FAQs
WHERE DO YOUR IDEAS COME FROM
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This is probably the question I get asked most often. It’s difficult to answer, because there is no single source of ideas - different stories start out in different ways. My first book, Girl, Missing was inspired as I wondered how it might feel for a teenager to discover she’d been stolen away from her birth family as a toddler. What would she do? What would happen as she tried to uncover the truth about her past? In contrast, my next thriller, Blood Ties, arose out of a long fascination with human cloning. I was frustrated that most fictional clones I’d come across were robotic creatures created by madmen to carry out their evil agenda. I wanted to explore – in a thriller context – the experience, for instance, of realising you had been cloned from a much-loved older sibling, created as a replacement for a dead child.
WHAT DIFFERENCES ARE THERE BETWEEN WRITING FOR ADULTS AND TEENAGERS
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I love doing both and, in many ways, the key aims and challenges are similar; I’m always trying to write an entertaining and hopefully thought-provoking tale that readers won’t want to put down. Clearly an adult thriller is more likely (though I’m sure there are exceptions) to have adult main characters and a longer and more complicated plot, as well as more space to give background on the characters and their relationships. When it comes to the teen novels in particular, my storylines often put ordinary people that readers can hopefully relate to, into extraordinary situations, taking daring risks and often facing life-threatening danger.
WHAT'S THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE OF WRITING FOR TEENAGERS
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It’s always to create a strong story featuring compelling characters! But on top of that, one huge hurdle to overcome is getting all the tech and devices out of the way. I want my main characters to have to work out their salvation on their own, without help from the many adults who would normally be a call, text or WhatsApp away.
In The Medusa Project the four main characters each have a psychic power – mind-reading, telekinesis, predicting the future and being able to protect yourself from physical harm. My big challenge here was to make something extraordinary feel like it’s really happened to four quite ordinary teenagers.
ARE THERE ANY RECURRING THEMES IN YOUR BOOKS
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Most of them revolve around relationship dynamics and the secrets and lies that can arise within families. I've also written two standalone teen novels that focus on environmental issues. Truth or Dare puts industrial pollution and toxic waste dumping in the spotlight, while in Storm of Lies the focus is on extreme weather events, specifically the threat of a tsunami hitting the south coast of England.
HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHERE TO SET YOUR BOOKS
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A lot of my stories feature areas of north London that I’m very familiar with. Ketty has a vision of herself hiding behind a tomb in Highgate Cemetry – a place she later visits for real in The Hostage. Luke and Eve spend time in Waterlow Park in Six Steps to a Girl while Flynn and River meet in Priory Park in Falling Fast and Cat, in Hide and Secrets, waits at a bus stop just outside Alexandra Palace. It’s fun referencing these places which I know so well – and very easy to see the characters in my mind’s eye.
Sometimes, of course, my characters venture outside London and when that happens I’m often relying on my memory to supply places that I can describe convincingly. Spain features in several books, especially Three’s a Crowd which is largely set in a hotel in Mallorca, while a visit to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC inspired scenes in Blood Ties and some aspects of the isle of Skye prompted me to imagine the (far smaller) Dimity Island in Secret Sister. When I wrote Sister, Missing, I loosely based Norbourne, the location for the holiday home Lauren is staying in at the start of the story – and the beach where her sister goes missing - on Westbourne, near Bournemouth.
For my psychological thriller for adults, Burn This, I invented the left-behind mill town of Framley, where all the key events of the story – both past and present – take place.
WHAT MADE YOU WRITE A DR WHO ADVENTURE
AND WHY DOES IT FEATURE ARTIST FRIDA KAHLO
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I was a big Dr Who fan as a child and I leaped at the chance to be part of the amazing Dr Who legacy. Frida Kahlo and the Skull Children is a short book in the Dr Who:Icons series. It was daunting but fun to try to bring the Doctor to life. And an amazing opportunity to write about Frida Kahlo too. Her life and her art are fascinating. For instance, while I was researching her, I learned about las pelonas. These 1920s women were Mexcian versions of flapper girls, who bobbed their hair and campaigned for the emancipation of women. This fitted perfectly with my desire to build the story around the Thirteenth (and female) Doctor!
WHAT IS YOUR TOP TIP FOR ENGAGING YOUR READERS
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Remember that story is king and that your readers live through the characters you create, so they need to feel real and accessible. I think a lot of successful writing is creating a balance between staying true to your vision for your story AND being respectful to your readers and cutting anything self-indulgent that doesn’t serve that story.