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An Interview with Costa shortlisted author Frances Hardinge
Frances Hardinge has just been announced winner of the 2015 Costa Children’s Book Award. Already featured in our May Authorgraph, she talks to her editor, Rachel Petty about her writing and her books, including The Lie Tree.
I’m always amazed by your imagination when I read your books, and then further amazed by the obscure, real-life things that have sparked your imagination in the first place. Is it important to you that the fantasy elements of your books have one foot in the real world? Is it always your starting point?
I don’t think it’s essential for fantasy to be based on the real world, but in my case I find research fun and useful when it comes to fleshing out my settings and making them feel solid and interesting. The ‘real’ world is a wondrous and unlikely place, full of strange events and larger-than-life people. Dig below the surface, and you find unbelievable things happening all the time.
Sometimes I discover something that needs to go in a book. When I found out about Victorian postmortem photography, the practice of taking photos of dead loved ones to keep as mementos, I knew I had to use it somewhere (The Lie Tree). Similarly, when a friend told me that a gang in Manchester was forcing shop-owners to hide money in cabbages and hang them outside, so that they could be collected by mooks in Chinese dragon costumes, that was irresistible too (Twilight Robbery).
Even when creating downright odd settings like the underground city of Caverna in A Face Like Glass I did a lot of research. I visited caves, tombs, crypts, secret passages and buried streets, and even went ‘black water rafting’ in the Waitomo caves, so that I could describe the subterranean labyrinths better. When I was writing Gullstruck Island I clambered around on a lot of volcanoes. However many times you read about them, it’s just not the same as slithering around on loose pumice, or edging round bubbling mud pools, or seeing the air shiver with hot, sulphuric gases, and getting to know how a real volcanic wonderland looks, sounds and smells.
Usually the details I take from the real world are distorted, exaggerated, or combined in odd ways. In Gullstruck Island the tropical setting takes elements from many different countries, and weaves them together with my own crazy imaginings to create an entirely new place, but hopefully one with a sense of life, complexity and history.
My books may have one foot in the real world, but sometimes the foot in question is standing on tiptoe and wearing a very peculiar shoe…
I remember you telling me that you once went and lurked at the British Transport Museum to verify that Trista could have climbed in through the window of a 1920s tram in Cuckoo Song. Why do you think historical accuracy is so important?
Well, there is partly a fear of being ‘caught out’, and getting something wrong! When I create my own worlds I do need to be careful not to contradict myself, but at the end of the day the setting is my invention, so it works the way I say it does. In the case of Cuckoo Song and The Lie Tree, however, I was setting my story in a real time period. There was a danger that I could get my facts wrong.
I got a bit obsessive about some of it, trying to work out which rooms in a house might have gas or electricity, how often the post would arrive, etc. And yes, whether somebody could easily climb in through, or be thrown out of, the window of a 1920s tram. (The London Transport Museum staff were very helpful and patient when I sent them questions!)
Historical accuracy has other benefits, though. I understand my characters a lot better if I have a clearer idea of their daily lives, and the things they believe, eat, read, see and wear.
The more you find out, the more surprising and interesting things you unearth. When I wrote the first draft of Cuckoo Song, I described my heroine creeping through a darkened cinema, and imagined it a lot like a modern cinema – a scattering of silent figures all sitting still, staring intently at a flickering screen. Then I read up on cinemas of the time, and realised it wouldn’t have been at all like that. It would have been much more lively, particularly in children’s matinees – lots of chatting, yelling, confusion, thrown nutshells, thumped-out piano music and even some women doing their sewing or potato peeling in a corner. Much more interesting! My first image wasn’t just wrong – it was dull.
I think your stories speak to a really broad audience, but do you have a particular reader in mind when you write?
My usual answer is that I usually write for twelve-year-old me. (The Lie Tree is an exception, and was written for fourteen-year-old me.) It is probably worth mentioning that twelve-year-old me was quite an odd little girl.
You’ve created several fantasy worlds in your novels (in Fly By Night and A Face Like Glass) and set others in different historical periods. Verdigris Deep is your only book set in the present day – is there something about the distance from everyday life that attracts you, and do you think you’ll ever write another contemporary novel?
Sometimes it’s easier to handle very real issues by looking at them through a dark, distorting fairground mirror. You can get away with more, experiment more, choose the setting that best suits your story. I find it very freeing.
When you create a fantasy world, how much extra information do you create about the world, its topography, politics and history, which doesn’t make it into the book? Do you think it’s important for an author to know a world inside out before they attempt to set a story there?
Different authors work in different ways. I know some writers that prefer to flesh out only those parts of their world the story needs, which is fair enough.
In my case, I love world-building, and often get quite carried away! I do like to know how my invented world works, since if it feels real to me it’s easier for me to make it convincing to the reader. If I create a society, I like to have some idea of its customs, history, economy and laws. If I can think of ways in which it might fall apart, I need to work out why it hasn’t. When I created the Fractured Realm for Fly by Night, I created a historic timeline, and quite a long list of odd and powerful guilds, only a few of which made it into the book. The Watchmakers and the Playing Card Makers are still waiting in the wings…
There are limits, though. In the Fractured Realm, different dates are sacred to different Beloved, the little gods most people worship. Occasionally readers ask me if I have a full calendar listing all of the hundreds of the Beloved! No, I haven’t. For one thing that would take me ages… but also it would mean that in the future I couldn’t have fun inventing more Beloved.
I like to flesh out the world enough that I can believe in it, but still leave myself a little room to come up with new, colourful ideas. If I’m learning a bit more about my world while I write, it keeps things interesting.
What can we expect from your next book? I heard rumours of an angry bear . . .
You can expect espionage, possession, betrayal, a stolen charter, smuggled gold, a terrible old man with thrice-dead eyes, and friend killing friend as England slides into Civil War.
And yes, you can also expect a very angry, very dead bear…
The winner of the 2015 Costa Children’s Book Award will be announced on Monday 4th January 2016.
Fly By Night, Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-0330418263, £7.99
Cuckoo Song, Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-0330519731, £7.99
The Lie Tree, Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-1447264101 £6.99
A Face Like Glass, Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-0330519700, £7.99
Verdigris Deep, Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-1509818747, £7.99
Gullstruck Island, Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-1509818730, £7.99
