|
Cathy Cassidy — the EXTENDED interview!
We didn’t have enough room in the mag for all the interesting things
Cathy Cassidy had to say — so here’s an extended
interview. We loved Cathy — she obviously really cares about teenagers. So
thanks Cathy, we think you’re great (and you write fab books, too!)
Have you always loved stories?
I love making stories up and always have. I used to get into quite a lot of
trouble for daydreaming at school. The penny dropped about the age of eight
or nine that if you wrote the daydream down on paper, as a story, and shared
it with the teacher you were less likely to get into trouble. For me, a
daydream was always a way of exploring a story.
From a really early age I loved comics and magazines, and would produce my own versions. I would think up a great title and produce a beautiful full colour cover. The first couple of pages I would think were really amazing, maybe with a picture story in it, or something. Then it would kind of tail off towards the end.
It would always be hand drawn and hand written (in the days before photocopiers). And I’d always take it to school and sell it to a friend. I’d kind of hover at her elbow, waiting for her to finish. Then I’d take it back and try to sell it again — which is not what you should do! It would go round three or four people, until no one would cough up anything for it.
Later on, I did my own books. The first one was for my little brother. I thought: I can do a book for him that he would really like. It was about a really tall sunflower and I remember trying really hard to make my handwriting as neat as possible, so that it would look like it had been printed, and sticking tape down the spine to make it look like a real book. I think he had it all chewed and shredded by the end of the week because he was literally 18 months!
I don’t really know where it came from, but that compulsion to share a story has been there since forever, I think.
Did you grow up with stories and books around you?
I probably didn’t grow up in a house with an awful lot of books to begin
with. But a life changing thing happened when I was seven: my teacher took
my class to the library. She signed us all up and we all got a ticket. I
remember going home that night saying: “Look, look I’ve got a library
ticket”. My mum probably said, “Oh, that’s nice.” My dad, when he got home
from work, said: “Right, did you get any books then?” And off we went.
It was the start of about a million visits with my dad. He loved books and we kind of became serial library visitors: we eventually signed up to three of the local libraries, and would go every few days and come back with armful of books. We suddenly became a house heaped with piles of books!
When dad picked up that I was interested in writing he encouraged that
very much, too. He would tell me stories of writers — and I remember he told
me once, when I was a teenager trying desperately to get a story printed in
Jackie [ a teen mag that’s now out of print], he told me about an American
writer who’d wallpapered the walls of his room with rejection letters.
That was a very inspiring thing to hear because I had a box room at home and I thought, if I never get a story in print maybe I can at least get new wallpaper out of my rejection letters, because I had quite a pile of them! It was good to have a parent who kind of understood. I think if you have somebody in your life who believes in you it can make a huge difference, it’s really empowering.
Top tips for budding writers?
Write as much as you can, even if it’s in a diary or to jot down ideas; a
little bit every day, or as often as you can. Carry a notebook: all kinds of
random, interesting, exciting, or odd things might happen around you. Rather
than just let them escape, if you write them down, then daydream about them,
they can kind of attach themselves to a story or a character. My number one
tip is to daydream: it’s the fastest way to access your imagination.
Write about what you care about, too, which is a well-known tip but I think it does matter —people can tell if you’re just trying to be clever.
I would also start with short stories. Try and master the short story before you bite off more than you can chew and try to get a book published.
On my website there’s also a “Writer’s Workshop” page with more tips. It always has a writing competition running on it, too. And there’s a page to post your poetry.
How do you get your ideas?
Ideas are never going to be in short supply if you have your eyes open, and
if you’re aware of what an idea could be — anything from a funny story that
one of my children might bring home from school that day, something you see,
or an interesting character that I happen to notice, even going in doing,
for example, a school visit or a book festival, you might meet a reader or
see someone in the audience who looks unusual or even just cheeky — anything
that captures your imagination. Then there things you’ve experienced
yourself.
If there’s a shortage of ideas you shouldn’t be afraid of taking ideas from a movie, book; even a PlayStation game because, for me, what happens then — once you have the spark of an idea — is to daydream and see how the story develops.
For
me it’s 100 per cent how I work and I think that process is what creates a
character from an interesting person you might have met along the line, and
what turns an interesting event that you might happen to witness, or read
about, into something that could be relevant for your story because by the
time you have daydreamed about your starting point and your little spark of
inspiration, it turns into something completely different — that’s the value
of daydreaming. I think its something everybody should do a little bit more
of!
