1.
When you close your eyes and imagine your readers, who do you see?
I see myself at 16. Then I shiver.
If I try to look further, I see a person
who looks a lot like Queenie - on the inside more than the outside - an avid
reader, enthusiastic to the point of loopiness about the things she’s
interested in, not sure yet what she wants to do with her life. Looking for adventure. I do confess that this is a book aimed more
at girls than at boys.
2.
Who do you relate more closely to in Code Name Verity, Queenie or Maddie?
I think there’s a bit of me in both of
them, but I guess the answer has to be Queenie. Her bookish childhood, university background, love of pretense
and pleasure in writing - that’s me. I
have never in my life created a character whose voice came so naturally to me.
I had to work harder at Maddie’s voice to
keep it consistent. Maddie is a nicer
person than me - sometimes when I was working on her part I’d put my pen down
and exclaim aloud, ‘Maddie, you are just SO NICE!’ Most of my characters have a mean or jealous or devious
streak. Maddie’s straightforward
generosity surprised me.
Agreed, Maddie is staggeringly nice!
3.
I've read several articles talking about Code Name Verity being your debut book
- which is rather wide of the mark! That said, it's certainly brought you
to the attention of many people who haven't heard of you before. Do you think
there's a particular reason for its phenomenal success compared to your
earlier books?
There are two clear answers to that, and I
think they work together with equal weight:
1) It’s the best book I’ve ever written.
2) It’s being more aggressively promoted by
the publishers than my other books.
It’s really only the Brits who use the
‘debut’ word, and that’s no doubt because I’ve never had a book published in
the UK before. So British booksellers
and librarians and the general reading public are very unlikely to have heard
of me (though a few savvy reviewers have pointed out that it’s NOT DIFFICULT to
search Google or Amazon before calling this a debut novel… and my other books
ARE mentioned on my website and on Goodreads…)
A third answer is ‘online buzz’. I think this has made a huge and amazing
difference for Code Name Verity. My most recent book previous to CNV was The Empty Kingdom, published by Viking
in 2008. That’s only four years ago,
but my impression is that book blogging was in its infancy then. There weren’t any online reviews for the
book. Virtual galleys weren’t
available. Online literary exchange -
in particular Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter, in addition to the bloggers and
readers themselves - has had an enormous effect on Code Name Verity’s early success.
It’s so easy to promote the
book online.
I ran an on-line launch for The Empty Kingdom in 2008 and it was such
an original idea at the time that the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators
paid me to write an article for the SCBWI
Bulletin about it. It really wasn’t very long ago, but there’s nothing
original about this idea now. (The
mortal remains of that party are viewable here, but it’s a ghost of its former
self.)
I think the 'online buzz' factor is awesome. (Although as a blogger, I would say that!) I'm thinking back to my own childhood and teenage years and how much I woud have loved it if I could have found likeminded readers then!
4.
Your love of planes shines through Code Name Verity, and I wasn't particularly
surprised to find out you had a pilot's license. In the same situation, do
you think you could have coped as well as Maddie does?
I really, really hope so. A large part of a pilot’s training is
ritually practicing what to do in an emergency (so in fact I’ve actually done
the same firefighting maneuver as Maddie, but only in practice). I feel obliged to point out that Maddie is a
much more experienced pilot than I am; but practice for emergency situations is
handled as a drill, to get you in the habit of going into a set routine the
moment you recognize a problem.
The only recurring dream I have about
flying is of having to land a broken plane.
Amazingly, these dreams are never nightmares. I usually have to land in some really dumb place like the top of
a car or the roof of a narrow boat, and I always manage to pull it off
successfully. I like the confidence of
my dream world emergency landings, all the more so because in real life
practice emergency maneuvers scare the pants off me. And practice forced landings are the worst.
‘Fly the plane’ isn’t something I made up
specially for Maddie to remind herself when she needs to stay calm - it’s
something every aviator is supposed to remember. But honestly - anti-aircraft guns? I don’t know if I’d cope as well as Maddie. I would certainly use
stronger language than she does.
