Keith Gray’s first book Creepers was published when he was 24 and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award. He has since written several critically-acclaimed books including his best-known, Ostrich Boys, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and the Costa Children's Book Award, as well as being successfully adapted for the stage both in the UK and abroad. Keith has also written The Last Soldier (shortlisted for the Scottish Teen Book Prize) and The Runner (winner of a Smarties Silver Medal). He has edited two ground-breaking anthologies for teenage readers (Losing It; Next), lectured in Creative Writing, and now spends much of his time visiting schools all over the world encouraging and enthusing young readers and writers wherever he meets them. He now lives in Austria.
You were once a reluctant reader, and yet you were published at a very young age: you were only 24 when your first novel, Creepers, came out.
That is quite an unusual path, isn't it? Yes, but it didn't seem it at the time. I didn't really kick off reading until I was thirteen or fourteen, and then I got obsessed with books. I've always had that obsessive nature in that if there's something I enjoy, I want to keep doing it. I love board games. I've got a big board game collection. And I want to design a board game. I'm not happy just to play them; I want to design them. When I was a teenager, I loved music, and so I wanted to be in a band. I loved books, and so I wanted to write a book. I've always had that sort of controlling or obsessive nature. I want to share it, I want to know everything I possibly can about it. Books were really doing things to me and taking me to lots of wonderful places, and so I wanted to write those kinds of books that could do that for other people as well. I wrote Creepers when I was 21, and it was published when I was 24, but I'd been writing since the age of 14. It was the third book, so I'd sent out two previous books to agents and publishers. So, although it seems young, it was ten years of work to get published. And I think that some people don't start writing properly until much later, and it might take them ten years...
Also, I was writing about being a teenager. I'd only just stopped being a teenager, so I was writing exactly what I knew, and how me and my friends spoke. Creepers is just me and my mates – I've dictated it almost! The story's made up, but the sound of the voices, the streets, they're all lifted from real life. Derwent Drive is the most important street in the book, and yeah, that's just round the corner from the street where I grew up.
In real life did you call racing the fences 'creeping'? Yeah, garden-creeping. The only thing I invented was the jargon. I had this idea that I was going to write about this, but I wasn't sure how to do it at first. I wrote three or four false starts. What was originally chapter one is now chapter four or five. It was a three o'clock in the morning thing. I thought: let's make this a secret club, and let's give it a secret language, and then the book clicked from that point really.
Did you get an agent first? The first book I wrote, I sent it out to about 12 agents, and they all refused it. But one agent wrote back saying, 'Not for me. But I liked one or two bits of it. Thank you.' It was a bog-standard printed letter, and they'd written in the margins, just in pencil. But they'd taken the trouble to write back. So, I wrote my second book and I was receiving rejections for that, and I thought I'd try that same agent again. I sent it to her and she picked me up on the strength of the second book (which we never got published). While she was sending out that second book, I was busy writing Creepers.
What draws you to writing young adult books, for teenagers primarily? Was there a particular book that opened the door for you? It's a happy accident. That first book I wrote – that never got published – was me attempting to be Stephen King, Clive Barker and H.P. Lovecraft. I wanted to recreate that horror, and failed miserably. And then for the second book, I went back to what first got me into reading: The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall. It's a fantastic book – it kicked the door down! It almost instantly made me a reader, and almost instantly made me want to copy it. I still say I'm trying to rewrite The Machine Gunners, basically. I thought this book is meant for kids, but it's an incredible piece of writing. So I tried writing for a younger audience, and it seemed simpler, because it was more experience than imagination: I wasn't trying to put myself in a forty year old's shoes, talking about mortgages. I was putting myself in a fifteen year old's shoes, talking about chasing girls. Creepers, getting published in 1996, was before 'YA' [young adult] as we now know it. I remember my agent saying that people don't publish teenage fiction, but 'we'll see what we can do with it'. Luckily someone took a punt. And it was published the same year as Junk [Melvin Burgess], and suddenly there was this thing called teenage fiction happening in Britain, and I just hung on to the coat-tails of people like Melvin, as he bulldozed his way through children's books with this new teenage fiction.
So for you, it was very good timing? This is the trouble. A very clever person said to me, 'You need to be talented, professional, and lucky.' So make sure you've worked hard on your talent, make sure you're as professional as possible... because if your luck kicks in too early, you might not have the stamina or professionalism to keep up with what's happening in the world of publishing. You might not have your talent polished sufficiently. I'm just lucky that there was me, Melvin and Philip Pullman, with the first of His Dark Materials, all published in 1996, and then Harry Potter followed in 1997. And, suddenly, teenagers were reading books again. Sorry, I'm not putting myself in their bracket at all – there were other writers as well as me...