It’s something that is given very little room these days and yet it’s a really creative way of thinking. I write very little down in the way of a story plan apart from the occasional jotting, it’s usually not even sentences that make it into my notebook, its little bits and pieces jotted down and sketches and doodles. You can carry a daydream round for weeks, months or years. And when I get emails and letters from readers who say things like: “I felt like I was in the story” I know they can see the daydream as vividly as I could.
Readers will sometimes write to me and say: “Oh, did these things happen to you,” and they mean: did your parents divorce, were you get abandoned at the age of four, were you badly bullied at school, etc. Quite often those things are not the bits of personal experience, but little incidents instead.
In Driftwood, for example, there’s an art teacher that has three rescued kittens stashed away in her art stock cupboard, and that idea is something that really happened to me — except that when I was a high school art teacher some of my pupils ran in one morning saying: “Miss, Miss, there’s a dying pig on the field. Luckily it wasn’t a pig it was a little Yorkshire terrier. We hid it in the stock cupboard because, again, we had a head teacher who wouldn’t really have approved of having a pet in the school!
It sounds like you never get writer’s block!
I’m sure I get writer’s block as much as anyone else, but I have a writer
friend who reminded me a couple of years ago that it’s kind of a luxury to
have writer’s block because you’re not really allowed to have teacher’s
block, or postman’s block, or even journalist’s block, are you. You just
have to get on with it. Her view on curing writer’s block was you just have
to write anyway. You know you can’t afford to just sit there worrying.
But I suppose everyone has moments when the story isn’t flowing properly, or when you need to solve a problem in the plot, or the pace or something, and my solution to that would either be to daydream and to try and get some fresh ideas moving, or to go and do something completely different — maybe to take my dogs for a walk through the woods or something. Quite often when you switch off from the thing you’re worrying about it can release ideas a little bit and hopefully, eventually, you get there.
The trick is not to obsess about it and get into a big frenzy of fear: “Oh I can’t do this, I can’t do this.” That’s when it gets into a block thing.
Favourite character in your new book, Angel Cake?
On of my favourite characters in Angel Cake is probably not the most fun
character, but is Dan, who is really the school “bad boy”: a cute, cheeky
and handsome mixed-race boy. Anya notices him the day he sets his school
exercise book on fire and everyone gets evacuated. Dan is excluded for
several days. When Anya meets him again, he’s stood on a street corner with
a tray of beautifully iced fairy cakes, wearing a pair of white feathered
angel wings. All through the story
there’s this question of whether he’s the dodgy character he appears to be
at school, or this lovely gentle person she’s seen a few glimpses of outside
of school. Obviously there are reasons behind all those things, but I love
the idea of a boy who’s not so tough that he’s scared to be seen wearing
angel wings if it might help his family out at the time. So I think he’s
probably my favourite character.
I think any book with a cake theme in it has got to be good! And I’ve got to say the research for Angel Cake was more fun than for any other book.
I just like the idea of these cakes not quite having magical properties, but being quite wonderful and transforming people. So I like the idea that cake can be quite a cool thing.
You write about friendship a lot in your books.
Why?
If I was going to pick a central theme for just about every book that I’ve
written it’s got to be friendship, but that really hasn’t been a conscious
decision — it’s just the way it is.
I think it’s really another aspect of the idea that I want to reflect the way life is for my readers. Friendship is really important for almost everybody. But at the top end of primary and bottom end of secondary school, friends are your whole world sometimes. Whether a friendship is working well or gone a bit out of shape can really make or break your happiness and school life.
I never set out to particularly write about friendship, it’s got to be there, it’s basic. At the same time I do feel quite strongly friendship is something that holds us together and keeps us in one piece, maybe when things aren’t going well in the rest of your life. Friends can make all the difference. Equally they can take the rug out from under your feet — for example in Ginger Snaps, when things aren’t going well for Ginger and Shannon it’s like the end of the world.
For girls friendship thing is so important; being part of a group, being accepted for who you really are, all are important.
I think the books sometimes look at quite difficult issues that like might throw at you, whatever your age might be, but I feel quite strongly that life has a lot of magic about it as well. — not Harry Potter type of magic — but the genuine magic that can come from friends and family, whatever shape or size, also from random things like nature, or unexpected things that might happen. It’s important to hang onto that idea that life has a little bit of something special.
What was your time at school like?
