wanted to preserve a real ambiguity for the reader, and this was hard to navigate at times.

The novel is written from the perspective of a teenaged boy, what was it about this particular voice that you found inspiring?

There are two narrators: sixteen-year-old Ben and twelve-year-old Hobie. Although Ben is the more sympathetic character, I struggled a lot more with his voice than I did with Hobie’s. I’ve spent much more time working with children of Hobie’s age, and I’d say of the two it was Hobie’s voice that I found the more compelling to write.

One of the first things I tried to do was recreate the rhythms of speech found in American Psycho – that kind of relentless, slightly flat tone, namechecking labels and brands, not pausing for breath – and then add dashes of Nigel Molesworth in full Down With Skool mode. What drives Hobie’s narrative is his rage: his frustration with his mother, with the boundaries imposed daily on his life. To write in Hobie’s voice I had to feel his rage, which was sort of refreshing, and then go with it. Ben is a softer, nicer, more thoughtful and sensitive person, but strangely this did not make it easier to write in his voice – all the rewrites I did were of Ben’s narrative. Another challenge was sufficiently differentiating the two voices.

Young adult fiction is increasingly popular with adult readers. Do you have any thoughts on what the genre has to offer readers of all ages?

I think YA has a kind of tautness of voice and a briskness of pace that are probably compelling for many readers. There are big themes, strong characters, absorbing worlds; there are many subgenres to choose from. Sometimes a book with a teen protagonist is marketed as YA, when in fact it might have been originally written for adults: just because it’s targeted to a particular audience doesn’t mean it should exclude a wider readership.

How have your experiences as a musician and songwriter affected your prose writing?

Julia Gray

Music is quite important in The Otherlife – Ben is a massive Metallica fan, as am I. I really enjoyed writing about heavy metal, as it’s something I’ve not had the opportunity to do before. As I worked my way through various drafts I had certain playlists that I always listened to while writing. One was just called ‘Sad Songs’. Songwriting by comparison is a far faster process.

For me the hardest thing was to learn to sit still long enough, and to have enough tenacity and patience, to produce something eighty or ninety thousand words long, as opposed to a set of lyrics on the back of an envelope. From the first chapters (written for Julia Bell’s Writing for Young Adults Workshop) to the final copyedits, I spent exactly three years working on The Otherlife. I found the writing of prose informed my music-making as well.

How have you found the experience of becoming a published author? Have there been any memorable moments along the way?

I was sitting exactly where I am sitting now – on the floor in my living room – when I received an email from Louise Lamont, who is now my agent, asking me to come in for a meeting. (She had been given the manuscript of The Otherlife by another agent.) At this moment, it all started to feel a little bit more possible that maybe one day someone might publish my book.

You completed two Creative Writing courses at Birkbeck, a post-graduate certificate in Children’s Literature and an MA in Creative Writing. How did these courses affect you as a writer?

For me, the deadlines, structure, peer support and the guidance of tutors were all totally essential and I wouldn’t have had the confidence, understanding or ability to write a book in its entirety without having done them.

Can you tell us about your current writing? What’s next?

I’m halfway through another YA novel, which is coming along slowly but surely.

Find out more

• The Mechanics’ Institute Review Online
• Creative Writing at Birkbeck
• Read an extract of Julia Gray’s debut novel

Julia Gray is a London-based writer and singer-songwriter. Her first novel for young adults, The Otherlife, will be published by Andersen Press in July 2016; she has also written a picture book about the endangered Arabian Leopards of Oman, published by Stacey International in September 2014, and has contributed a short story to the eleventh edition of the Mechanics’ Institute Review.

Her most recent album, Robber Bride, was recorded with the support of the Arts Council. Named after the novel by Margaret Atwood, the album explores how turning points in contemporary and ancient narratives can be reflected in song. Julia has a first in Classics from UCL, a post-graduate certificate in Children’s Literature from Birkbeck and most recently an MA in Creative Writing, also from Birkbeck, for which she received the Sophie Warne Fellowship. www.thisisjuliagray.com

Melanie Jones

Melanie Jones graduated from the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA in 2015. She is the Managing Editor of MIROnline and a member of the MIRLive Team. She was a member of the editorial team for The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Issue 12.

This post was contributed by Melanie Jones of The Mechanics’ Institute Review. This month the Birkbeck Creative Writing department launched its new website The Mechanics’ Institute Review Online. This year marks a huge success for the Creative Writing MA as ten alumni have novels coming out this year.

To celebrate these achievements we are profiling a selection of the authors and extracts from their upcoming novels will appear on MIROnline. Here, Melanie Jones speaks with alumnus David Savill, about his novel, They Are Trying to Break Your Heart (Bloomsbury, April 2016)

Read an extract of the book at MIROnline

They Are Trying to Break Your Heart

MJ: They Are Trying To Break Your Heart comes out this month, congratulations! Can you tell us a little bit about the novel?