But if ever there was a time to make your move, that was it? Yes, absolutely. And then there was another push in the mid-noughties with Twilight and The Hunger Games and John Green and writers still producing YA now, but I was lucky with teenage fiction then. That clever editor must have seen it coming.
You've had seven novels published, as well as several shorter works. What would you say you're most proud of? It has to be Creepers, because that was the first. It has to be Ostrich Boys because that's been my most successful. And then the others, I kind of swap and change. I'm not thinking of the story – the twist at the end or the exciting car chase – I'm thinking of where I was when I was writing it. There's a book called Warehouse which was the first book I wrote when I moved up to live up in Edinburgh. I'm just really proud that I managed to write it. I decided on the Friday and moved up on the Saturday. I had no friends. I knew one person in the city. I was basically on my own, in a rented room, and I went on to produce Warehouse, which was shortlisted for the Guardian Award and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. For me, there's a pride in the ability to write, rather than the finished product sometimes.
Bound up with the circumstances when you wrote the book... That's right. There's a Barrington Stoke book called You Killed Me, which was the first book I wrote as a dad. I wrote that one-handed, with my daughter cradled in my other arm, trying to feed her at midnight, and so there's a pride that I actually managed to produce a book under those circumstances (laughs)... I could talk about Ostrich Boys having a good unreliable narrator and I like the thematic interlinking in a short story of mine called Burying Barker, but actually for me just managing to finish a book is the bit I'm most proud of under the circumstances that we all have in life... blocking real life out to get into the world of the book.
Having had that success with Creepers, did you ever worry that you'd run out of ideas for new stories? It was never a worry about ideas, or what I was going to do next. But on the other hand, it was never, 'This is it. I've got it cracked now!'. I did sit down and think, 'I'm a writer now,' though. Which is wrong.
You were before. Yes. You can be a writer, and not be published. I remember me and my girlfriend at the time (Susan, the woman I dedicated Creepers to) were filling in forms in a video rental shop and they asked me my occupation and I said 'Writer', and this was long before I'd written Creepers. And she laughed at me and called me 'Big Head', because we were students and she knew I did it as a hobby. And that changed, because after Creepers I thought, well somebody won't laugh at me now when I say I'm a writer. I'm walking down the street, in a kind of early-twenties, bigheaded way, thinking, 'Anybody else walking down this street who's a writer? No! Just me, I'm a writer!' (laughs)
But with that joy and pride of getting a book published, I've always been a believer of starting on that bottom rung and working up. I've never done anything in life through luck or circumstance, where I've stepped straight in at the middle or top of the ladder. I always knew, very sincerely and groundedly, that Creepers was the first rung of the ladder. When it was shortlisted for the Guardian Book Awards, that was the second rung, but I knew I had to produce another book, and then another book. I knew I was going to have to climb that ladder, and just see how high I could climb...
It's over 20 years since your first published novel. What expectations do you have at the moment? That's really tough. I've struggled recently, if I'm going to be honest, since Ostrich Boys. That's my most personal book, and I guess my best book – that's what people often tell me – but I just didn't know what the hell to write next. It wasn't the ideas, I had plenty of ideas, but suddenly there was expectation. It was the absolute high point in my career. I just thought how on earth am I going to match it, never mind beat it? That's when I started editing the anthologies and writing small educational or Barrington Stoke books to keep me writing while I was searching for that next big thing inside. Ostrich Boys had taken a lot out of me to write.
Suddenly I now felt that the literary elite would be taking notice and saying, 'Oh, here's Keith Gray's new book'. It was sheer egotism. Before, I was enjoying the writing, and I was writing pretty much for me – got a nice review here and a shortlisting there – and it was great. Then Ostrich Boys made people go, 'Who's this overnight success? Who's this Keith Gray?' (laughs). I felt that pressure, and I didn't know what to write next. So I did lots of little things, never stopped writing at all: lots of personal short stories that were given as gifts to friends... always, always writing. And then I became a dad, and that shifted my focus a little about what I want to write about. So it's not a problem with coming up with the ideas, it's more which one do I want to spend time working on?