At primary school I was very happy. I had lots of good friends, and I was
quite confident. At secondary school I wasn’t. I don’t know what made that
difference. I did make new friends at secondary but somehow my confidence
wasn’t what it had been. I was quite shy and quiet and I wasn’t always
happy.
I didn’t feel understood a lot of the time; I think that’s probably a natural stage for quite a few teenagers. I do identify with the underdog, and definitely with characters who are shy, or who don’t always feel confident.
That’s another thing that drove me further into writing. My life wasn’t as exciting as the lives of the girls that I read about in magazines, like Jackie. But if I started to write a story, suddenly those things were possible. It was a way of escaping from a life that was quite ordinary, and finding a different world where anything was actually possible.
Daydreaming
and writing rescued me from teenage years that weren’t as happy as they
should have been — mum and dad argued a bit and that was difficult to cope
with at the time. My mum was ill as well for quite a bit of that time, so
there were things going on in the background that contributed to it not
being the best time of my life. But again, you do get through those things.
That’s also a message I want to pass on, that yes, life is going to throw difficult stuff at you from time to time but generally you will get through, and there are certain things you can do to make it a little bit easier for yourself — like asking for help if you need it.
I wouldn’t speak to my parents about what I was feeling at the time. But I think I would have understood what was going on a lot more if I had. My friends would have understood and been more supportive if they’d known, too. Instead, I retreated into my shell and kept very quiet about things.
Top survival tip for school?
One of things I didn’t have going for me when I was at secondary school was
the confidence thing, and I think a lot of teenagers don’t. You’re very
critical of yourself at that age and very unforgiving. Even if your
friendships aren’t looking healthy, at any given moment, the person you
really need to be friends with is yourself. You need to believe in yourself
and be your own best friend, and that’s basic.
How do you do that?
Well, it’s very difficult but it’s almost as if you were trying to be
friends with somebody: you would find out a little bit about that person,
get to know them, chat, and say nice things to them. Well, you can do that
to yourself in the mirror. You can say: “well, you’re not doing too badly”,
instead of being so negative all the time. So you can be kind to yourself in
a way that you would be to other people — that helps an awful lot.
I was very down on myself at that age. I was very unforgiving. I thought everybody was looking at me and expecting me to fall flat on my face. But, of course, that was rubbish. Most teenagers are very wrapped up in themselves! It’s not an easy thing and it’s not something that you can create over night.
I’m editing a non-fiction book at the moment that kind of expands on that whole idea a little bit more — with lifestyle tips and confidence tricks in. It’s kind of based on the letters I’ve had and will be out in October. I think it’s going to be called Letters to Cathy.
So, I think you have to try to believe in yourself and be less hard on
yourself, and also ask for help if you are struggling — which means telling
a teacher, or a friend if you are, for example, being bullied or if
something is upsetting you, or is going wrong. You might think it will get
worse if you tell someone, but that’s not true. If you keep quiet about
problems then you allow whatever the thing is to carry on, protecting the
bullies, for example.
Whatever it is there are support systems to help you, to enable you to get control back again and rescue yourself. It’s actually being able to speak out and say you need the help that’s the difficult thing so you just need to be brave and do it, because you only get one shot at your school life, and it’s great if you can try and make it work.
Do you have a recurring daydream of your own?
Usually my daydreams are focused on whatever book I’m writing. I do get very
wrapped up in the characters and what’s going on in their lives, and they do
seem very real to me! But if you’re talking about a personal daydream,
probably the longest-held daydream has been to be a writer. It’s crazy
because that dream seemed like it wasn’t ever going to happen, and it
actually did happen one day. Obviously dreams don’t come true by themselves,
you have to be very determined and you have to want it, but if you’re
prepared to put in the work to make it happen, then you can maybe make a
dream come true — and that is the most amazing feeling ever! There is
definitely no sell-by-date on a dream. I want the world to be daydreaming,
that’s what I’d like to see on my National Best Friend’s Day, on 4 July,
lots of people eating cake and daydreaming. Happy world!
One wish, what would it be?
I don’t want one wish, I want more than one wish. I’d have three, and
the last one would be for more wishes. But I would say the wish would be
friendship round the world, because it kind of covers everything. And maybe
don’t make it a wish, make it a reality: be the best friend that you can,
spread the friendship net a little bit wider.
If you got into specifics, however, I’d be wishing all sorts of things: end cruelty to animals; lamas in the garden, all sorts of crazy things!