5.
Your POV for a large part of the narrative shows Queenie talking about herself
in the third person. It's drawn a lot of comments, partly because it's quite
unusual and partly because you handle it so wonderfully. Did you always know
you were going to write those bits from that POV?
I did decide early on to do it that way,
for all the reasons Queenie gives - mainly that we were telling the story from
Maddie’s point of view and it would have been awkward to introduce another
viewpoint character. What I had trouble
with was figuring out what to call her in her role as Queenie - or rather, what
she should call herself. I thought it
would be weird for her to call herself by her own real name, and I also liked
the idea of messing with Anna Engel’s brain by fooling her into thinking the
narrator hadn’t turned up yet. And then
I realized that it would be kind of neat if the narrator didn’t mention her own
name throughout her narrative.
I have never been entirely comfortable with
‘Queenie’ as a name for this character, though it is useful and appropriate for
many reasons, and when she says, ‘I am not Queenie any more,’ it makes sense to
me. In my head I call her by her real name, the name she calls herself. ‘Scottie’ is another pseudonym I (and she)
considered, but it’s less of a disguise and wouldn’t have worked so well for
messing with Engel’s brain.
There is a point at which Queenie slips up
and talks about herself in the first person during her embedded story - it
describes a traumatic experience for Queenie which Maddie doesn’t witness,
though she is on hand to pick up the pieces immediately afterward. It seemed right for Queenie tell this
particular experience from her own point of view, so the slip is purposeful on
my part but not on hers.
Most reviewers have been extremely careful
about not revealing Queenie’s real name.
This is incredibly touching to me, because the name itself isn’t a
spoiler. It feels like sympathetic
magic - almost as if by, protecting her identity, you are declaring your allegiance
to her - as though she were a real person.
It awes me that people feel so strongly about this.
6.
One quote that I've seen loads of people use is the one which Queenie uses to
describe herself and Maddie - 'We are a sensational team.' Who's your
favourite team, or group of friends, in YA fiction?
Gaby’s Gang in The Horse Without a Head by Paul Berna, first published in 1955. There are 10 friends in this multicultural, variously
aged gang of poverty-stricken post-war French children, boys and girls, each
with a distinct personality. Gaby Joye
is the oldest and the leader; the story is told from the point of view of
Fernand Douin. The absolute hero of the
novel is the girl Marion Fabert. The
gang gets inadvertently involved with a high-profile train robbery which ends
in a showdown between kids and gangsters in an abandoned factory. Marion saves the day, and her friends’
lives, by setting a pack of sixty dogs against the armed gangsters.
I’ve read The Horse Without a Head innumerable times in English and twice in
French. It is one of my top ten
favorite books EVER. The setting, a
gritty industrial railway village on the outskirts of Paris, pretty much gave
me the framework for my invented French city of Ormaie in Code Name Verity.
Since Gaby’s Gang is pretty obscure, here’s
a favorite pair of friends from contemporary YA fiction: Saffy and Sarah from Hilary McKay’s Casson
family books. McKay is my favorite
contemporary children’s writer and although only Saffy’s Angel focuses on Sarah and Saffy, I love the fierce,
supportive friendship these two continue to develop as they grow older
throughout the rest of the series.
Hilary McKay is one of those authors I keep meaning to try and somehow forgetting about! Will definitely keep an eye out for Saffy's Angel. Gaby's Gang, which I hadn't heard of, sounds great as well!
7.
What advice would you give to someone trying to get their first novel
published?
NETWORK.
I can’t stress enough how productive it is to get to know other writers,
to go to workshops and conferences where you have the chance to meet editors
and agents, and to learn to take constructive criticism. Every single one of my publishing breakthroughs
has been because someone I knew helped me out - handed my manuscript to the
right editor, or gave me a recommendation, or asked a friend for a blurb. Join a writers’ group and/or a reading
group; go to author readings and book festivals in your area; find out if your
council or town has a local writer in residence. Building a network of friends and industry contacts is essential to getting published, no
matter how talented you are.