But to answer your question, at the minute, I feel a little bit out of the loop with what's current and what's happening. One, because I haven't produced a novel to put into that loop since Ostrich Boys, and two, because I've taken a step back: reviewing in The Scotsman and The Guardian. That was really tough because I kept reading books, going, 'bloody hell, that's good, why am I even bothering?' (laughs) or, on the other hand, 'that's awful – how the hell did that get published?'. So reviewing became a real stumbling block: I was too busy looking at other peoples' books – and not worrying about my own. So, for the last two years, I've purposely not read any YA. I've just read adult novels and non-fiction. Now that YA's so big, I feel there's 'a voice', and I don't want to write in that particular voice. I don't want to be involved in that. Apart from going back and re-reading The Machine Gunners, I think it's like me reading different books when I was writing Creepers: I was reading Stephen King, Catch-22, Roddy Doyle. I wasn't reading kids' books, and I think that's perhaps why Creepers struck a chord. But I think I approached that book from not the current standpoint of what kids' books were about. So, coming from a different angle – I'm trying to do that now.
That sounds like shifting gears a little. I'm coming to the end of writing a new YA novel and I've got a feeling it could be my last for the time being. I'd like to write for younger readers, and I've got a couple of ideas for adult novels. I'd rather write for younger people. My daughter is absolutely mad obsessed with How to Train Your Dragon books, and seeing her joy and knowledge of the characters and the way she relates those stories to me – big eyes, massive smile – and her amazement at how wonderful these stories are for her... I want a bit of that. Teenagers are not going to tell you that. It's more, 'Yeah, it was alright.' Shrug. (laughs) I want to give my daughter something like that at the right age. I'd quite like to write Middle Grade [age 8–12], so maybe by the time she's twelve (laughs), I'll have something for her!
Have you ever tried writing something quite far out of your comfort zone? Early on in my career, my agent, who did a lot of erotica, asked me to write a short story for one of these collections. It was awful! It was published under a pseudonym, so my Mum wouldn't find out, but it was still about a young adult – I was sticking more or less around 'my patch'. If I were to write for adults it would probably be a genre piece, say, crime. But when writing for teenagers, there's only one thing I wouldn't write... and that's mortgages! Otherwise, I think I could pretty much write anything, as long as the story interested me and the characters were good company.
What's so special about writing for you, personally? I love the creative process, when the writing's going well, with lots of ideas – and you think, wow, that went well, thank you very much. I write with music on in the background. I've got an old-fashioned CD player, and I fit three CDs in at once and I know I've had a good day when I don't hear the music. That means I'm in the book with the characters and you don't notice the words so much. That's a fantastic feeling when you look back and you think: How did I do that? That's just come out of my head, through my fingers. That's just wonderful.
Like, 'Was that really me?' Exactly. So, first and foremost, I do genuinely enjoy the process of creating on the page. Coming up with ideas, coming up with exciting ways to say different things, and to move characters around... and now I love meeting the readers that enjoy the books. That is fantastic. You've got to weigh that up with the 'goodreads' and 'amazon reviews' sometimes (laughs), because they're not always positive. But with the school visits, I get to meet the readers on a regular basis. I talk to them. I see what they like. I see what they don't like. I introduce them to who I am. Whereas with adult authors, there's maybe a bigger barrier between them and the reader. You might do a big festival, but you've got five hundred in a room and you're on a stage – and you don't get to meet the audience. You sign a book quickly and say, 'Oh, I'm glad you liked it,' and move on. Whereas on a school visit, you can actually talk to the kids. I've got a reputation of working with 'reluctant readers' and watching them click is great. They never thought it was for them. The trouble is with school is that everything's graded – there's always a tick or a cross at the side of the page. My workshop is different: you may not be a best-selling author or a Booker Prize winner, but you can still write a really nice story, or you can still get something down on the page that matters to you personally, even if it's not going to get published, but you enjoyed getting it down. I love seeing that light go on in the kids' eyes, when they realise that there's no real right or wrong answer.
And to think that you might have just sparked something? Introducing your book, or getting them into other reading? You never know. Because you've moved on from that school, and you don't always get the feedback, but there's always that little bit of hope that, yeah, some of them have gone on to be a reader. I grew up in a house without books, and I wasn't that interested in reading. So part of me wants to aim for... me... when I was twelve or thirteen years old. Also, I think my style suits it. I write short sentences. I write quite accessible books. I want to tell a really good story. There are writers who are interested in words and language, and there are writers that are interested in story and emotion. And yes, the two can dovetail, but I'm definitely a storyteller. I grew up reading Stephen King. He may not be the world's greatest writer, but he knows how to tell a good story. When he's on top form, he can get you to believe in the most weird and wonderful things and I've always found that admirable in writing – not just the use of language, but telling a story you get lost in. So I think that appeals to reluctant readers. The story comes first, not the metaphor.
