Nick Lake: Crafting stories

Katherine Woodfine interviews critically-acclaimed young adult author Nick Lake about his latest book, Hostage Three

Tell us about Hostage Three. Where did the idea for the book come from?

A dream, actually – which was a wholly new experience. I dreamed more or less the entire plot, and woke my wife up saying 'OK, remember this. There’s a girl on a yacht, and she and her rich father get captured by Somali pirates…'

That said, the ending in my dream was very different, and not at all right for the book or for the target audience – it was a happy ending of sorts, but a troubling one for a number of reasons, and so I changed it.

As the book developed, of course, lots of themes came to the fore that hadn’t been present in my dream – about girls and their fathers, and the financial system, and piracy and grief and redemption. I think the one that most consciously fascinated me was to do with globalization. Not in the usual sense of businesses and brands spreading around the world, but rather the way that certain groups, like Somali pirates, have assimilated the ideas and rules of global business and employed them almost like captured weaponry. They’re super-organised: when they board ships, they use smartphones to video the deck, and then send these videos to the ship’s owners via the satellite link-up as proof. You can see such videos on Youtube. They’re also heavily hierarchical, in a very business-like and organized way: they have a self-imposed system of fines for misbehavior, they split money according to established principles, X percent to the sponsor who funds the attack, X percent to the leader, etc. There’s even a stock exchange, in the centre of Puntland, which is the region of Somalia where piracy is most prevalent, where you can buy ‘shares’ in a crew’s next mission, and then you get a cut of the profits from the ransom. It all operates like any other business in the globalized world. At the same time, though, the pirates are coming at life, and their business, from such a wholly different perspective.

It’s endlessly interesting to me, and I think it’s going to be the dominant force in history going forwards: the world is going to get more and more the same, and at the same time more and more different. That is: capitalist economics and business and a certain philosophy of business has gone global, as have certain brands, but this has had unintended consequences; it has been to a certain extent and in certain places turned against the very people who developed those ideas, and I’m absolutely fascinated by that.

Both Hostage Three and In Darkness have been set in far-flung locations. Do you visit the places you write about?
 

Weirdly, no. And the especially weird thing is that I have actually travelled a lot, to great swathes of Asia and South-East Asia – I followed the Silk Route – and some of Africa and South America – I’ve spent time in far-flung places like the North-Western Frontier Province of Pakistan, a tribal-controlled zone on the Afghan border that is, um, interesting to say the least. But for some reason, I have never set a book in a place I’ve been to. I don’t know why that is: it may be a better question for a therapist. I have wondered if it’s something to do with suspension of my own disbelief: with places I have been to, I think I would feel that I could never capture them accurately, and so it’s ironically easier to invent when dealing with a place I haven’t visited.

How important is research in general to your writing process?

Too much research can get in the way of a story

Research… Yes, it’s important. But it’s not the part I enjoy, particularly. I also think that too much research can get in the way of a story – authors find themselves trying to shoehorn in details that they have discovered, potentially at the expense of the character arc. So it’s a balance: enough factual basis to give verisimilitude, but not so much as to encumber the book. That said, if I mention something specifically, it’s almost always true. For Hostage Three, I consulted all sorts of different sources: there’s a fantastic Al Jazeera documentary about Somali pirates, featuring interviews with imprisoned pirates, which helped to inspire the story of Farouz’s brother; Wired did a great sort of Freakonomics-style piece on the business of piracy; there was a very thorough article in I think Vanity Fair about the capture of the French luxury yacht Le Ponant, which supplied details like the fines posted on the passengers’ doors, to warn pirates not to disturb their private belongings.

But I guess the process is not just of finding these things, or of trying to learn everything there is to know about a subject, so much as trying to gather the elements that might form together into a story, for your characters. Which is much more challenging than research itself.

In Darkness was published as both a young adult and an adult novel. Do you see yourself as a 'teenage' author, and what do you make of the idea of 'crossover' fiction?

It varies. With Blood Ninja, I was consciously writing for teenage boys. But I had no idea who In Darkness was for – and I don’t think publishers necessarily did either. With Hostage Three it seemed reasonably after I had written it to be mostly for teenage girls since the character is a teenage girl. But with the exception of Blood Ninja it’s not something I think about for even a second when actually writing.

