Capturing a generation of young readers is a skill effortlessly achieved by Jacqueline Harvey. Having written over 60 novels for children, including the Alice-Miranda, Clementine-Rose, Kensy and Max, and Willa and Woof series, as well as her most recent release, The Girl and the Ghost, Harvey is more than experienced in writing children’s fiction. Being so influential in encouraging my love of literature as a child, I was delighted to learn more from the author herself, leading up to the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
I started by showing Harvey a photo of myself aged 7 at a book signing in Sydney’s North Shore. We laughed over the chances of me now interviewing her so many years later, and chatted about my childhood fangirl antics over her series Alice-Miranda.
Eden: Firstly, I thought you could just introduce yourself a little bit by sharing what got you into the career of writing and how you knew you wanted to write children’s literature.
Jacqueline: When I was a child, I loved to tell stories. I used to always be the kid that used to go home and tell my family stories about what was going on at school. My grandparents were always really good at telling stories, my dad is very funny and tells lots of stories, and I suppose it kind of grew from there. I knew I had this ability to keep an audience interested [by] telling a story.
I would have loved to become a writer earlier. When I became a teacher, I used to write a lot for the kids at school. I would write stories and poems and plays and after a while I thought ‘I wonder if I can write for a bigger audience then just my own kids’. My husband one day said to me “you talk about writing for kids a lot”. I thought: yeah, I know. But my husband goes “no, you talk about it non-stop. So here’s the thing; are you ever going to do anything about it or are you going to talk about it for the rest of your life.” I thought that was a really good question because I guess I didn’t want to wake up in fifty years time and walk into a book shop and wonder: could that have been me? The worst thing that could have happened is that I tried and it didn’t work out because I still had a career I loved. But the best thing that could happen did work out and it did happen.
I feel really lucky because I have the best of all worlds now. I love working in schools, but I get to go to schools now and kind of be a rockstar entertainer because you’re the writer, and they don’t make me do playground duty or write reports or deal with cranky parents anymore.
E: Your characterisation and world-building is something I remember so distinctly when reading your novels as a child. Alice Miranda is flung into the world of her boarding school, Winchester Downsfordvale, and Clementine-Rose is adopted into a family of distinct personalities. What inspired you to write on these locations and characters?
J: I think having been a teacher for a long time. A lot of the kids I’ve worked with over time: it’s their personalities that are often infused into my characters. I love being able to do that and to think “oh I remember this kid!” and “how would this kid have reacted”. In terms of world-building, a lot of it is just my imagination. I would have loved to have been a kid [who] had the life of Alice-Miranda, I mean, who wouldn’t! But in my new book that I’ve just released, The Girl and the Ghost, it’s set in the south-west of France in a chateau that my husband and I stayed at during a trip to France a couple of years ago. Going to places and being in those environments and thinking, how could I make this into a story, that’s a lot of how it happens for me. It’s fun to think okay, this new character Josephine, she goes to live in France with her family, why does she go there? You have to have all the answers. What are their motivations? Why did they go there? What’s going to happen when they get there? How on earth is she going to meet a prince?
E: I honestly still want to live in a boarding school after Alice-Miranda. It’s been my life’s dream.
J: Both of the schools I worked in long term had boarding. The first school I worked at was very akin to Alice-Miranda because it had horses and lots of things. I travelled to England just after Alice-Miranda came out, and I went to schools that were very alike to her school. I remember this school in the Peak District of England, and the headmaster and his wife and family lived in this gorgeous house on the school grounds. They invited me over for a barbeque the day before I started working there, and all the boarders — and these were preppies, not high school students, they were year 4, 5, and 6 students. It was like they had 50 children, and it was like it was a big family. I remember thinking what a happy place it was.
I know that boarding school isn’t always a happy experience for lots of kids, so I guess my take on it is all the positive elements. Although, Alice-Miranda and her friends encounter some pretty nasty girls at their boarding school.
E: I was wondering if you could share your process of writing. Is there a moment where you just know that you have to start a new book? What does your journey to producing that book look like? And, are there any writing rituals you might be willing to tell us?