And how do you write? Are you a plotter or a pantser [i.e. a writer who flies by the seat of their pants]? I have a loose idea of structure. I know where it's going to begin. I know what it's going to be called (although that might change), and I have a rough idea of an ending. Endings don't usually change for me. Beginnings may get shifted around, and get edited in. With Ostrich Boys, I started the book somewhere else, and the editor said we needed a bit before, almost like a prologue, and a couple of chapters got shifted around.
I like to know what my opening line is – and then I can start writing. I always knew that in Creepers it was going to end with the final creep, and then funeral. Ostrich Boys was always going to finish with the three boys with the ashes – although in the final version one of them's disappeared – but I knew the book would finish in Ross [the place].
But it's still a process of discovery for you?
I'm not sure how I'm going to get there exactly. In Ostrich Boys, I knew there was going to be a bungee jump and a haunted house, because death and loss was one of the themes of the book... so paying money to almost kill yourself on a bungee jump and a talk about the afterlife in a haunted house would tie in with the theme. I knew those bits would be somewhere in the book. I didn't know where exactly, I didn't know how I was going to get to them, but I've got to write to find out where they'll happen and how it'll all fit together in the end.
How does the seed for that story emerge? Over many years, weirdly... So the book I'm writing now is a 15-year-old idea. The Fearful was a 20-year-old idea. I often have ideas at the back of my head, and if I keep coming back to them, then they just grow... and I think, yeah, this is what I need to write, and I need to build on that idea. In Ostrich Boys I knew I was going to write about teenage suicide and I didn't have a clue how. The first time, I wrote it as a detective story and I had this kid as a private-eye character who was investigating the death of someone from his class, in this Chandleresque kind of story. The themes were there, and there was a bungee jump! The road-trip emerged later. The main idea for the story is there: it's that bit of dirt in your head that gets cluttered up, and cluttered up, and hopefully grows into a pearl... I've got two or three, four or five, six or seven ideas in my head for things that I'd love to write.
Are you able to retain them and then build on them? Do you ever forget or lose them? Only since being a dad (laughs). Or maybe it's age. I have a pad and I do most of my writing long-hand to begin with, and then type it up. But, no, I suppose I have maybe three or four good ideas that are bubbling around at the back of my head and one of them will rise to the surface and that's the one I'll write about. The book that I'm writing now I originally thought would be the book before Ostrich Boys.
What's the best writing advice that you've ever received? Keep doing it. A genuine thing is muscle. You go to the gym every day and you build up muscles. You stop going, and pretty quickly that muscle sags and disappears. I genuinely believe in your head there is a creative muscle. I've found that if you stop writing for a couple of weeks, you lose your concentration span, you lose the ability to get started. Just write every day... to build up that muscle.
No matter what comes out? No matter what comes out, keep writing. It is tough to do. Writing every day is so simple to say, so hard to do. It is the number one, top thing that writers have to do. Write every day. And secondly, write something that you'd enjoy reading. And I think that is the key for good kids' writers as well. Even though they're writing children's books, if it's something you'd enjoy reading yourself – and the emotion you're putting in as a writer because you're enjoying writing it or the discoveries you're making as a writer – that enjoyment comes out on the page. It's like How to Train Your Dragon: it's aimed at 7-8-9 year olds, but I'm laughing my head off.
What do new writers get wrong? They want to get published. Obviously, they want to get published. The problem is there's too much information out there. When I wrote Creepers, I knew nothing. I was just trying to write a book, any old book. To the best of my ability. I knew nothing about the marketplace. I didn't know that it was going to be called 'teen fiction' and that people would say that teen fiction didn't exist. I didn't know that, I had no clue. Because if I'd known that, I wouldn't have written it. I would've said, 'Well, what are publishers looking for?'. But I'd have written rubbish, because that's not what I'm interested in, and that's not what I want to read. I think organisations like SCBWI [Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators] are fantastic, but I think new writers are in danger of writing to please the publishers and not writing to please themselves.
The trouble is, in my 21 years of being a published author, I have never seen a publisher create a trend. I have only seen an author create a trend, and publishers jump on the bandwagon. Harry Potter. Rejected at Random House, my publishers... they rejected it. I think it was the seventh publisher [Bloomsbury] they went to, picked it up. Everyone said it was derivative. It was J.K. [Rowling] that created that. Then everyone was looking for the next J.K. Rowling. The next wizard at school. What came along? Twilight [Stephenie Meyer]. No publisher was looking for a vampire romance. It was published by Atom. No one had even heard of the publisher. Then the next big thing was The Hunger Games [Suzanne Collins]. Then 'sick-lit'. You went from dystopian fiction to John Green and kids dying from cancer.
