I’ve written
about thirty books, of which all but one, A
Love Like Blood, is ‘for children’. Or so I’m told, and so I am led to
believe by the fact that it’s the imprint of a children’s publisher that
appears on the spine of all of them, apart from this new title. But is it all
that straightforward? What makes a book for children, and another for adults?
And indeed, what does that innocent preposition ‘for’ even mean?
The world of
children’s books has changed over the years. It used to be pretty obvious what
was a children’s book and what was an adult novel. That was the case when I was
a teenager at least, and I should probably specify that in this train of
thought I am speaking about the reading that teenagers choose. Perhaps we can
all agree that not many adults are picking up Horrid Henry’s latest outing. Perhaps.
Of course, even
back in those dim distant days of teenagehood, there were strange books that
threatened to make things more confusing; Catcher
in the Rye and Lord of the Flies are
the ones that are most often touted as hovering somewhere in a liminal space
between the worlds of the teenager and the adult, but there were always other
books that appealed to the young adult as much as the more mature version of
the human being: Camus’ Outsider, the
science-fiction of Heinlein, the horror of Poe, the epics of Tolkein.
Publishers, being canny people, have over the last few decades been
instrumental in defining a new area of the bookshop – the notion of the YA novel
was born, with those at the forefront being writers like S.E. Hinton, like Alan
Garner (I defy many adults to fully appreciate Red Shift on first reading), or Robert Cormier, who pushed the
boundaries of what was acceptable to find in a book ‘for’ children. There were
many others. So now we live in a complex grey area of what’s-for-who, and I can
say that at least four of my books have been widely perceived to be as
appropriate for adults as young adults. When John Ajvide Lindqvist (Let The Right One In) read Revolver for example, he told me he
couldn’t see why it wasn’t published as an adult novel. To confuse things even
further, some of the foreign editions of my books have been published as adult
books.
And yet, despite
this, I can see that A Love Like Blood is the first of my books that is ‘for’
adults. Why?
To unpick this,
it’s necessary to understand what motivates a writer. I’ve spoken to many
writers about this, and with a totally unscientific guess, I would say 99% of
them don’t write a book for anyone other than themselves. This can sound a bit
arrogant at first, but if you think about it, it’s quite the reverse. What
would be arrogant would be to assume that you, the writer, knows best. That you
know what a 40 year old male commuter in Berlin would like to read on their
Kindle, or a 16 year old girl in Rio, or a 65 year old pensioner in Penzance.
No. That’s not how you write. You write the book that you yourself would like
to discover. Nothing else is going to make you sit at your laptop for 8 hours a
day for months on end until the thing is finished. That’s the only honest and
true way to do it – to write something that excites and moves you, and then,
when it’s published, you can hope that someone else might be excited by it too.
Looking at it
from the other side, the reader doesn’t by and large choose a book because they
think it’s ‘for’ them. Of course, things might put a certain reader off reading
a certain book, but all the reader is looking for is a book that grips them.
That’s why, as a teenager, I was reading Arthur C. Clarke alongside Hemingway,
and why any adult now is as free to choose The
Hunger Games and Twilight as
Martin Amis’s latest, an author I mention for his contention that he would only
ever write a book for children if he had a serious brain injury (Faulks on
Fiction, BBC 2011). And we know adults are reading these apparently teenage books
because the sales figures could not possibly be as high if they were only being
sold to teens. Although, Amis went on to reinforce the very point I make above
when he added that ‘the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the
story to is anathema to me’. Quite.
Like the White
Queen, I also believe in the possibility of thinking six impossible things
before breakfast, and here’s just one: at the same time that I am writing the
book purely for me, I am also aware that it has a publisher waiting for it, and
beyond that, a logo that will be printed on the spine and an area in which it
will be placed in the bookshop. So, once I had the concept of A Love Like Blood, I knew no children’s
publisher would publish it. For one thing it’s just too unpleasant, for
another, I wanted to delve more fully into psychological depths which would be
deemed uninteresting to the young adult reader. Who knows? Has everyone
forgotten what the landscape of their teenage mind was like? These questions
are not mine to ponder, however. It’s only up to me to write the best book I
can. And do I care who it’s ‘for’?
Ultimately, no, I don’t. All I hope for is that someone will like it, that
people will buy it, and I for one am glad to be selling books to adults as well
as their younger selves.
MS 15/3/14