J: No, I’m not like Lee Child, who starts a book every year on the same day. When we went on our trip to France, we went to Singapore on the way, and I have the most bizarre story about how I met a prince in a book shop at a book signing. A friend of mine who lives in Singapore arrived at the signing and said: “There’s a prince in the bookshop”. I said, don’t be ridiculous, but I should never doubt David because he knows everybody famous. He said spot the bodyguards and I looked around and saw one, two, three, six of them. Then he said, now spot the fiancé. I saw this gorgeous girl: very glamourous, long hair, and impeccably dressed. Her hand flashed at one point, and I thought we were going to be blinded by the size of the engagement ring. Anyway, the girls who were working in the shop, and David, said you should give them a book. I thought I would rather die than give a prince a book! But I walked up to this prince who was alone by a bookshelf and said “excuse me your royal highness”, at which point I was surrounded by bodyguards with one of them demanding [to know] what I wanted with the prince. The prince asked me who I was and what I do. And I said, “I believe your getting married soon”, which he was, “perhaps you and your wife will be blessed with children, I’d love to give you a book.” He asked me to sign it and get a photo. I was shaking like anything.
His dad is the king of Brunei; he’s a real action man, but I guess at the time, it got me thinking he’s just a person. He’s just the same as anyone else, except it just so happens he’s grown up with an immense amount of privilege. This idea of writing about a prince had just been scratching away at the back of my mind on the way to France, and then I started thinking about this girl from Sydney who moves to a chateau that her parents are going to do up to be a hotel or something along those lines. And then I started thinking: I want a prince in this story. I started researching the French Revolution while visiting Versailles on this trip. I thought, well, if I’m going to write about a prince from France, he’s going to have to be dead, so he’s going to have to be a ghost. Marie Antoinette’s second son lived until he was ten years old. His name was Louis. He died of tuberculosis ultimately, but he’d been imprisoned in the temple in Paris for years.
I didn’t want him to be an annoying little brother to my main character because I wanted her to be 13. There’s a window where he wasn’t seen for a year, so I thought I can spirit him out of France and he can go and live in the chateau next door to where Josephine and her family live. So, it all went from there. The idea I’m going to use a dead prince from France to be my ghost. I had a lot of my character outlined. I had a lot of the big ideas of the plot in my head, and then I thought well, you’ve just got to start. I started writing in third person, and I didn’t like it in third person so then I changed it to third person present tense as opposed to third person past tense, which I had been writing in. That was a good experience because I had never written a book like that before.
E: You’ve already touched on it a bit but your new book The Girl and The Ghost has just been released, which is super exciting. Could you tell us your favourite part about this book, and if you think your writing has changed at all during your time as an author?
J: My highlights of this book are that it’s funny, and even though it’s got a ghost of a dead prince in it, it’s got a really fun aspect to it. Josephine, the main character of this book, moves to France because her birth mother was French. Her brother Teddy has just finished high school, and she’s just finished primary school, so her father and stepmother think it’s a perfect time to move and have this adventure to find out more about her mother’s side of the family. It’s Josephine who finds a picture of her mother standing outside her old school in Sarlat-la-Canéda, which is near where I’ve set the book. The parents say, well that’s it, obviously we should buy a chateau in that part of France. So they buy a chateau with the intention of doing it up. The dad’s a documentary filmmaker, the stepmum is a chef. They’re going to do it up as a hotel, and its quite funny because the dad is just hopeless at DIY and his wife is worried he’ll die in a painting and plastering accident before they can get the hotel opened. Josephine finds a lot of interesting stuff in the chateau, such as taxidermy animals, old crockery, linen and clothes, and then she finds a locket and when she opens the locket, the ghost of Louis appears.
They have an evolving friendship. They have this kind of tempestuous relationship to begin with, and then over the period of the book, grow to understand each other, but of course, there’s another boy too. I love that I’ve been able to put a bit of romance into this book.
Josephine can see Louis. Her dog Daisy can see Louis. Every cat in the village can see Louis. But no other person can see Louis. She doesn’t want to tell anyone about him, so she keeps him a secret.
Josephine also has a friend called Harriet who moved to Singapore, so throughout the book there are email exchanges, they facetime, and Josephine writes in a diary. The book has lots of different elements to it. It’s got everything: it’s got bad guys, romance, and friendships. It’s got wonderful locations. I have absolutely loved writing it. I’ve written the second one already, which will come out in October, and I’m in the throes of structurally editing that now.
