James Roy has been one of the western Sydney authors we’ve worked with from the early days of WestWords. He also happens to be one of Australia’s best writers for children and young adults. Enjoy this post on the writing of his latest book for young adults, City. If you would like to win a signed copy of City, see the end of the post for details of this week’s book giveaway.
___________________________________
BROWNIAN MOTION IN AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT
Def: Brownian motion
(noun) – the erratic random movement of microscopic particles in a fluid, as a result of continuous bombardment from molecules of the surrounding medium.
Some years ago, when I was thinking about getting back into writing for young adults after a number of books for the middle-grade years, I began looking about for that great and elusive idea. A love story, perhaps, or a coming of age story. A story about a young person coming to terms with loss or faith or their own sexuality, maybe even something that would fit neatly into that great catch-all loved so much by the NSW Board of Studies – ‘belonging’. And here’s the thing: I would argue that pretty much all young adult novels are, to some extent, about belonging, so really I guess I was just looking for that great story.
I found it in Motocross Hero, a short story that I’d written previously for Penguin’s first Kids’ Night In collection. It was a completely true story taken from something I saw myself – the special-needs kid who, by pure good fortune, took a catch on the cricket field to dismiss the school’s alpha-male jock.
Town started from that idea, and the further idea that even the revolting Neilsen, storming off and having the mother of all tantrums, had a story of own his own to tell. And in his story, Neilsen might not be the cocky athlete the rest of us loved to hate, but some misunderstood kid who lost the ability to speak in complete sentences whenever his best friend’s girlfriend wandered by. And of course she had a story, too – a story that was also misunderstood by most – and so on. So from that initial idea, Town grew, and grew, and grew.
It was immediately clear to me upon its release that Town had struck a chord with readers. Kids wrote to me and told me how they loved the fact that characters could be so multi-faceted, even profoundly different depending on who was narrating their story. They got it, which is always good news to a writer. But most rewarding of all were the readers who emailed to ask if I’d been writing about their home town. ‘It’s all there,’ one said. ‘The arcade, the nursing home way out on a back road, even the way you described the layout of the school felt right.’
Of course I’d never been to their towns, but of course I had, too, because what that book was really about was how all small communities are more or less the same, populated by a motley crew of locals who are known to everyone, whilst also being truly known by no one.
Which brings me to my newest book, City.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Cities are different from towns – we know this. They’re bigger, for a start. Much, much bigger, both geographically and in terms of population. By virtue of that, they generally cover a much more diverse range of characters. Of course many of those characters are connected, but it’s the way they’re connected that really caught my attention: it’s often in anonymous ways, such as through found objects, chance meetings or random acquaintances. It fascinates me that in small communities we think we know everything there is to know about pretty much everyone (even if we actually don’t) while those of us who live in cities will think nothing of driving for an hour across town to have coffee with a friend, yet we don’t know that name of the lady who’s lived across the hall from us for years.
If the story about taking the cricket catch by accident was the first seed-point for Town, this book started with a couple. One was Veronica, or Ronnie, from Town, who was the much-maligned ‘scarlet woman’ at the high school. It was Ronnie who found herself stranded up in a dark bush clearing with a bunch of drunk and sex-crazed guys, and had to do some rapid diplomacy to make a terrible situation a little less bad. Perhaps more than any other, The Clearing was the story that people most liked to talk about when we discussed the book. But as is usually the case with the short form, the character’s story continues on after the last full-stop.
‘You could write a whole novel about Ronnie,’ people would tell me, and I guess they’re right. But instead I asked myself what happened to her after the events on the previous book, and projected on from there. Thus Toyota of the Beast came into existence. From there it became a relatively simple matter (I say relatively) to ask questions about the people and places that I worked into Toyota. The cafe where Ronnie and her ex-boyfriend discuss her plans, her two housemates, the motorbike her ex has come down from the country to buy, and so on.
After that it was a largely organic process, interspersed with little tentacles that stretched out from each story. The boy whose mother is selling the motorbike works at a hand-carwash, and makes a point of emptying the vacuum bags at the end of each shift so he can sort through the jetsam collected from beneath the seats of dozens of cars. The signet ring he discovers in this way has been lost by the community nurse who is caring for the dying mother of another character, who buys drugs from the friend of the kid in The Driver, and so on. And so on.
Confession time: I don’t usually plan my books. Like many of my peers, I write in a very organic way. A couple of key ideas, a scene I want to write, a character who won’t leave me alone, a setting I simply must immerse myself in. But for this book I did have to plan, at least in part. I don’t own a whiteboard large enough for the job, but I do have a fairly large window in my study, and whiteboard markers work really well on glass. I’m not sure what the postman made of all the mirror-image diagrams that cluttered my window – all the connecting lines made it look remarkably like the circuit diagram for something incredibly impressive – but I found it useful, just for keeping track of which character knew which other one, and how, and what other factors or events or objects connected them.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The other door into the structure if the book was the Poet. I hate graffiti. Actually, that’s not true – in the right place I think urban art is astonishing. Berlin without the angry, cold-war imagery painted onto grimy walls would be much the poorer. Hosier Lanein Melbourne is ever-changing, and engages the passer-by in a wonderfully gritty way. No, the graffiti I loathe is the tags. They adorn almost every blank space along the urban rail corridors and beyond, but I don’t see much evidence for cleverness or dissent or thought – all I see is the same tired trademark to arrested development repeated over and over like some kind of remedial exercise.
But writers like to ask ‘What if…?’ and my question was this: ‘What if someone’s form of civil disobedience was to use a Sharpie to write small poems – haiku, in fact – in public places? On a bus seat, or a hospital window, or on a cafe table? Under a famous bridge, for instance, or on a bollard beside an iconic waterway?’ Thus the Poet became something of a thread that runs through the centre of the book, adding mystery but also a sense of uneasy connectedness to the cast of characters.
This brings me to the place in which this book is set. If I’ve done my job well, no one will be able to claim with any certainty that I wrote this book about their home town, because I was careful to make it anonymous. In this city is an iconic bridge (Sydney? Hobart? Brisbane?). The river in the book could be the Swan, the Torrens, the Parramatta, the Brisbane, the Derwent or the Yarra, even the Ross or the Hunter. The mountain behind the city, the casino by the river, the docks, the stadium, each of these was chosen to make the city both familiar and anonymous at once.
And of course that’s the point. There’s no moral at the end, since I don’t much like morals in books. But if there is a message, it’s this: we just don’t know. We don’t know what people know, we don’t know who people really are, and we don’t know what people care about. Even the most bizarre opinions are, to those who hold them, entirely valid, since who that person is, and the experiences that have formed them, and the connections they’ve made or failed to make, are really little more than random lines made on a window pane with a whiteboard marker, or Brownian vibrations in a beaker.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
____________________________________________
If you would like to win a signed copy of James’s book City, leave us a comment below, describing your favourite place: town or city. Keep your comment to 250 words. WestWords staff will select the best comment to win the book.