Interview with Naomi Rich

Naomi Rich is the author of Alis, an excellent YA novel about a young girl’s struggle to remain true to herself in an unspecified theocratic society. I reviewed the book earlier, and - the novel being so thought-provoking - she was kind enough to answer some questions for us.

Alis has a strong message without being didactic: about religious fundamentalism, about thinking for yourself. It’s clear from the book that you feel strongly on the subject. Did anything in particular inspire you to write a novel about it?

I can’t say that, in the immediate sense, anything particular inspired me to write the book. I’m a teacher and I wrote the opening, or the first version of the opening, when I needed a passage of fiction for an exam paper. I couldn’t find anything suitable in other people’s books so I wrote something myself. I don’t know why it came out the way it did. I’d also say that as I developed this material into the book, I wasn’t thinking consciously about giving a message about religious fundamentalism. I was just very engaged by the story. The only ideological concern was what I guess would be seen as a feminist one: I wanted Alis to be strong, not weak, not dependent on and eternally grateful to men. This was quite difficult sometimes because the nature of the society I created for her meant that it was necessary for her to have male help and support. I was definitely aware that the book would be read, if anyone read it, by teenage girls and I wanted to avoid creating an image of female dependency and inferiority. But I didn’t intend Alis to be a feminist hero and I hope the men in the book don’t seem weak either. I am aware that Alis’s mother is a much stronger personality than her father, and Alis herself is in some ways stronger than Luke - though that is partly because Luke was more of a device than a character to start with and I don’t think he’s really very well-developed. I did feel I had to take care not to have him become the hero by saving Alis and thereby pushing her into the background of her own story ideologically.

In a more general sense, the setting and subject matter must have arisen from a long standing interest in non-conformist Christianity, especially varieties of what is loosely called Puritanism. I have no idea why this is an interest. I am Jewish by background and not a religious believer myself. In addition I am drawn to dystopian fiction if it is not too horrific, and I was certainly aware of the influence of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. A couple of readers have mentioned Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible so there are literary influences.

You can usually tell why people write children’s books or adult fiction, but with YA, I’m curious why they’ve chosen this target audience in particular - especially when the themes are very serious or ‘grown-up’ in themselves. Is it just something that comes naturally to you, or is it partly to do with your being a teacher, or something else?

Don’t forget that initially I didn’t set out to write a book at all, just an exam paper - but the target audience for the paper was clever 10 - 11 year olds. Then when I began developing the story, I was interested in the adults, especially Galin - his spiritual struggles, and his relationship with Hannah. I meant to write the book just for myself, to see whether I could write a whole book. I wasn’t worrying about the readership at that stage. But then, while I was still writing, I found out about the Faber-Waterstones WOW Factor competition which was for an unpublished children’s author so I had to adjust what I was doing and eliminate things I knew wouldn’t interest non-adult readers - such as the spiritual anguish of a middle-aged man. I still think the book is quite adult in some ways and will be more likely to appeal to older or more mature teenage readers. I’m currently trying to write something a bit more ‘young’ and less ’adult’ but I’m not sure I’m happy doing it.

Another answer would be that I’m a secondary school teacher so I’m most familiar with that age group, like it, and tend to read fiction aimed at it, so it’s not surprising that I’m drawn naturally to writing YA.

Also, I’m interested in serious things but I don’t feel that I want to write for adults - or not yet. I’m not wholly sure why but partly it’s that I’m used to being scrutinised and judged by teenagers, whereas the idea of trying to impress adults with my writing is more daunting. In addition, I like the simplicity that’s permissible in writing about complex things for pre-adult readers. I don’t mean that matters can be simplified but - I’m not sure how to explain this - it’s about a sort of directness that seems easier if you aren’t addressing adults.

I might write an adult novel one day.

Obviously very few first-time authors get shortlisted for a prize like this - how much do you think it helped? What was your road to publication like?

The WOW Factor helped me initially by giving me a deadline. I was working full time as a Head of Department in a busy school and I would never have finished the first draft by September 2005 had it not been for the competition. I had to use the school holidays which meant neglecting my partner horribly as that was the only time he ever got any attention from me. He was wonderfully supportive.

The second benefit was that, because I was a finalist, I got feedback from Julia Wells of Faber who was one of the judges. I wrote the second draft on the basis of her advice and she also said I could send the redrafted book back to her and she would read it. Obviously this was hugely encouraging, and although she didn’t eventually take the book, it gave me real hope that I was publishable.

When I’d completed the second draft, I sent it back to Julia Wells and out to 5 agents at the same time. In my submission letters, I naturally mentioned my being shortlisted for the prize and also that the new draft was with Faber. Whether this helped to get me my agent I don’t know for sure, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t. I’ll ask her next time I see her.

Getting an agent was rather magical because it so completely failed to follow the pattern I was expecting. I got one rejection within a fortnight - a simple form rejection. After about three weeks, came almost simultaneous requests for the full manuscript from David Higham Associates and Rosemary Canter at PFD. Rosemary phoned me within 24 hours of receiving the manuscript, and I met and signed with her four days later. I just knew she was right for me.

