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An Interview with debut author, Helen Harvey
I always enjoyed wiritng sotries although we didn’t get to much of it at primary school. I used to write fan fiction when I was a teenager and that was very exciting because you post a chapter and you get immediate feedback. I also went to some rather wonderful couses place called Kilfe Court in Somerset – enrichment courses, where you go away for a weekend, met some wonderful people, run by Beth Webb who’s a children’s authrog, told us alo srots about world of publishing – so kndeew how small mondy is for each book by the age of 15 – also very inpriing took us to castles and got us to imagine all sorts of scenariois, make up stories. By time I was doing my A levels, I had decided I wanted to be a writer, thing I liked most, because it was creative and interesting and hard and you could do it all by yourself in your bedriim with just pen and paper or cpmuter. Nice to be indeiendent and be able to create. I then I trained as a teacher and stopped writing because I had no time. After a couple of upears of teaching I realised itw as really getting me down, and I was supposed to be teaching these children to write and was doing none of it myself. So dcided to do the MA because that would give me a year to just do writing concentrate on writing. Absolutely lovely, fantastic course, and by the end of it I’d written this book.
Up until maybe 19, I was sure that I would greos up to write adult books and ant to write those. Yet somehow that never happened and each summer holidays during my univ degree, I would tell musefel I’d get a job, never ended up getting a job, and I’d tell myself ok if I don’t’ get a job if I write anovel instead. So I’d write a draft of a novel each summer instead of getting a jon – second year I didn’t I wrote a children’s novel, much better than the adult novel I’d tried to write the year before.
Big gamer? Yes – I got into games in a big way in my 20s when my friend told me I must play this game called portal – did, really good game. All takes place in sluightyl dystopian scenarios. I used play the Sims as a child, pets, neopets, made websites for these games. Joined clubs. Partly because they were quite girly games, not ‘proper games’ as I thought at the time, I’ didn’t think of myself as a gamer, erased that idean until I was in my 20s. But in fact I was playing them all the time.
AR – sense of group of people, friendship – secret writer, does it appeal to similar things in people? Games ehy’rere usually stories, and stories where you get to be the main character, and go off on this adventure, and all sorts of different tpes of games – action, logic puzzles, lots now recently that are just stories and game is uncover the story (v much enjoy) – playground games I played as a kid were all pretending games, this charact in this scenario and video games are exactly the same thing?
Bullying was the start of the story – but gaming came very quickly, co s I’d written this absl miserable scene with x getting bullied and I knew that if I didn’t have something joyfl and excigit going on in her life, it ws going to be a miserbal book and no one would want to read it. Had to be something totally separate from school so that her school life could be treally be that miserable and she could have – made sense – she’s a gamer, online world and online frineds who would support her. Often think that people are different online because they can hide their trues selves, but in fact opposite is true, online they don’t have to pretend to fit in with people around them, cn just be who they want to be.
AR bullying – really awful examples – Emmy doesn’t notice, don’t point it out, but her mum, Jude’s mum, unashamedly themselves don’t care what people think. She has to learn to have that self confidence. My original version more boring – had feedback that ‘mum’s often boring in books, why don’t you make her more interesting’.
Teacher help with writing? Had a group of children at one point all had huge imaginations, loved telling stories,– other children who struggled with English but huge imaginatios and loved telling stories. as a group they were where the Geek Club came from
Miss Monday in many ways me as a teacher, then made her slightly better – was all my guilt about dealing with these challenging situations where you know somethings going on but you don’t have the evidence because you can’t be sure. Miss Monday takes a little while to get to the point – my experience when I was being bullied and talking to teachers, they don’t always listen, or get it the first time because it’s quite hard to explain this sort of thing.
Emmy’s Mum writes it all down –
Bullying approach: original idea for this book was a piece of writing I wrote for a workshop, meant to be write something that really happened to me as if it was is for this audience, so one of these bullying scenes is one that really happened to me. Feedback I got was – some people were like yes, this is like the bullying I experienced, the people who hadn’t experienced bullying, said this doesn’t seem realistic, it’s too much, it’s too harsh – she’s too alone, she’s too powerless. I was like, no she’s not, this is true. I wanted first of all to tell the story leading up to that point, to show how it gets there, how that drip drip of bullying leads to someone being that powerless. But I absolutely didn’t want to write a preachy book, or book just about dealing with a problem. Really this book is for people who’ve been bullied getting their own back, showing what it’s like and then the bully gets their comeuppance in the end as they deserve to get it, but without it being too cruel at the end. I wasn’t really interested in a lot of stories about bullying come down to switching it around so that we’re looking at it from the bully’s perspective, and going oh but actually this bully’s got a terrible home life and that’s what’s causing them to bully so you end up feeling more sorry for them than for the victim of the bullying and from the victim’s point of view that really doesn’t matter – what matters is they’re making that person feel horrible. I also think that It may be true that there are bullies who bully because something horrible has happened to them, but there are also bullies who bully because they discover they can do it and it makes them feel good and they can get away with it. So that’s what I wanted to show – this is a bully, she’s got a bit of a reason but it’s not very good, she’s doing it because it makes her feel good about herself.