Ask the Author: Phill Featherstone
Answered Questions (7)
Phill Featherstone
Thanks for the invitation. What would it involve, and how would it be different from just posting a review?
Phill Featherstone
I went to my cupboard. There was no wine left.
Phill Featherstone
Good question! I think that every character an author creates is based on people they've known, but Kerryl, like many others, is an amalgam. In her there are elements of a number of people I know and have known, but she isn't any single one of them.
Phill Featherstone
The heroine and hero of Paradise Girl, the twins Kerryl and Lander, had been in my head for some time. I was working out a plot featuring them for a novel based on organ harvesting, but it wasn't going well and they were hanging about twiddling their thumbs.
I live in a farmhouse high on the pennine hills. One day I was looking at the small town in the valley below. Usually you can see vehicles moving, sometimes hear a train or an emergency services siren, but on that day there was nothing; no sound, no movement, no signs at all of life. A sudden thought came to me. Suppose there was no one else. Suppose everyone else had vanished. What would it be like to be alone up here? The idea for Paradise Girl was born.
It was then a matter of deciding how it might be that there was no one else, what might have happened to create such a tragedy. At that time an outbreak of ebola was raging in Africa, and there were daily news reports of the suffering that was causing. So a virus seemed to be a possible answer, a highly infectious one which defied preventative measures by constant mutation.
I imagined a house not unlike mine, and Kerryl and Lander and their family moved in. It remained to tell the story of how the infection spread from its point of origin to this remote corner of the world, what might occur on the way, and what might happen when it got here. Their friends and family would all fall victim to the disease, and then so would they. But what if by some fluke one or both of them was immune, perhaps the only person anywhere who was? It would make a kind of version of the Robinson Crusoe story, a tale of a character in total isolation, and how that affects them. Kerryl, or Lander? I decided it should be Kerryl, although I also decided to keep the survival of Lander as a possibility.
Right, so Kerryl is alone and the story is how she got to be in that predicament, how it impacts on her and what she does. It's obvious it can't just be her, she needs a Man Friday. Enter Adam.
The last major decision was how to tell the story. It couldn't be in the first person, because a reader would want to know whether or not Kerryl lives through it, and if she were narrating it would remove that question. Also, with a single character there's not much opportunity for dialogue, and straightforward narration would get tedious. The answer was for her to write a diary. She could describe the events and what she makes of them in the first person, and the matter of whether or not she lived through it all would remain a question until the end. There used to be a fashion for telling stories through letters and diaries, and I liked the idea. I included some media reports and texts too, to offer a little variety.
All that remained was to write the book.
I live in a farmhouse high on the pennine hills. One day I was looking at the small town in the valley below. Usually you can see vehicles moving, sometimes hear a train or an emergency services siren, but on that day there was nothing; no sound, no movement, no signs at all of life. A sudden thought came to me. Suppose there was no one else. Suppose everyone else had vanished. What would it be like to be alone up here? The idea for Paradise Girl was born.
It was then a matter of deciding how it might be that there was no one else, what might have happened to create such a tragedy. At that time an outbreak of ebola was raging in Africa, and there were daily news reports of the suffering that was causing. So a virus seemed to be a possible answer, a highly infectious one which defied preventative measures by constant mutation.
I imagined a house not unlike mine, and Kerryl and Lander and their family moved in. It remained to tell the story of how the infection spread from its point of origin to this remote corner of the world, what might occur on the way, and what might happen when it got here. Their friends and family would all fall victim to the disease, and then so would they. But what if by some fluke one or both of them was immune, perhaps the only person anywhere who was? It would make a kind of version of the Robinson Crusoe story, a tale of a character in total isolation, and how that affects them. Kerryl, or Lander? I decided it should be Kerryl, although I also decided to keep the survival of Lander as a possibility.
Right, so Kerryl is alone and the story is how she got to be in that predicament, how it impacts on her and what she does. It's obvious it can't just be her, she needs a Man Friday. Enter Adam.
The last major decision was how to tell the story. It couldn't be in the first person, because a reader would want to know whether or not Kerryl lives through it, and if she were narrating it would remove that question. Also, with a single character there's not much opportunity for dialogue, and straightforward narration would get tedious. The answer was for her to write a diary. She could describe the events and what she makes of them in the first person, and the matter of whether or not she lived through it all would remain a question until the end. There used to be a fashion for telling stories through letters and diaries, and I liked the idea. I included some media reports and texts too, to offer a little variety.
All that remained was to write the book.
Phill Featherstone
I'm currently working on a novel called 'The God Jar'. The first half is set in the time of Elizabeth I and is about John Dee, one of the most noted scholars and magicians of the age, and his wife, Jane. The second half skips forward 400+ years to the present day and the time of Elizabeth II, to a young couple just embarking on their lives together. The God Jar is what links the two.
Phill Featherstone
Very very simple. Read read read and write write write. Pick up your pen or laptop and start. Some writers work out every twist of their plot before they start, and have detailed character descriptions all ready to go. Others have only the vaguest idea of where their story is going or how it will get there. These are extremes, and there are lots of stations in between. There is no right way; or rather there is: the right way is the way that works for you. My advice is to start. For 'Paradise Girl' I began writing Kerryl's story and only when I was several thousand words in stepped back and worked on the plot. The final resolution didn't emerge until I'd done the first draft and arose from my wife's comments. The book I'm working on at the moment, 'The God Jar', is more structured and symmetrical, and so I worked out most of the story before I started.
A final piece of advice: don't imitate, be yourself.
A final piece of advice: don't imitate, be yourself.
Phill Featherstone
I've never experienced it - there's simply so much to write about. However, I do know that it's problem that strikes some people, and I think it might be due to one or other of two things: a drying up of the imagination ('There's nothing new left to say') or a failure in confidence. Maybe for some it's both. For the first one, imagination, there are several things to try. Newspapers and magazines can be wonderful sources of plot and characters and can act as great stimuli. Another approach is to take an existing work by a writer you admire, and redo it. Change the time or location, or the gender of the main character(s), and go from there. It's not plagiarism because as you start to tell the story it will change and become your own. Besides, it worked for Shakespeare! And as has often been said, there are only seven basic plots.
The confidence problem is harder. You have to be pretty arrogant to pour out your words and expect people to give up their money and their time to read them. It's natural to sometimes doubt whether one's material is good enough. I don't think this is a bad thing. A little humility is helpful for a writer and part of the human condition, which after all is what we all write about.
The confidence problem is harder. You have to be pretty arrogant to pour out your words and expect people to give up their money and their time to read them. It's natural to sometimes doubt whether one's material is good enough. I don't think this is a bad thing. A little humility is helpful for a writer and part of the human condition, which after all is what we all write about.
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