Bio

Born in Whakatane in 1936, Margaret Mahy has lived in New Zealand her entire life. A former children's librarian, she decided to become a full time writer in 1980. From picture books to YA novels, the age groups for which she writes vary as much as the characters in her stories. She won a British Library Association's Carnegie Medal for THE HAUNTING in 1982 and THE CHANGEOVER in 1984. In 1993, Mahy received an Order of New Zealand, the highest honor a citizen can receive.

Interview

Baffled as to how YA author Margaret Mahy manages to perfectly capture adolescent sensibilities without sacrificing an exciting and compelling plotline, Teenreads.com staff writer Audrey Marie Danielson decided to take her query to the source. So, after reading 24 HOURS, Mahy's latest, Audrey landed an interview with the author and finally got a chance to ask her about the difficulty of compressing a whole, twisting-turning story into 24 hours, the inspiration behind her book, and what advice she might have for aspiring writers.

Teenreads: 24 HOURS is eerie and exciting. How did you achieve the balance between stopping time and moving forwards without compromising the story?

MM: In both 24 HOURS and an earlier book, MEMORY, a young hero finds himself entering a time zone in which a particular drama, a mixture of real life and fairy tale, is acted out. (Of course sometimes real life is rather like a fairy tale. Not all fairy tales are entirely unrealistic.) Anyhow, time seems to operate a little differently within these contained zones, and both heroes find themselves involved in a series of events that, while they are not fantasies, are still fantastic. And at one stage, time stops for Ellis, the hero of 24 HOURS. This is partly because he's been drinking but also because of the strange circumstances in which he finds himself. He feels as if he has entered a timeless state. However, time does not stop for the reader, who is continually reminded that it is flowing implacably on. Writing the story, I tried to make events that were (intentionally) confusing to Ellis clear to the reader and hoped that the two states would work together.

Teenreads: What inspired you to write a story that only uses events that happen within 24 hours?

MM: There is nothing directly autobiographical about this story. All the same, there have been times when I have gone out to visit friends and progressed from one party to another and have had a similar feeling of timelessness to the one that Ellis experiences along with a feeling of space and adventure. In a matter of a few hours I would experience exhilaration, join in with cheerful conversations, see people in the process of falling in love and witness great arguments and fights (I've never actually been a fighter myself --- fighting tires me out and I'm not an efficient fighter anyway --- but I have certainly seen other people have great complicated goes at one another). By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life. I am not recommending this sort of experience, but I think that in writing this particular story I was remembering the quality of it all.

Teenreads: Did you find it challenging to develop your characters, plot, and setting in such a short span of time?

MM: Yes, I did find it challenging, but interesting too. Ellis's understanding of himself and the world around him certainly develops because of his adventures, and part of that development comes through recognizing other people for what they are. In the end, for example, his confrontation with Christo Kilmer enables him to see that Christo, for all his unpleasant and even psychotic ways, is vulnerable. He is insecure and unhappy and, like a lot of unhappy people, wants to compensate by spreading his unhappiness out around him. Ellis's understanding is advanced, and art (in his case, his acting) becomes something more than an abstract exercise [like] something flatly pinned to a page or a wall or acted out on a stage. His acting becomes part of real life something he can use. I thought hard about the story, wrote and rewrote it, working my way into it --- and acted bits of it out in my head.

Teenreads: Are the characters in 24 HOURS based on real people or are they solely the products of your imagination?

MM: They are imaginary characters. But perhaps not solely the products of my imagination, since there are some aspects of the characters that relate to my own experience of a wide variety of people. I once knew a house rather like The Land of Smiles --- an old house occupied by a varied collection of young people, mainly students. However none of these people were true models for the characters in the book, though their way of life may have been.

Teenreads: Many of your books, most specifically 24 HOURS and MEMORY, deal with the protagonist trying to come to terms with the untimely death of a friend or relative. Why do you return to this theme?

MM: I don't know that I would say many of my books deal with this theme. I hope I am not too repetitive. However, coming to terms with death is part of the general human situation. When I was a child I had a best friend who lived across the road from me. When her mother died unexpectedly it was like losing a member of my own family. I think I am still affected by the memory of that loss. However, I also think the uncertainty of life is part of a central human mystery, and either loss (or fear of loss) tends to haunt us all. And in this case some experience of death was probably necessary for the hero, since in the end he confronts the kidnapper and is able reinforce Shakespeare's thoughts on death with the power of his own experience and conviction.

Teenreads: How do you research your books?

MM: I read, and talk to people. In the case of 24 HOURS, for example, I did some research into the work an undertaker does. I talked to undertakers and asked them a lot of questions and I read one or two books. I soon had more information than I either needed or used. On the whole, the stories I write do not involve me in a great deal of research, since I am inventing the story and can set my own rules to a considerable extent. Still, one has to make anything one writes as convincing as possible, and there are times when research is essential.