As for crossover: I think there are two different kinds, which sometimes get confused. One is the phenomenon whereby children’s books are read by adults, because they showcase superb storytelling and writing, and provide incredibly immersive entertainment. Harry Potter, The Graveyard Book, even His Dark Materials. The other is the more recent development where the upper end of teen fiction is crossing over into adult readers. The latter seems to me to be an inevitable sort of blurring that’s going on, because YA didn’t really exist even five years ago, and it’s natural that it would spill over into people in their 20s and 30s.

With both, though, I suspect that it’s really just a peripheral effect of a much bigger shift that has been happening for a long time, which is that the old genres are colliding and merging and will continue to do so even more. The watershed moment was probably Kavalier and Clay, but Harry Potter is part of it, as is Neil Gaiman, as is Philip Pullman, and Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami and even Stieg Larsson – this way in which the old divides between fantasy and children’s and sci-fi and crime and literary fiction are being gradually dismantled. It’s not necessarily new – Shakespeare mixed genres, so did Spencer – but it’s accelerating, I think, and children’s and YA literature are being pulled into the spiraling vortex quicker than any other.
 
There's recently been a lot of discussion of what subjects should be covered in books for young people, sparked by an article in the Daily Mail about so-called 'sick-lit'. What's your take on the debate? Both In Darkness and Hostage Three have explored challenging and dark subjects - do you think there are any subjects that should be 'out of bounds' for teenage fiction?

The short answer: no, I don’t.

The much longer answer:

There are a couple of questions here. I’ll answer the easiest first, which is about challenging subjects in my own books. I think where this is most applicable to me is in the arena of violence – I am preoccupied with it, and have written a lot of it. To me, though, the violence is essential: I hate and deplore violence, and to some extent I think that’s why I write it; I’m often exploring the reality of it. How, unlike in comic books and movies, it has profound and lasting repercussions; how it turns lives upside down, and destroys them. That’s true of Amy’s mother’s suicide in Hostage Three, and also of the way that Shorty losing his father and sister in In Darkness is the catalyst for every terrible action he then undertakes. Which is to say: I want the violence to be unpleasant and shocking and have dreadful ramifications: that’s the whole point. It should not be casual.

I hate and deplore violence, and to some extent I think that's why I write it
I don’t particularly write about sex – not because I’m not interested in it, but because in an adult book, you can have sex and it can be peripheral to the story; in a young adult book, if there’s sex, it IS the story.

The other question is about ‘sick lit’ and what should or shouldn’t be appropriate for young adult literature. This is something I have thought about a great deal, and I think my feelings break down into three distinct responses, mostly because I detect several strands in the criticism of YA books:

1)    I would argue that shocking and controversial fiction is not necessarily immoral. For instance, as a thought experiment, consider America in the early 1960s, and imagine writing a young adult book set in Mississippi. Do you talk about segregation, and lynchings? If you did you might be seen as provocative. You could of course write something innocuous and safe: but then you wouldn’t be challenging the status quo, and is that necessarily admirable? Nor should we imagine ourselves beyond the invidious status quo in our current day and age. There are things that future generations will judge us for: I’d guess these to include the continued inability of gay people to marry, which I imagine in fifty years time will be seen purely as a civil rights issue; our dual standards about female and male sexuality; and plenty of others too.

[The] idea that boys can be players but girls can only be sluts shocks me far more than any amount of sex and violenceI suppose what I’m driving at is that there are things that offend me more than ‘sickness’, and the conventional can be shocking too. A concrete example: there’s a film called 17 Again. It’s not deemed to be controversial. And this is what happens in it: a man is turned into his teenage self again and befriends his teenage son and daughter. He learns that his son is a bit of a weed, and so helps him man up and get with a girl he fancies. At the same time he learns that his daughter is getting involved with a bad boy, who Only Wants One Thing. So he works very hard to split them up, to protect his daughter, and succeeds – just as he succeeds in getting some action for his son. The question that the film wouldn’t even know how to frame, so blinkered is it by the dominant culture it belongs to, is: what if the girl Only Wants One Thing too? There’s no suggestion that the son is looking to marry the hottie he gets with. Why shouldn’t the daughter get with the bad boy? And I guess, in the end, I find that moral – which is repeated in so many ways and so many media to teenage girls ALL THE TIME – that idea that boys can be players but girls can only be sluts, shocks me far more than any amount of sex and violence.

