Fiction for Children and Young Adults

The Steep Path from Editor to Writer: The Ghost Detectives by Emily Mason

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:19:44 +0100

That all changed two years ago when I decided that if I didn’t tackle the mountain range, I would die wondering what the view would have been like from the top. I had been writing stories, scenes, ideas all my life, I had become an editor because of my love of books and I was terrified of going public with my own writing because I valued writing and reading so highly. The case against was watertight, but still the pull of the written word proved too forceful to resist. I put together an...

Eighteen Kisses, Laura Jane Cassidy

Wed, 02 May 2012 12:22:12 +0100

She says the idea for the young adult crime series developed naturally. “I think it was just a combination of different things over the years. Like when I was younger, a lot of women went missing in the area where I live – well, a lot for Ireland. There was kind of three or four in a triangular area sort of around my town. So when I was seven or eight, I remember how my friends’ mothers would be like, ‘Oh, don’t walk home alone, make sure you walk in twos,’ and all that. So I ...

Alan Early and The World Serpent

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:41:13 +0100

Alan studied in the National Film School, Dun Laoghaire and on graduation in 2008, co-founded Annville Films. Writing.ie asked him how he started writing fiction - he told us: “I’ve always been a big writer. All through my childhood, I would spend my free hours making up and writing stories about banshees, ghosts or vampires. My father is an undertaker so I suppose that goes some way to explain my early fascination with the macabre!” He explained, “at secondary school, I wrote a children...

The Real Anna Carey and The Real Rebecca

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 10:27:27 +0100

Anna’s motivation for writing The Real Rebecca stemmed from wanting to write “a funny book” – she’s a big fan of Louise Rennison (author of the Georgia Nicolson series) and wishes there’d been more of that sort of book around in her own youth. “There weren’t that many really, really funny books about teenage life in my day – it was mostly a bit angsty,” she observes. She also wanted to write about being in a band – “partly because I was in one myself for a huge chunk of my...

Judi Curtin - Double Trouble

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:56:05 +0100

I wanted to write about two best friends, living in Ireland. I needed some drama, so I looked into my past, and remembered that I moved primary school three(!) times. Then I decided to split up my two heroines, and base the story on their attempts to get back together.

What attracted you to writing for children?

I had written three books for adults, but my three children persuaded (bullied?) me, until I agreed to write a book they’d like to read.

How do you organise your writing day? For exa...

Jean Flitcroft and the Cryptids

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:32:02 +0100

‘Crytpids are those creatures like the Loch Ness Monster that lie between fact and fiction’, Jean explains. While some people confine such ideas to the realm of conspiracy theory, there have been numerous credible accounts and sightings ‘They have been witnessed by a lot of 'reliable' people - monks, police officers, bank managers in the case of the Loch Ness Monster and been investigated by scientists but have not been proven. The coelacanth which was thought to be extinct for 65 mil...

Leigh Fallon and The Carrier of the Mark

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:05:20 +0100

Leigh spent many a patient hour sitting in the car, waiting to pick up her children, but it was not time wasted; ‘The beautiful surroundings of Kinsale combined with memories of school tours. Add in an overactive imagination and the surrounding and ideas started merging and needed to be written down. I started out on scraps of paper I found in my car, receipts and kids drawings’. Leigh became more organised and began to fill notebooks rather than nearby scraps before typing up a r...

Jonathan Stroud - The Bartimaeus Sequence

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:44:37 +0100

In your recommended reads for children and YA, you include Wind in the Willows and Treasure Island - do you think that modern children’s books are losing some of the magic of classic literature? Or do you think that there are some classics in the making right now (and if so - who would you recommend)?

Oh, I’m sure there are plenty of classics being formed right now – I think this has to count as a golden age in terms of the range and variety of wonderful titles being produced for children...

Conor Kostick's Epic Journey

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:39:57 +0100

My childhood was spent in Chester, England, which is a walled city with Roman remains. Nearby are a great number of castles, including some spectacular medieval ones across the border in Wales. And what with my dad having a love of history and correspondingly enormous book collection, I’ve grown up with a fascination for the past. The same goes for literature. My mum tells me that she just wasn’t able to get me started on reading until I was six. But I must have caught on fast, because by the...

The Butterfly Effect: Denise Deegan

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:52:47 +0100

When the book opens, Alex's mum has recently died of cancer and both Alex and her father are finding it difficult to cope. While her father throws himself into his work, Alex pushes everyone, including her father, away. It’s only when an American boy in her class, David McFadden, starts to pay attention and really listen to Alex, that things slowly begin to change.

A recent review in the Independent described And by the Way as “Packed with contemporary references -- Paris Hilton, Ann...

The Almost Fearless Darren Shan

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:04:26 +0100

It was a few more years before Darren went about securing a publishing deal. "When I finally produced a book that I had genuine hopes for (when I was twenty-three) I followed the advice in The Writers and Artists Yearbook, drew up a shortlist of five agents and sent a sample of the book and a covering letter to them. Four rejected it promptly. The fifth asked to see more, worked with me on re-writing and fine-tuning the book, and eventually accepted me as one of his writers. It still took more th...

Cathy Cassidy: The Queen of Teen

Mon, 16 May 2011 14:33:16 +0100

"I have always been drawn to working with or for teens and children: as a teen-mag journalist; as an art teacher in high school and primary; as a teen-mag agony aunt. All of those things helped me to understand kids more, which has in turn helped with the books." This means Cathy can easily relate to young people and keeps her fans reading and relating to her stories. "These days I have two teen kids of my own, so they and their friends help me to keep in touch - and school and book f...

Fairy Tales do Come True: Bob Burke's Story

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 21:43:05 +0100

“never EVER illustrate your stories unless you can actually draw!”

For a long time after these first self-illustrated attempts at writing, the self confessed “lazy chancer” was very much in love with the idea of being a writer without actually producing anything. The ball finally began rolling for him when he started writing articles for magazines and realised how much fun it was. As Burke explains: “if you don’t enjoy your hobby in some respect, it’s not much of a hobby to b...

Benji Bennett: Little Stars, Pirates and Hidden Treasure

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:41:44 +0100

Benji was kind enough to take some time to talk about his books and what inspired him to write....

As a first time writer, how did you begin to write Before You Sleep?

I'm probably different from a lot of writers in that I never thought I would be a writer, it never really occurred to me. It started when I lost my son Adam when he was four years of age and, as a way of remembering him and showing how much I loved him, I started writing little rhymes on scraps of paper. Three or four weeks after...

Who is Amy Green? Sarah Webb on teens, trouble and terrific stories!

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 22:46:46 +0100

Once I had the main character, and her voice (first person – I love first person) I was off. Clover came next, Amy’s mad 17 year old aunt who works on an Irish teenage magazine called The Goss, then Amy’s best friend, Mills, then Seth, her boyfriend, and the rest of her slightly eccentric Dublin family – her mum, Sylvie, Dave, her step-dad, her useless dad, Art, his new wife, Shelly and so on. I had such fun creating them all! And Amy’s first book, Boy Trouble pretty much wrote itself.
...

A Day in the Life: Claire Hennessy

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 21:44:16 +0100

One of the nice things (we won’t get into the negative stuff!) about a writerly day is that it’s never quite the same as the one before. But let’s go with a Monday for this – start of the week, bright and optimistic. Alarm number one goes off – that’s there to be switched off and grumbled at. Alarm number two is the real one, the no-nonsense out-of-bed-you-get beeping. So out of bed I get, and on goes the computer. As it powers up, tea is made: large mug, no sugar, plenty of milk. Utt...