DS: I’ve been telling people it’s about the connections between the Bosnian conflict of the 1990’s, and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami – of which there were none until I made them up. It sounds bleak, but the story is focused around people putting each other back together again after catastrophe. In writing the novel I was interested in the tangential connections between people, and the power of the slightest encounters. But there’s a compelling mystery in there too – the story of a human rights researcher who discovers a war criminal believed dead may be alive and living a second life in Thailand. If you want a straight thriller or war story, you’ll probably be disappointed – I hope what the reader gets instead is a really novel drama about displacement, loss and love.

The novel tackles the political landscape of the early 21^st What was it about this time period that inspired you to write?

In one sense, I’ve done what so many debut novelists do, and drawn upon formative experiences. I was 19 when I spent two summers volunteering in Bosnia, and the lessons the war taught me needed to be worked through. But as the writing moved from therapy to story, and as I began to inhabit a Bosnian protagonist, I began to realise a whole generation was growing up with no knowledge of the conflict, or what it meant for the politics of human rights and interventionism in Europe, (let alone the basic history!) This became a purpose for the book. I’m also really interested in the challenge of writing about very recent history, where the historical narrative isn’t settled, and a novel has a chance to work something out about how we came to be where we are.

There are very different voices in the novel. How did you approach this and did you enjoy writing any character more than the others?

Stepping into the head of a Bosnian protagonist was a big moment in my development as a writer. Until then, I’d been far too compelled by autobiography. I began to test this voice out in Birkbeck workshops, and the reactions gave me confidence. I work on the principle that all humans across all cultures, whatever gender, share the same basic drives and ambitions, and face the same struggles in life. There are differences, of course, but the more time I spend inhabiting different protagonists, the less important those differences seem to be. I liked writing Anya the most. Although the drama joins her in a moment of uncharacteristic doubt, she’s the kind of committed, focused and ambitious woman who fascinates me. One of the main springs of my inspiration is people I admire.

David Savill

You left a career in journalism to become a writer and teacher, can you tell us what made you decide to switch to writing fiction?

I was working in Sri Lanka on the tsunami aftermath when I came very close to a fatal car accident. A bus in front of us hit a truck head-on. The bus driver died, and one of the passengers was thrown into the backseat of our car so that we could take her to hospital. It’s terrible to say, but with the shock I had a feeling of elation. I’d spent so much time around the grieving, and seen a lot of death in those months. On top of the natural disaster, this random accident seemed absurd, and for a moment, it helped me shed the fear of death. And in that moment I thought, ‘so I could die tomorrow, what really makes me happy?’ The act of writing, actually sitting down and doing it, was all I could think of. I loved a lot about journalism and documentary film-making, but it didn’t allow me to tell the kind of stories I felt improved life on the deepest level – the stories found in literature. It’s about form of course, and what it’s fit for. I needed to be working in a different form. Another answer is, I wasn’t the world’s best journalist.

How did completing a Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck affect your writing process?

In many ways. But the key thing it gave me was the belief I had a story to tell. Not that I was a writer – I knew I was a writer, because I think writing is a personality type. The tragedy is some people never discover the thing they’re best at doing. But before Birkbeck, I wasn’t sure I had anything interesting enough to relate to people. Being good with prose is a job – a matter of hard, stubborn work for me. But what if you have nothing to say? Julia Bell uses this word ‘territory’, and I began to see I had a territory to explore, and I needed to mine it for something of value to the reader.

Do you have any advice for new writers, perhaps those just starting a creative writing course?

Listen. Be receptive. Throw your ego out of the window and experiment with new things. Don’t expect your drafts to be complete, or for people to like them. Why should they? You can only hope your cohort and tutors spot the potential and help you develop it. Authors are asking readers to invest the most precious thing they have — time, and a creative writing course is probably the only place people will give it freely, even when your writing doesn’t deserve it. Be persistent, practice a lot, and your prose will improve. Then you need to focus on what it is you have to say that is worth a few hours and £16.99 of someone’s hard earned money. I’m convinced we all have something worth writing about, but finding it is hard. Dig deep. After doing the hard work, whether you publish or not is pretty much down to luck. I’m enormously grateful I had a little.

Can you tell us about your current writing? What’s next?

I am so happy not to be writing They Are Trying To Break Your Heart! My next book is provisionally titled, Disinformation: Finding Grace Bailey-Payne. It’s the biography of a brilliant, but little known journalist who disappeared in Georgia in 1999. I hope it’s also about how Russia became the place it is today, and the power games played between Europe and Russia in the beautiful Caucasus mountains.

Find out more

• The Mechanics’ Institute Review Online
• Creative Writing at Birkbeck
• Read an extract of David Savill’s debut novel

David Savill worked as a freelance journalist in the Caucasus and then with BBC Current Affairs television before founding the St Mary’s University MA in Creative Writing. They Are Trying to Break Your Heart is his first novel. It was published by Bloomsbury in April, 2016.

Melanie Jones

Melanie Jones graduated from the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA in 2015. She is the Managing Editor of MIROnline and a member of the MIRLive Team. She was a member of the editorial team for The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Issue 12.

This post was contributed by Melanie Jones, of The Mechanics’ Institute Review. This month the Birkbeck Creative Writing department launched its new website The Mechanics’ Institute Review Online. This year marks a huge success for the Creative Writing MA as ten alumni have novels coming out this year.