2)    There’s a sort of contagion model of fear about stories, which is very old and which one sees in the medieval church’s Index, for example – the unspoken theory that certain ideas, when introduced to the young, might corrupt them, like a virus. You see this in anxiety about books featuring self harm, as if novels could make teenagers do it. I don’t think as a notion it’s necessarily 100% wrong – stories are powerful things – but it does rely to some extent on one extremely flawed a priori assumption. That being: that young people are uniformly happy and secure and thus corruptible. The simple fact is that young people are not safe. A proportion of them so large that we avoid thinking about it have diagnosable mental health disorders – one in five according to most sources. An equally alarming proportion of children are abused – or witness abuse – at home. Let’s define alarming, actually: according to the NSPCC, 24% of young adults experienced sexual abuse as a child. That’s one in four, and that’s only the ones who came forward about it. 10% of young adults were subjected to severe physical abuse in childhood. That’s one in ten, and to reiterate, that’s SEVERE physical abuse. 29% of all children experience bullying. 65% of LGB young adults are bullied for their sexuality. No one knows the true number of date rape cases involving teenagers, but it is likely to be very scary indeed. And that’s not even going into the number of children suffering from physical illness. The truth is, there are many, many, many very unhappy children and young adults in the world, and in this country. If there is anything shocking, outrageous or unacceptable, it is that children should suffer – not that they should read books in which dark things happen.If there is anything shocking, outrageous or unacceptable, it is that children should suffer - not that they should read books in which dark things happen

In fact, a lot of the books that have aroused controversy in recent years have focused on these precise sorts of issues: have dealt with date rape, bullying, sexual abuse, and illness, physical or mental. And I would say: how could one possibly argue that the very large numbers of young people who experience these things shouldn’t see their experience mirrored in their fiction? I know that mental illness has had an enormous impact on my life, in a number of ways – and other people have it much worse. Stories tell such people and all people that they are not alone. It is one of their most significant functions.

3)    The final strand, which is particularly in evidence in the article you mention, is an idea that by talking about sad subjects, like a young person who is dying, a book might be deemed to be somehow exploitative or manipulative. I’m not entirely un-sympathetic, in broad terms – after all, we’ve all read books that made us uncomfortable, and it’s a somewhat subjective thing. But it is prone to reductio ad absurdum – if a writer can’t imagine that they are a dying child, then maybe a writer shouldn’t be allowed to pretend to be someone of another gender, or age, or century…

And I also think there’s another mistaken assumption here. The thing is that it’s arguably good for people to be given a window into the life of a person different to, or less fortunate than themselves. To expand: historians like Lynne Hunt have argued that it was the development of the novel, alongside the more obvious philosophical explorations of the Enlightenment, that helped to usher in Humanist ethics. That is: writers like Defoe and Nashe started to write full length novels about ordinary people, often in straitened or dire circumstances, which invited readers to imaginatively occupy the mind of another person and see the world through their eyes. Suddenly people weren’t reading about knights, they were reading about prostitutes. Stephen Pinker calls this 'enlarging the circle of empathy'. Humans began by empathizing with their own tribe, then their own nation, and then – thanks to the advent of novels – with people wholly different to them; people they might otherwise have condemned or ignored, and whom they now had a window on, through the book.

The novel in general could be seen as a kind of machine for empathy, a device that allows a reader - and particulary a young reader - to step through portals into any number of different mindsAll of which is to say that the novel in general could be seen as a kind of machine for empathy, a device that allows a reader – and in particular a young reader – to step through portals into any number of different minds. If a young adult reads a book about a child who is facing death, and it makes them think even for a short moment about what it might be like to go through that, if it makes them just that tiny bit more able to mentally project themselves into another consciousness, then isn’t that a good thing? It makes no difference to us, materially, if strangers suffer. It only makes a difference if we choose to empathize, to picture how we would feel if it was us. And books – especially those that get singled out as being exploitative or what have you – are such an incredibly important tool for teaching young people to do that.

So I come back to: no, I don’t think difficult subject matter should be excised from young adult fiction. For all the reasons above, but also because the world is moving on, all the time, and it is not always the explicit or the challenging that is problematic, but rather sometimes it is submission to conventions that is wrong, and should be challenged. I wouldn’t want to go back to the safe and inoffensive children’s literature of the past, if it also meant going back to a time not so very long ago when children were legally allowed to be beaten by the schools charged with their care; or when your gender or the colour of your skin could prevent you reaching your full potential; or when, as a young person, you faced the prospect of imprisonment for acting on your natural sexual desires.