Teenreads: Do your characters ever take over your story?

MM: In a way, the characters often do take over. There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and "live" with the characters. There have been times when the act of writing (which is a way of living in the story) has actually changed the story. One of the simplest examples of this is in a short story I wrote called "The Great White Man-Eating Shark." The hero, Norvin, dresses up as a shark and frightens people away from a swimming space in order to have it all to himself. Halfway through writing (and living in) this particular story, I found myself suddenly wondering what would happen if Norvin's acting was so good that he actually fooled another shark. I had always known that at the end of the story, Norvin would be terrified by a real shark; but it was only when I was actually writing the story that I found myself suddenly wondering what would happen if a female shark, fooled by his disguise, should fall in love with the disguised hero. It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can "take over" as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

Teenreads: You started writing at a very young age. When did you decide to be a writer?

MM: My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years. I was about 33 when I got my first book published and about 43 when I began to make my living as a full-time writer. I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child.

Teenreads: Do you feel your previous work as a librarian helped your writing career?

MM: Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act. Though, of course, when you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared. When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books. Indeed, I wanted to know about them and I read extensively. Not only that, I read reviews and journal articles where books were discussed so that I found it easy to have ideas as to which books I liked (and why) and which books I didn't. I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original. At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader's mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.

Teenreads: : How do you stay involved with young people and their current trends?

MM: At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young. However, anyone interested in the world generally can't help being interested in young adult culture --- in the music, the bands, the books, the fashions, and the way in which the young adult community develops its own language. I stay in touch after a fashion through reading and listening in. Within another three or four years (if my grandchildren and their friends are still speaking to me) I will be in everyday touch once more, but I will still read and listen in. Many years the writer of girls' school stories, Angela Brazil was sometimes criticized for her use of authentic British schoolgirl idiom, "slang." It was felt she was endorsing careless speech. Apparently, she used to listen in on conversations in trains to make the dialogue in her books as realistic as possible. At present I tend to do a lot of listening in, in shops and on street corners, and to the boys next door talking to their friends. They don't know that I am there on the other side of the hedge taking notes, mental notes anyway. It isn't quite the same as having teenagers in the family, but it works reasonably well.

Teenreads: You write for many age groups. Which do you like best?

MM: I don't think I prefer writing for one age group above another. I am just as pleased with a story which I feel works well for very small children as I do with a story for young adults. Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them. Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too. The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book...

Teenreads: Do you have a favorite place in which to write?

MM: I am really chained to my computer these days so I work in my bedroom, which is a room I have worked in for years and years. It is just as much an office as a bedroom, and during the day, my bed is rather like an extension of my desk. Behind me, as I work answering these questions, stands a filing cabinet and shelves and shelves of books; there are books piled on the floor beside the chairs. On my left is the printer. On my right is a fax, and my little old cat Orsino (she is 19-years-old --- old for a cat) sleeps on the fax because it is always warm. Most efficient offices don't have to dust cat hair out of their faxes. Behind my computer there is a long thin window, and the window sill is crowded with photographs of my two daughters and their children. The wall beside the door opening into the rest of the house is hung with a collection of masks from various parts of the world. Some of them are very strange. They watch me work, very seriously for the most part, though there is one mask, a Japanese mask, that has a slight --- a very slight, barely noticeable --- smile. As I write this my cat is sitting up and washing her tail, turning around, and collapsing onto the fax machine yet again. (If I am correcting a printed-out story I often take it outside and work in the garden.)

Teenreads: Do you ever write settings other than New Zealand?

MM: Quite a lot of my stories for younger children have settings other than New Zealand. They are set in a sort of story-nonsense land, the sort of land where anything can happen. However, all the young adult novels have a New Zealand setting. New Zealand is the only country I know well enough to write about. It can sometimes lead to complications. A young adult can get a driving license at the age of 15 in New Zealand, and if I describe a 15-year-old legitimately driving, people in some other countries think I must have made a mistake. Editors then insist that I explain the driving license situation instead of simply taking it for granted. It sometimes makes me more self conscious about details than I really want to be.

Teenreads: What was the best book you read recently?

MM: At the moment I am reading two books, a biography of the New Zealand novelist Janet Frame and a novel by John Le Carre who, roughly speaking, writes spy stories. Both of these books are too heavy to read in the bath, however, so I am also reading a thriller by Elmore Leonard, great for reading in the bath (or a spa pool!). All these books are very good books in different ways, but one of the best books I have read over the last few weeks is THE POISONWOOD BIBLE by Barbara Kingsolver, and my favorite young adult novel has been CLOSED STRANGER by the New Zealand novelist Kate de Goldi.

Teenreads: What advice would you give aspiring young writers?