Barbara Horgan sat down with YA author Kate McCaffrey to discuss her latest title, Crashing Down. You can watch the interview here or read the transcript below.
Barbara Horgan: Welcome to Boffins Kate. Why did you decide to write young adult novels rather than adult or ones for younger readers?
Kate McCaffrey: It was a deliberate choice. As an English teacher I knew how hard it was to engage students in reading and um it's particularly reluctant readers, so I wanted to write books that would be fast, that they could relate to, that they could recognise their friends or events that concern them and get into reading something.
BH: As a high school teacher, I'm sure you hear many diverse statements and even gossip from the students. Do you ever pick up any ideas from the teenagers that you mingle with eduring the day?
KM: Probably not in the creative heart, it's more in the fact-checking part. I have – and my students are really keen to be a part of it – created a little working group where I run language past them. I'd say, particularly with Destroying Avalon, if a girl did this what would you call her, would you say that she's a cow? And they said no, she'd be...something else. So trying to keep language up to date - would this be a realistic reaction? And so they sort of workshop ideas with me at that point.
That's why I think your books are so good - because they're relevant to people who are reading them. Why did you decide to write your books relating to major issues?
Again it's part of that appeal to the readership. When you're a teenager, the sum total of your existence is you and your friends and your friends before your family and before your teachers, and so the events and the incidents and the things that occur happen often to teenagers because perhaps there's a lack of awareness or for whatever reason and so this is why I think YA fiction is important, to sort of mirror the world that we live in. These are the issues that kids face - cyberbullying is huge. Body disorder. Drug use, teen pregnancy...these are things that happen to kids.
I think it's important that you tackle them in the way you do as well. How do you find time for writing, you're a full-time teacher, you have two daughters...how do you find the time?
I don't actually know! Somebody asked me that when Crashing Down was released in August this year, and my answer was I don't know. But on Wednesday I started writing a new manuscript and today I've written ten thousand words of it. When it happens, it's like you're sitting in the surf waiting for the waves, and then the sets roll in and you just go, and keep going.
Now you've told me a little bit about Crashing Down and exactly when the plot came to you - can you explain a little bit about that?
The background story of it? So Crashing Down, its first manifestation was the first manuscript I ever wrote which was called With Vinegar and Brown Paper. It was about a girl who was in her final year of high school who had an intense boyfriend and who decided she wanted to focus on her exams and her boyfriend crashed the car. And then she had to deal with him coming out of a coma, being a bit deranged and the guilt that she felt. And I tried to get that published but it always came back that there wasn't enough to the story.
The fact was, that was my final year, my year 12, and that was four weeks before my final exams. So it was a very vivid part of me and always something that I thought had merit in a book. But then it was only after the other three had been published that I revisited it, and realised it was too autobiographical, too couched in that one event and it needed something bigger to take it to a bigger audience – and that was to introduce the concept of teen pregnancy.
So it was in a bottom drawer for that amount of time!
It was, it was there...gee I must have written that, I probably wrote With Vinegar and Brown Paper in 1997.
Wow! Well I'm glad that you embellished it into the wonderful book that crashing down is. Thankyou Kate.
Thankyou for having me!