As well as being an author, you're Editorial Director for Fiction for HarperCollins Children’s Books. How do you balance your day job with writing?

With increasing difficulty! I have a very long commute to work and I attribute to that a lot of the writing. There’s nothing like an hour and a half with a laptop and noise-cancelling headphones to help you get some words down on the page. But work has been spilling into my commute more and more, whereas it used to be concentrated at certain times of the year, and I also tend to prefer spending time with my wife and two-year-old daughter to writing, so it’s getting really hard to do it. But I’m trying.
 
Do you think working in publishing has helped you as a writer?
 
Oh, yes, absolutely. Editing other people’s books for years is the best possible writing course I could imagine – even better than just reading lots of books, because you’re helping an author to re-shape a story, which is an obvious help in learning how to shape a story. And I have worked with some very talented authors, which means I have absorbed a lot from them.

Tell us about your writing routine - do you have any writing rituals? When and where do you write?

I write pretty much exclusively on a First Great Western train, on a laptop. I have no rituals that I know of, though I did get into a very expensive habit of feeling that I needed to replace my laptop every time I started a new book. I have tried hard to break that one.
 
Who are your favourite authors for children and young people? Which authors have particularly influenced you as a writer?
 
Oh, every author I work with as an editor!

In terms of influence: I’m never quite sure, to be honest. There are lots of writers I absolutely love, and it’s quite a broad church: Stephen King, Marilynne Robinson, Orhan Pamuk, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, Shirley Hazzard, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Philip Pullman, Ishmael Kadare, Mark Helprin… the list goes on and on. And I imagine that virtually every time I read an author I love, I see some effect or device that they use, and am impressed by it, and want to try something similar; or am just inspired by their brilliance to try to be half as good.

Occasionally though I become aware of a specific influence. For example, I realized just the other day that I’d been profoundly affected, without knowing it, by Douglas Coupland. I went through a big Coupland phase in my early 20s, and I am aware now that a certain thing he does – which is to tell a kind of tightly controlled, restrained story that gradually builds to a transcendent, almost mystical, emotional ending – is something that had been present unconsciously in my mind when working on In Darkness and Hostage Three. He is the master of endings – it’s almost like his books are suspensions of water, held delicately in a lattice, that dissolve on the last page into a storm of shimmering droplets. Or at least that’s the kind of imagery that comes to mind when I think of this very special and beautiful thing he does. For action, I have also studied Joe Abercrombie, who is the best around at the moment – but I’m usually not conscious of these things.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers for teenagers and young adults?

Caveat: I’m going to assume that we’re talking about storytelling as opposed to literature, which is arguably different, and which I wouldn’t presume to comment on.

It’s so boring because everyone says it, but they say it because it’s the truth: read as much as you can, all the time. The crucial bit that not everyone adds, however, is that (in my opinion anyway) you need to read in as many different genres as possible. Be open to all the ways a story can be told, and learn from those ways. I have said to slightly-disbelieving authors, yet it is true, that I feel I learned a great deal about editing from watching Friends and Buffy, and I think virtually anyone who wants to write or edit could do worse than to watch both those series, back to back. Every storytelling trick and tool is in them, and in places they are sublime.

I feel I learned a great deal about editing from watching Friends and Buffy and I think virtually anyone who wants to write or edit could do worse than to watch both those series, back to back
For instance, there’s an episode of Friends where Rachel and the gang watch a home video while Ross cowers in the background. It’s an old film taken by Ross’s parents of him getting ready to take Rachel to the homecoming dance, because her date has stood her up. Except that her date does turn up, which Ross only realizes on descending the stairs and forlornly watching her leave, totally unbeknownst to her. After seeing which, Rachel, back in the present day, gets up from the couch, walks over to Ross without saying a word and kisses him. It’s one of the most perfect pieces of storytelling in any medium.

OK: now. This is making me think, about that advice to read (and watch) a lot. Because it’s possible to go into the mechanics of that advice, and actually WHY it’s important, which just might be a bit more helpful than my saying, ‘read a lot’. Bear with me, because this will get a little metaphysical and there is an annoying lack of vocabulary to describe stories and how they are made.

