Niel Bushnell: 'you only live one life if you don't read'
How satisfying do you find being a children’s author and what is your favourite thing about it?
I think it is one of the best jobs you can have. You get to let your imagination run wild which is good fun. It’s hard work as well but really good fun. The best bit actually is doing this: meeting people who read the books. It’s nice to get out from behind a computer and go to meet young people and find out what they think about my stories – especially people like you who have read them!
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You say that the inspiration for Sorrowline came about when you were researching your family tree. What was it that made you want to research your own family history and did you find anything unexpected while you were doing that?
Well it is something I have always been interested in, finding out about the family. On my mam’s side, there was someone who’d killed somebody once so I found out about that which was interesting. To be honest, there was just lots of people on my dad’s side who had no money and lived in terrible houses, didn’t live very long and looked like they struggled quite a lot. But it was so interesting to look into all of that and find out what life would have been like for them.
How much time per day would you say you spend writing? Do you have a special place where you prefer to write?
I have an office at home which is my writing den, so I have got a desk there, all of my books around me and a drawing board for drawing as well. So that’s all there and really good but a lot of the time it ends up being written wherever I am at the time. If I am working somewhere, I’ll take my laptop with me and do some writing. Sometimes it is nice to do some writing downstairs instead of being upstairs all of the time. It all depends, but officially it’s my writing den and it is where I should be doing my writing!
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Are there any writers who have particularly influenced your own writing?
I suppose growing up the kinds of authors I was reading were…There was an author called John Christopher who, when I was your age, wrote lots of children’s science fiction stories so I think he was one of the first authors I read a lot of. Then I liked John Wyndham who wrote The Day of the Triffids which was a really scary book and HG Wells who wrote War of the Worlds. So things like that – those kinds of authors. Other science fiction authors I enjoyed were Arthur C Clarke and lots of comic writers as well.
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Which is your favourite genre of books to read?
I would say science fiction and fantasy, I think, they are my two main ones.
Do you find time to read for pleasure yourself and what are your thoughts on the advantages of this for young people?
I always try to make time to read for pleasure. I try to read a little bit every day. I think it is really important for young people to try to read as well. It is a really nice way to unwind and let your mind go somewhere else. There’s an interesting quote about you only living one life if you don’t read. If you read books you live lots of different lives and live the lives of other people by reading those stories. There has been research about people who read for pleasure making themselves more intelligent, more emotionally intelligent, by reading stories because you understand people more through reading about them. If you read a story, you can understand more how people think, which is quite clever and pretty cool!
Did you use a public library regularly as a child and did your school have a library?
Yes, yes, we had a library at school and the library in town. First time I went to the library I think I found out that you could take out 10 or 12 books at a time so I did, I brought them all home. I don’t think I finished reading them all just skipped through them and took them all back after the two or three weeks. I then got into the routine of taking one at a time. Yeah, we had quite a good school library, it’s just a shame that a lot of schools don’t have libraries anymore and I can see that you do have a library which is great!
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If Sorrowline was made into a movie and you could choose the cast yourself, which actors would you personally cast to suit your characters?
My daughter would like to play Eloise even though she is not the right age or even acts, but apart from that, I don’t really know. I think Jack would have to be someone unknown because he is just a boy. You would have to have someone really interesting for Rouland who is the bad guy. You could maybe have Benedict Cumberbatch, yeah, he’ll do, we’ll have him!
When you began writing Sorrowline, how many drafts did it take before you were completely happy with everything?
Oh, that’s a good question because you think you’re happy with everything but you always realise that there are things you would do differently. I think I sent it off after the third draft but the published version is the seventh draft. I would even maybe quite like to tweak it again if I’m honest because now I go into schools a lot, I read pieces of it out and you learn all of the time. So when I’m reading, I think I’d do that a bit differently now. So yeah, you could never stop really in a way, but seven drafts is what it was up to.
If you had an author superpower what would it be?
Author superpower! Oh that’s pretty cool. I suppose it would be quite nice to get it right first time! So that I didn’t have to do seven drafts. That would be quite cool to just go, “here is my story and it’s perfect in every single way” but I suppose then it would be just too easy wouldn’t it? So either that or if it was a non-related superpower to authoring, flying would be good – but that has nothing to do with writing!
Niel Bushnell is the author of Sorrowline, in which 12-year-old Jack discovers he’s a Yard Boy - someone with the ability to travel through Sorrowlines, the channels that connect every gravestone with the date of the person’s death. Read the first few chapters of Sorrowline. Find out more about Niel and Sorrowline on his website. Buy Sorrowline at the Guardian bookshop