The road to publication: Rosemary took me on in late April and advised me to revise the book again which I did. She sent it out in late July I think and I had a publisher (Andersen Press) by September. Then there were some delays because of conferences, book fairs etc. I started working with my editor in October. She wanted quite a lot of revisions which have made the book much better, and it was published 10 months later in September 07. In the meantime Rosemary had pitched the book in New York in the spring of 2007 and in June I heard that it is to be published by Viking Penguin in the US. It’s all moving very slowly but I am now working on yet more revisions for my US editor! I don’t actually know when the US edition will come out.

What kind of changes do the US publishers ask for?

So far my US editor has only asked for the kinds of things any editor might ask for - additional material to make a particular discovery more plausible, an extra episode to give more background to one character risking her life for another, and the conversion of a monologue (basically a bit of info dumping) into dialoge to make it easier to read. None of this is in any way different from the kinds of things my UK editor wanted.

The process isn’t finished however, (though these are what my US editor calls the major revisions) so there may be different things to come.

Going back to your interest in Puritanism… Alis isn’t a fantasy novel - it could easily be set in a seventeenth-century Puritan community, for instance, but of course it isn’t: the characters aren’t even explicitly Christian. Did you find the lack of historical context liberating, or did it present you with any difficulties in creating a believable world?

It was liberating because I am interested in the forms of society and worship that non-conformist varieties of Christianity have produced, but historical accuracy would have limited me to what has actually happened and I wanted to explore some pre-occupations of my own. One of these was whether it is possible to have a morally austere, even repressive, society that is nevertheless a just and compassionate one in some ways. I think some people will feel I could have considered a Quaker community for this - perhaps I will one day. But I didn’t want a specifically Christian theology because I didn’t want the book to be perceived as anti-Christian and, at the beginning, I had ideas about inventing a theology myself. I abandoned this later as I thought more about the proposed teenage readership.

As well as being liberating, the absence of a real historical context created certain difficulties. These were not in how to create the moral, spiritual, social elements of my imagined world because, as I said earlier, I know quite a lot about past Christian practice - an interest that arose from becoming fascinated in my early twenties by religious architecture, and which was fed by studying and teaching English Literature so much of which requires an understanding of Christian belief and practice. The difficulty was that not having picked a specific period, I had to invent, or rather borrow, practical information about such things as food, clothes, travel, toilets, buildings, sickness, books, etc. I spent a lot of time on the internet and cherry picked things that ranged from the medieval to the back-to-nature modern. Nevertheless you are right that Alis owes a lot to my rather vague knowledge of 17th century puritanism.

What would you like young girls to walk away with once they’ve finished reading Alis? (Do you know if your own pupils have read the book, by the way? Have you had any feedback from them?)

I find the first question difficult to answer and even find myself reluctant to answer it - perhaps because I didn’t write with an agenda (or not one that I was conscious of) beyond wanting to avoid making the female characters submissive, and I don’t want to pin the book to a one line message. I suppose I want young female readers to absorb (without necessarily being conscious of it) the idea of female strength and courage. I also want all readers to recognise that life is morally complex. I ‘d like young readers to see that religious belief can (though it does not always) lead even those who mean well to do terrible things

I’m not teaching at the moment so I don’t have access to any current 14 - 18 year olds. I know that a few older former pupils with whom I’m still in touch have read the book. Of course they say they like it!

Lastly: please recommend five books . . .

The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. Originally a series of columns in Punch in 1888-9, this a wonderfully hilarious and wince-making combination of diary entries and illustrations. Charles Pooter, a city clerk, is the most pompous, absurd little man though touchingly fond of his long-suffering wife Carrie. Almost everything he attempts ends in humiliation but he never loses his sense of his own importance.

Middlemarch by George Eliot. Still my favourite novel. No one does the twists and evasions of human motivation better.

Paradise Lost by John Milton. This extra-ordinary epic poem takes us from the fall of Satan from heaven, to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden, taking in the whole of human history and the promise of redemption by the way. Satan, chief of the rebel angels, is a fascinating character, of course: some of the Romantics saw him as the hero of the poem. The context of the English Civil War adds greatly to the interest of the poem for me but I’m also fascinated by the brilliance and rich complexity of Milton’s handling of the English language. You don’t have to be any sort of religious believer to enjoy PL though you have to be prepared to put in some effort (and read footnotes).

An Outline of European Architecture by Nikolaus Pevsner. I read this more than 30 years ago just before I went to university. I’d never thought about buildings before - they were just there. I can still remember the excitement of discovering a whole new world - technical, historical and aesthetic.

The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy. If you’re interested in the history of religion in England, this book is a must. Duffy argues that history has been written by the Protestant victors and that far from being a spent and resented force in England, the pre-reformation church was a vital and valued part of people’s lives, and an institution in which, (contrary to popular accounts ever since the reformation) the laity was extensively involved. It’s a contentious argument of course but the book is full of the most wonderful detail of the way religious practice was interwoven with people’s daily lives.

If I could have more than five books there’d be something by Samuel Johnson as well as Boswell’s life of Dr J (or possibly Boswell’s own London journal). And lots of other things!