To celebrate these achievements we will be profiling a selection of the authors and extracts from their upcoming novels will appear on MIROnline. Here, Melanie Jones speaks with alumna Sarah Alexander, about her novel, ‘The Art of Not Breathing’. (HMH Books for Young Readers, April 2016)

Read an extract of the book at MIROnline

MJ: First of all I want to say congratulations on the upcoming release of The Art of Not Breathing. Can you tell us a little bit about where the idea for this story first came from?

SA: Thank you! Hmm, I’ve been thinking about this question a lot recently, and I still haven’t nailed the answer. It’s hard to describe where the idea came from because the process was so organic. Some of the original ideas are no longer part of the story, and others have grown into something I couldn’t have imagined at the beginning.

The novel is a patchwork of many ideas and themes that I’ve previously tried to put into novels, but the actual story idea came from my main character, Elsie. She popped into my head one day. I knew she and her family had been through tough times and that they didn’t talk much about the past. I wanted to write about a family who’d had a complete communication breakdown, and whether they could recover.

What was it that drew you to Young Adult Fiction? Did you always know that this was the genre that you wanted to write in?

Books were my security blanket when I was at school but somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, I lost my zest for reading. As a grown-up who wanted to write but didn’t know what to read, I thought back to the books I read as a child and teenager, the ones that inspired me to write in the first place, and I chose the Young Adult module on the MA as a way of reconnecting with my teenage love of literature. As soon as I started writing from a teen perspective it all clicked into place.

There are lots of different approaches to the process of writing. Do you have a particular routine?

I don’t really have a routine; I do whatever I can around my day job, so it varies. It helps to mix it up a bit – sometimes I’ll write every day in 45-minute sprints before I start work and other times I’ll do marathon weekend sessions. The only constant is that I always write on a computer. I do make notes on my phone and Post-it notes but when it comes to putting it all together I need a keyboard because my handwriting is atrocious. I’m sure I’ve let go of ingenious ideas because my notes are illegible.

Sarah Alexander

You completed your MA at Birkbeck in 2013, do you have any advice for other students of Creative Writing?

With any course, the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. I don’t just mean working hard on assignments, I mean immersing yourself in everything related to the course – go to spoken word nights, socialise with other writers (this is probably the most important one!), challenge yourself and your writing – do something out of your comfort zone, go to author talks and events, ask for book recommendations from people who have different reading interests, have fun.

Some writers work with writing groups and have groups of first readers, others prefer to put the work together before sharing it. How have other writers played a part in your writing life?

I started writing The Art of Not Breathing during my MA so I workshopped the first few thousand words with other writers on the course and this was hugely valuable. I don’t know if I’d have had the courage to finish it without the constructive feedback I got from those workshops. Plus, I learned a lot from reading other writers’ work. Once the course had finished, though, I retreated into my personal writing bubble, afraid of what people would think of my story, never quite ready to share. With Book 2, it’s different. I want people to read it – even the early raw drafts, because readers are the reason books get written.

What has been the most exciting part of the journey to publication?

Getting to know the publishing and book community. Once I’d got my book deal, I emerged from my solitary writing bubble and discovered a whole online (and real life) community of writing folks who just wanted to talk about books and writing. I wasn’t a big a big social media user before, so I had missed out on all of this – I really wish I’d embraced it earlier. It’s great to have such a supportive network of other writers and book people. Bad for my bank balance, though – so many brilliant recommendations.

Your bio tells us that you’ve worked as a “tomato picker, travel consultant, mental-health support worker and suitcase administrator”. Do you think it’s important for writers to have a varied history to draw upon?

I was about to say that I don’t think tomato picking has helped much with my writing but then I remembered I wrote a short story about it – it was pretty dark. I might share it one day. It’s important to understand people, places and things outside your day-to-day environment but perhaps the way you draw from your experiences is more important than the actual experience.

A wise professor once said to me, ‘Whatever you write, it has to be interesting.’ This is, of course, subjective, but it got me thinking about how narrow my personal interests were. New experiences help to broaden my knowledge and provide different perspectives on the world. Other people’s books are also an excellent source of interesting things!

Can you tell us about your current writing? What’s next?

I’m working on another standalone YA novel. I can’t say too much, but I am very excited about it. I’m also sketching out two other novels so watch this space! I’m desperately trying to find time to write more short stories too – I miss this part of the MA.

Find out more

• The Mechanics’ Institute Review Online
• Creative Writing at Birkbeck

Sarah Alexander grew up in London with dreams of exploring the world and writing stories. After spending several years wandering the globe and getting into all sorts of scrapes, she returned to London to complete a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College in 2013. She works in publishing and lives with her husband and two chickens. THE ART OF NOT BREATHING is her first novel. You can find her on her website www.sarahalexanderwrites.com or on Twitter @SarahRAlexander.

Melanie Jones

Melanie Jones graduated from the Birkbeck Creative Writing MA in 2015. She is the Managing Editor of MIROnline and a member of the MIRLive Team. She was a member of the editorial team for The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Issue 12.