If you’re hoping to write for children,
join the Society for Children’s Book Writers and
Illustrators (SCBWI).
The Writers &Artists Yearbook also has a very informative website:
Finally, this site is a
little weird-looking, but it has useful links to all the fantasy-related
conventions going on in the UK in 2012.
If you write any kind of genre fiction you’ll find that conventions are
a great way to meet authors (both published and unpublished) and many other
people in the publishing industry:
A massive thank you for that wonderful advice!
8.
Are there any books you'd recommend to people who enjoyed Code Name Verity
while they wait for your next book?
There’s a book about a teen who joins the
SOE coming out in June which I’m excited about myself. It’s called The Violins of Autumn by Amy McAuley:
Flygirl,
by Sherri L. Smith, is a well-researched look at a
teenage girl who becomes a pilot for the WASP (Women’s Auxiliary Service
Pilots) during the war in the US.
Tension is added by the heroine’s subterfuge of being a black woman
‘passing’ as white. My review:
I find Garth Ennis’s six volume graphic
novel series on World War II, Battlefields,
to be exquisitely good, though maybe not to everyone’s taste. My very favorite episodes are Vol. 1, Night Witches, and Vol. 6, Motherland, which are both about a fictional
Russian female combat pilot, Anna Kharkova. My reviews are on Goodreads- NightWitches and Motherland.
Finally, Mare’s War by Tanita S. Davis is neither about spies nor pilots,
but is a beautifully crafted and gently courageous story of another teenage
black woman, this one underage but otherwise legitimately enlisted with the
Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Her unit
is sent to wartorn Europe as postal workers.
Mare’s War is a Coretta Scott
King Award winner and deserves a good deal more attention than it gets.
Tamar by Mal Peet is another post-CNV reading
recommendation which I have just downloaded to my Kindle. It looks brilliant. (There's a Kirkus review here.)
Thank you so much for all of those! (Although I have a feeling I'm about to hit Amazon or the Book Depository pretty hard; this is undoubtedly going to end up being an expensive interview!!)
9.
Do you listen to music when writing? If so, what was the soundtrack for Code
Name Verity?
Stuck in my head for six months:
‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ (words by Oscar
Hammerstein II, music by Jerome Kern, 1940)
Stuck in my head for two months:
‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ (words by Gus
Kahn, music by Wilbur Schwand and Fabian Andre, 1931)
Maddie’s comment that this song was a
welcome relief from ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ was really Maddie voicing my
own thoughts!
The actual soundtrack I associate with the
book:
Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Hebrides Overture’ - Die Hebriden. Maddie mentions it, obliquely, as being part of the soundtrack
for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. If CNV ever gets made into a movie, I think
it is the perfect music to accompany it
- Scottish-themed music by a German composer, with the Colonel Blimp association thrown in.
I didn’t actually listen to any of these
while writing, but in fact played it all on the piano (and sang along to the
pieces with lyrics) when I was taking a break from writing.
Although it’s not contemporary, I also have
a strong association with CNV for Nanci Griffith’s album Flyer. ‘Don’t Forget About Me’ just crystallizes, for me, the
friendship at the heart of the novel. I
listened to this album again and again while driving as I was writing the book.
(I only have it on cassette so I can
only play it in the 16-year-old car!)
10.
What's next for Elizabeth Wein?
I am about halfway through a sort of
follow-on novel about a different ATA pilot.
It takes place the year after CNV and ends up in the Ravensbrück women’s
concentration camp and then at the Nuremberg war trials. The plot isn’t as complex and twisty as CNV
but the project is feeling over-ambitious at the moment, which may be because
it is JUST. SO. HARD to write about Ravensbrück.
However, this is a book I have been itching
to write since I was about 10. So I
guess it’s time.
Sounds amazing! I can't wait to read it.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me, Elizabeth! Very best wishes for the future.
I'm just about to start reading Code Name Verity! I'm so glad I'm starting with the book that Elizabeth thinks is the best she's written. And yes, what a wonderful list of recommended reading - they're all new to me. So thanks Elizabeth and Jim for that.
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