STEVE AUGARDE interviewed by Iain Emsley

Steve Augarde has just completed his first young adult trilogy with Winter Wood. It has been five years since the first book, The Various, was published and he’s aware that his readers have grown up.

Augarde: “If they’d been twelve when they read the first book would be eighteen or so by now. It’s difficult - in that it’s been a long time since the first one came out, and trying to rekindle that original interest isn’t an easy task.”

“I just started to write a story based on just one little image that I had of a girl in a barn finding something extraordinary. I wrote, I think, about thirty pages and sent it onto David Fickling whom I knew socially, really just to see if he thought I was wasting my time in trying to write for this age group or whether he thought it was worth persevering. I had no notion at that point of actually trying to sell anything, I just wanted a good professional opinion which is invaluable and very difficult for writers to get.”

Winter Wood is set in the West Country which is where the first book, The Various, was written.

Augarde: “We moved down from Birmingham when I was a baby so I consider myself to be a West Country man. So the territory, the actual landscape, is familiar to me - plus The Various and most of Celandine were written in Somerset. We moved to Yorkshire a few years ago, but I was continuing to write with the knowledge of that area. The original inspiration was from that area but it was something that wasn’t very carefully planned or pre-planned.”

Winter Wood itself mixes the past and present of both the human and the fey world.

Augarde: “It was so much a matter of trying to tie up the ends. I was aware when I was writing The Various that “oh god, there’s a lot of stuff to tie up here”, and then with writing Celandine, I was thinking exactly the same thing. Come writing Winter Wood, I thought “well here we are, there’s the rainy day where you go to pull all the loose ends together now and make it work”.

“It’s extraordinary how stories take on a life of their own – all writers say this, I know – but sometimes it feels like you’re trying to find what feels like you’re trying to find what already exists, its lie wondering around with one of those minesweepers metal detector things.

“You know that the stuff is down there somewhere, it exists but you’re trying to find it. Stories can be like that. Sometimes you can go an awfully long way down a particular path and then stop and think “hang on, you’re not going the right way here, this isn’t the story”. You go back and rewrite and rewrite and the story reveals itself to you. That can be quite an extraordinary thing - because even though you’re the inventor, you’re discovering something that pre-exists in some sort of way.

“Most fantasy writers create a world and - for the most part - their characters will remain in that world. So once you’ve made a convincing world and you’ve managed to convince the reader to suspend disbelief, there you are in this created world. What I’ve had to do is to keep moving in and out of a recognisable here-and-now world and this enclosed other world.

“To make that constant transition convincing, so that every time you move into the forest and you’re amongst these little people, you have to suspend your disbelief again - it’s asking quite a lot of myself and asking quite a lot of the reader, as well. I’m not any great fan of fantasy writing, I don’t read other people’s fantasy novels.

“I’ve read Tolkien but I haven’t read any of Philip Pullman’s books, haven’t read any of Terry Pratchett’s books. I just don’t go for fantasy writing really but - without wanting to be cold about it -having found myself apparently writing a fantasy series of books, it almost becomes an exercise in “how do I do this?” Here I am in this rather unlooked-for genre: how is it done, how is it managed?

“All I can is that I’ve had to convince myself before I convince anybody else that this is worthwhile and believable. Its something that I never imagined that I would ever find myself doing. So I come at it almost as a skeptic. If I can convince myself that this sounds possible and real then the chances are that I can convince an audience as well.”

Tags: author • Fantasy • interview • Steve Augarde • YA • young adult