I have really loved writing this book, and it’s interesting because I have got such good reviews from both adults and children alike. Even yesterday I had a review from a guy on Better Reading, and he just goes “oh my god, I love this book so much!”. I’m just thinking you’re a twenty-something-year-old man! But I’m very pleased with how it’s been received in the world.
E: Well, that kind of ties into my next question. I think children’s books are such a special section of literature because they appeal to such a diverse range of age groups, but we’re not often taught how to write children’s literature in high school or university English classes. What would be your advice for someone who would like to write children’s fiction but might not know how to appeal to a younger audience?
J: You’ve got to find your child voice. One of the best questions I was ever asked when I had just started writing was when I had won a competition with the Children’s Book Council of New South Wales for an unpublished manuscript, and I had a mentor who was an illustrator which was a bit odd at the time. I met her and we were having a cup of tea in her back garden and she said “How old are you?” I went, woah, that’s a pretty forward question. I just met you. She goes, “No, how old are you in your head when you’re writing?” I thought that was a great question. I thought I’m kind of nine. Nine or ten, that is my childlike self. I think with children’s books, you’ve got to retain that element of childhood in your voice and think about all the things that used to concern you as a young kid.
When I wrote Alice-Miranda, I just wrote the book I would have wanted to read when I was ten years old. I studied all of the famous books that had stood the test of time like your Pippi Longstockings, your Matilda, and a whole bunch of [other] stories, and I looked at those female characters and thought: what is it that has kept them popular and set them aside from other characters? You have got to have something that makes your character stand out a little bit, but that is not so out there that you don’t believe it. For Alice-Miranda it was her ‘perpetual-positivity’ that was the idea that this kid was always upbeat. But then as she grows up, she starts to question herself and go: I used to think I knew how everything worked, but now I’m not so sure. I think that was probably me as a kid. I probably thought I knew everything at 11 and then when I got to 25, I thought I don’t know anything, and now I’m 56 I think I don’t know anything at all. I guess it’s just keeping your child [self] alive in your story.
I would also say that now there’s lots of festivals and courses. I’m directing the kids and YA festival for writing NSW in august and that’s when a whole bunch of authors and illustrators get together with aspiring authors to learn from them and hear them speak. I think being able to meet people in the industry is really important. Enter competitions — that’s another great way to focus on what you want to do.
E: You’ve been to the Sydney Writers Festival a couple of times. How have you seen the culture of children’s literature change over your time as an author and what are you looking forward to for the future of children’s books?
J: I actually don’t think children are reading material that is as difficult as it should be for their ages at the moment. I think there’s a lot of dumbing it down in kids books. Where kids would be quite happy to read big books, they’re now either not interested or unable to hold the attention span. We’re seeing a bit of a rewiring of kids’ brains with all the tech that they use. At the Sydney Writer Festival you’re going to see kids who love books so you’re not going to see that as much, but certainly I see that when I’m in classrooms and schools. I think it’s really important that kids be read to all the time.
There was a study that came out in the UK that something like only 40% of kids between 1 and 4 were read to on a daily basis, [meaning] 60% of them aren’t and that’s really concerning. I don’t know whether we have devalued reading in our society or reading just competes with so many other things these days, but I just love festivals because it allows kids to be inspired and to meet authors and to delve into books. I’m all for getting kids reading. Whatever it takes to get kids reading. But you then have to guide them, and this is the teacher in me, into more difficult concepts and encourage them to read for a sustained period of time. All those things are really important to their overall development and love of literature — you want them to love literature.
If you’ve got kids in the upper levels of primary school reading fairly simple texts and then they go to high school and are confronted by Shakespeare, it’s an almost insurmountable challenge for those kids. I think we have to get kids reading but then we have to encourage them to read wider and harder. The landscape has changed for sure.
E: To finish up, if you could live in any one of your books, what world would it be?
J: I think I would definitely live in The Girl and The Ghost at the moment. The idea of living in a chateau in the south-west of France eating all that great food. Having a mint green coloured bicycle that I could ride to the village every day to get my baguettes and my pain au chocolat, that would be my dream at the moment.