But the thing is: storytelling is a craft, not an art. And just like a carpenter has any number of ways to join two pieces of wood, a writer can use any number of little tricks, devices, and tools to splice a story together. Some of those are obvious and have names: flashbacks, jump cuts, prologues, epilogues, as well as slightly more specific ones like The Exchange of Hostage for Ransom Where Neither Side Wants to Hand Over First.

Storytelling is a craft, not an art... Just like a carpenter has any number of ways to join two pieces of wood, a writer can use any number of little tricks, devices and tools to splice a story together

But most of them DON’T have names, and there are thousands of them, and no one will teach them to you, hence the reading lots thing. For the sake of argument I’m going to call these pieces of material, these joins and transitions and set pieces and standard recognizable sections of action ‘story fragments’. To loop back and give an example, the Friends scene above is:

Story fragment 2357: The Romantic Lead, Usually a Woman, Learns that Her Love Interest Did Something Beautiful for her That he Never Intended to Reveal.

It’s not new: Jane Austen used it in Pride & Prejudice, when Elizabeth discovers that Darcy saved her sister’s honour by using a lot of his money and effort to procure a marriage for her and Wickham – importantly, of course, Without Ever Intending Elizabeth to Know. But it’s very powerful indeed, whenever it is used.

Again, though: there are so, so many of these, and the only way to learn them is to read and watch everything. And much of writing and editing consists of spotting those parts of the story where there’s a crack in the plaster, and suggesting one of these fragments to smooth it over. Which makes it very frustrating being an editor because you spend a lot of time saying things like, 'oh, I know what could work here; you could do that thing, you know, like in Ghostbusters, where the well meaning but officious bureaucrat nearly brings about Armageddon by telling them to shut down the reactor!'

Anyway, to try to make this all a little less abstract, here are two random examples drawn from books I’ve worked on recently:

Story fragment 1589: The Hero Vanquishes the Villain but it is at Least Implied That the Villain, Who Never Originally Intended to be a Villain, Actually Allowed Himself to Be Beaten in a Way That is Moving and Noble. Also known as: 'wait, he did have one last bullet in the chamber.'

Story fragment 345: The Heroes Face a Deadly Foe but to Save a Big Action Scene, we Cut to the Next Chapter and Open on a Scene of Disproportionate and Extreme Devastation, Such That we Are Left to Wryly Imagine the Crazy Battle That Happened Off Stage. This one is especially interesting because it presumably originated in movies, due to budgetary restrictions, but writers have realized that they can use it to – usually comic – effect in a novel. (As a sidenote, I have wondered if some of the enjoyment of reading comic-book influenced authors like Derek Landy and Will Hill comes from the fact that they may be applying story fragments that originated in comics – due to the unique constrictions of the panel structure – in prose form, thus achieving new effects in a novel.)

Why am I going on about this at such tedious length? Because the reason people like Stephen King, JK Rowling and Joss Whedon are so unbelievably good at what they do is that they know ALL of these fragments instinctively, by osmosis. And the reason Friends is so incredibly good and consistent and well-crafted is that it was written by a team of people, which greatly enhances the chances that one of those people will have the perfect fragment for the perfect moment. (Which, incidentally, is also why everyone needs an editor.) We lesser mortals working on our own have to learn the fragments, the little pieces of story we can use to build a larger structure, by… yes… reading a lot. And watching a lot of TV and films.

A slightly irritating consequence of this, of course, and the reason that editors greatly value novelty and originality in stories, is that if you tune yourself into these fragments and start to really notice them, it’s usually possible when watching a film or reading a book to have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen in the next few minutes or pages.

So as with all disciplines, of course, the next level is to throw away all the fragments and do something fresh – like Sally Gardner has done with the amazing Maggot Moon. But the point remains that you still have to know all the building blocks first. And even then it will only be mostly fresh, because I suspect it’s not possible to build the whole edifice of a novel without using some of these arches and buttresses and walls that other people have made before. 

What are you working on next?

It’s a book called Your Little Princess. I’m not sure how much I can say about it because it’s a story constructed around an enormous twist. But I’ll try: it’s told by a teenage girl in America, who lives a sheltered life with her mother. Then she is hit by a car and taken to hospital, where for insurance reasons they have to give ID. Which leads to her mother bundling her into a car with all their belongings and saying that they have to go on the run…

I guess it’s similar to Hostage Three, not plot-wise, but in that it’s a thriller that’s also about identity and loss and growing up and redemption. I have untold admiration for authors who can do funny, but I seem to keep coming back to angst and emotion.