Writers writing is what creates the next big thing. These writers are not writing for a market, they're writing for themselves. I think this is the slight problem we have: there's too much information. Pitching to agents, pitching to editors, it's great – and you can be part of an incredibly supportive community – but you've got to write your book. I always say to kids if you love reading sci-fi, write sci-fi. Don't worry about your teachers, write what you want to write. If you're writing to get that grade A, where you're writing a romance story and actually your heart's always in a big werewolf punch-up story, your romance is going to be pants! But if you write that werewolf punch-up, it's probably going to be better – and get you higher marks – because it's a better written story.
You do have a light touch with big issues. However, at the end of Burying Barker, you appear to be more overt. You say, 'It's all about the stories you leave behind, isn't it?' How important is your legacy in writing? I've never, never thought of it as legacy. I don't know whether the books will outlive me or not. In total, so far I've had 22 books published, but of those maybe seven or eight are now out of print. So, who knows if these books are going to survive? I've never thought of it like that. It's all been about the person reading the book – and them enjoying it – and perhaps making them a reader or a writer now. When I've done a school visit, if they've enjoyed the book, maybe they'd like to read another one of my books, or find another author... that's always been what I've wanted... to inspire people now.
But as for a legacy, not really? No. There's a story idea at the back of my head... Basically, it's about a child whose father is gone, possibly dead. The child goes up into the attic and there are these boxes of the father's stuff. The child sees the music he used to listen to, the books he read, maybe the clothes he wore: the material possessions in a sense. The child tries to work out what sort of person that father was, by looking through their stuff. So I guess, if there's something to leave behind, if I got run over by a car tomorrow, I'd like my daughter to know the kind of person I was by the books I'd written. I'm not in any of my books – not any of the characters – but, of course, my thoughts and feelings on certain subjects and my emotions, if I've written them well enough, will perhaps come through those books.
You say that Ostrich Boys is your
most personal? Yeah. I attempted suicide when I was 18. Didn't succeed, but I did attempt suicide. I was very close to succeeding, but I didn't. Although I'm not in the book, obviously my experience really informs why I wanted to write the story, how the story's told, people's reactions to suicide attempts. It's all in there. I'd read a couple of books that dealt with suicide, and I thought, Bollocks, that's not right. It's the only book that I've tried to do any research for, and I talked to people in the social services community and in charities. The book was tricky to write, because at first I was trying to write everybody's story. But everyone attempts or commits for a different reason, and I had to focus on just one story, but tell as much truth about that single story as possible. Here's writers talking about truth again! (laughs)
And so, it is a very personal book, but I'm not Ross. I'm not even Blake the narrator, not really. At one point, suicide's called 'selfish', and I believe that. People are sometimes quite offended by that, but I myself attempted it for fairly selfish reasons, as well as other things, it was all mixed-up... People ask you, 'Why did you do it?', expecting just one reason. That's why in the book there are several reasons why Ross commits suicide. I'd also read books about suicide where the character attempts suicide because they were having a really tough time, they survive, and everyone tells them how great they are – and suddenly attempting suicide becomes a good thing somehow, because they discover they're loved. And some of these books were almost saying, 'Go and try it, everybody will love you.'
I knew that my guy was dead from page one. There was no way that it was going to be a good thing that this person had attempted – and succeeded at – suicide. So that's why it's very personal to me. I was worried about it because my parents were both still alive and went through that stage, and I didn't know how they'd feel about it. The publishers said, 'If you're willing to do interviews for the newspapers, and go on TV and talk about your own suicide attempt, we'll give you a higher advance for the book.' And, with my parents still alive, I refused. It was a very personal book in that way – and I needed to get it right.
And that experience that you had, and thankfully survived, do you think that's driven you on? I wouldn't be a writer without it. Every parent does the best they can, but mine were very strict and controlling and could be fairly narrow-minded. But when I attempted suicide, they said they didn't know who this person was – and took a massive step back from me. When they stepped back, I could breathe, and I could chase this dream of being a writer, instead of me being a teacher or a doctor. In a weird way, it was a coming of age. It's old news now, but it massively shaped my life.
Funny thing is, Ostrich Boys was published when I was 36 – like two 18s. When it was published, it was really quite emotional, looking back on my life, and thinking what have I done with my second 18 years? Years that I might not have had.
That's quite some double milestone. Absolutely. So I've done lots of talks to kids on mental health, about suicidal feelings and coping, and things like that. But I've never stood in front of the class and said this is all about me – I've said, yes, I've been there, but let's talk about the book... and let's talk about you.
Keith's agent: Lucy Juckes at Jenny Brown Associates
Keith's publishers: Definitions and Barrington Stoke
See also: Geoff's Published Works Geoff @ Hachette