This event was held at the Wheeler Centre on Wednesday 4 May.
In his introduction, Mike Shuttleworth said that the excellent standard of Meg’s writing in books such as How I live Now and Just In Case has been an important means of raising our expectations of what Young Adult fiction can achieve. The Bride’s Farewell is on the Carnegie Medal shortlist this year.
Meg began by talking about, and reading from, her latest novel, There is no dog, to be published in August.
Meg has lived in Boston, New York, and now London. She studied at Harvard, majoring in English Literature.
She spent many years working in advertising, which she said was the best apprenticeship a fiction writer could ever have. In writing advertising copy, she learned the technique of persuasive writing, to sell something to an audience which didn’t want the product in the first place. She learned to make every word count.
The ideal length for a YA novel is supposedly 70,000 words, but hers are always a lot shorter. After about 50,000 words, she finds that her stories are complete and she has said all she needs to say.
Notes on The Bride’s Farewell. To everyone’s surprise, this hasn’t sold well at all, although rated very highly by literary critics.
It is set in the 1850s. Meg researched the period in great detail, helped by her background in studying C19th English novels . She also mentioned studying the sentimental paintings done by artists during the 1880s , which show a vanished “idyllic” rural lifestyle from 40 years before.
In England in 1800, 90% of people were country dwellers, and by 1900 90% of the population lived and worked in towns. She is particularly interested in the mass migration that would have taken place during this period;the empty buildings that would have remained, and examples of “freakish” Victorian women (dressing as men, being independent, etc) and other eccentrics. The Dogman in the story is based on a real-life present-day eccentric she came across, who lived as a poacher. Dogs and horses play an important part in this story. Meg owns two lurcher dogs, and is also a skilled horsewoman.
Mike spoke about the spare and simple style of the novel, and Meg agreed, saying that she had aimed for a “Quaker” simplicity, with little use of adjectives and adverbs.
Meg belongs to a storytelling group in London. They meet regularly in a pub. Each storyteller has 10 minutes to tell a story, and the story must be true. She has a blog, “My friend kills people”. www.megrosoff.co.uk/2010/10/25/my-friend-kills-people
Through the blog, she met an ex-soldier, Ray Hewitt, who had suffered bad psychological damage from the war in Afghanistan. www.megrosoff.co.uk/tag/ray-hewitt/He also writes a blog, and Meg was so impressed by his gift with words that she invited him to the storytelling circle, encouraged him to write more, and managed to find him a publisher for his memoirs. The power of storytelling has aided his recovery. She believes that the story you tell about yourself defines who you are, and that you have the power to change your life. She talked about a girl whom she admired and envied at school. This girl is two years older, and at school she was completely poised, and without a shadow of self-doubt. They met again after 35 years, through Meg’s blog, and she discovered that her old friend was still living in the same town, and had not changed or developed at all.
Meg’s writing fits in with her family life and other distractions such as Facebook, blogging, etc. Her husband is an artist, and her income from writing is an important means of support for the family. They have a holiday house on the Suffolk coast, with no Internet, and she goes there when she needs to do some solid writing without distractions.
Meg suffered from cancer after her first book was published, and while working on Just in Case. She describes herself as a cheerful depressive, who always imagines that things will go wrong. She said that it would never be possible for her to write a book with a terrible ending, because it would leave her feeling completely devastated.
