Author Nick Green
Nick Green is a UK children's and YA author, best known for his trilogy The Cat Kin, published in the UK by Strident Publishing and in Germany by Ravensburger, and also as a BBC audiobook. He has appeared on BBC radio talking about his books, and has been shortlisted for two UK children's book awards. He regularly does school visits and other children's literary events. The Storm Bottle is his first straight-to-Kindle novel.
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Interview:
If you could meet one person
who has died who would you choose?
My great-great-grandfather
on my mother’s side. I own a rather beautiful wooden box, reminiscent of The
Box of Delights in John Masefield’s book, and my great-great-grandfather made
it. That is the only thing I know about the man – I don’t even know his name,
though I could find out. I would love to be able to show him that I still have
it, that it has been cherished by so many people over the years. I wonder what
he’d make of our lives now.
If you were a superhero what
would your name be?
I actually
am a superhero, so for obvious reasons I can’t really divulge that information.
All I will say is that I have sent compensation anonymously to the citizens of
Chelyabinsk for their shattered windows and other damage, and apologised on
Twitter for the panic that was caused by that alleged ‘meteor’. I’ll try to
keep the altitude higher in future! Izvinite – sorry about that.
If you weren't human, what would you be?
See above. However
(to be serious for a moment) in writing The Storm Bottle I spent long hours
trying to imagine what it’s like to live as a dolphin, doing a lot of reading
and research into their lives, how they sense and perceive the world and
communicate and so on. And I think it would be pretty cool, living as a
dolphin. Daily life would be rather like being permanently plugged into
Twitter, as dolphins can hear conversations going on for miles around them underwater,
and as such can form astonishingly sophisticated social groups. I realised that
they must have a totally different sense of ‘person’ and ‘place’ – physical
places mean little to them, but social places are everything. ‘Where you are’
is defined by where you figure in the hierarchy, who your friends are, etc. I’d
love to be a dolphin for a bit, and see if my intuitions are anywhere close to
the truth.
If you could choose only one
time period and place to live, when and where would you live and why?
My own. Visiting the past
is all very well if it’s a tourist trip – but it’s like going on holiday. You
can visit Africa for the safaris or India for the ancient culture – or Tudor
times to see Henry the Eighth – but in the end, if you live there, you’ve got
to deal with the violence, the poverty, the squalor, and Henry the Eighth. The
present is hugely under-rated as a time in which to live. We’ve got advanced
healthcare, gadgets for everything, governments that for all their flaws are
better than anything in the past, global transport… the list goes on. I would
never want to live in an antibiotic-free era in which a thorn in your finger
could ultimately kill you. (Unfortunately, I think we may be headed that way!).
Can you see yourself in any of
your characters?
Michael in The Storm Bottle bears a passing
resemblance to me in some ways, but he’s more stuck-up than me (I hope) and
ends up being far more heroic than I ever would be. Fictional characters do
tend to favour the extremes – real people are far too subtle and complex to
transfer easily to the page. What generally happens is that writers write about
what they know, and so some of their characters will inevitably share their own
interests, and perhaps some biographical details. But this is not a way of
saying ‘This is me! This is me on the page in a thin disguise!’ It’s just
easier, because you know for instance what it’s like to sing in a choir, or
play rugby, or to have divorced parents. The interesting thing is that the
other protagonist, Bibi, was far easier to write, and yet she has almost
nothing in common with me.
What was it like when you sold
your first book?
My
first book to be published was The Cat Kin, which is book 1 of the Cat Kin
trilogy. I had already self-published it before it was taken on by Faber, and
it did very well for a short time, until I wanted to do the sequel – but Faber
pulled out of doing the series, so I had to switch publishers to Strident. All
in all, it was such a convoluted and stressful process that I don’t think I
enjoyed it very much at all – not as much as actually writing the thing. But
it’s still out there, and still gets some great reader responses. Book 3 came
out this year.
Which scene or characters were
the most difficult for you to write and why?
Writing
all the dolphin parts was particularly challenging, because I had to throw out
everything we normally take for granted – even things like where people are
when they converse with each other. Dolphins can have a chat from half a mile
away, they can see in two ways (eyesight and sonar), they only sleep with half
their brain at a time, and of course
they have no hands or material possessions. So what do they even talk
about? And how do you transcribe their click-based speech as words? I had to
take all this into account whenever the
dolphins were around. Some of my solutions were plucked out of thin air: for
instance, I made my three main dolphin characters have Spanish names and
accents, to suggest a culture that was ‘foreign’ but still quite similar to our
own. This is how Michael (who becomes a dolphin) perceives them; they’re not
really Spanish of course, but his brain interprets their ‘foreignness’ that
way. Furthermore, all dolphins within a particular pod have similar or themed
names. This was inspired by scientific research which found that dolphins in
social groups develop similar name-whistles to emphasize their bond.
If your book was made into a
movie, who would you pick for Michael and Bibi?
They’d have to be child actors of course, and I
don’t really know the names of many of those. Given the time it takes to make a
movie, they probably haven’t even been born yet! It would be weird though if it
were to happen. I think Bibi especially would be great fun to play. It’s a
totally ham role.
With all the books being made into movies right now, are you
for or against it?
If it works, go for it. Better books than video
games, I say. But I do weary of ‘trends’, like everything being vampires or
superheroes. I love superheroes, and they make for great cinema, but now
they’re everywhere, it’s like a plague. I also disagree with the idea that
books are ‘made into’ movies, as if that was a natural graduation for the most
successful. We should think of it as ‘movies being made based on books’. The
book cannot be made into a movie, because it still exists as a book, and the
two will always be totally different. But this is a good thing: I can love The
Lord of the Rings as a book and as movies, and not complain where the two are
different from each other. They’re both great, and there’s a time to enjoy each
of them in turn.
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