[Interview_2] Tabitha Suzuma

Tabitha Suzuma's first novel, A Note of Madness tells the story of a teenage musical genius struggling with manic depression. The novel has received a lot of critical attention from newspapers, magazines and websites that include The Guardian, Hackwriters.com, Cherwell, Medical Humanities, CMIS and Write Away.

A Note of Madness, which is now available in both hardcover and paperback, was also shortlisted in the 2006 NASEN & TES Special Educational Needs Book Award.

Suzuma spoke about what she has been working on since making her debut as an author, in May last year:

How would you say you have you been received so far?

A Note of Madness came out in paperback this February and I am hoping it will sell well because its sequel, A Song for Jennah, will only be published next year if sales figures are high. And as soon as I get the green light from Random House -- with luck by August -- I will start work on the third book in the A Note of Madness trilogy. It will be about Flynn and Jennah post-university making their way on the classical concert circuit.

My second novel is coming out in May and has already received some great reviews. It's called From Where I Stand and is a psychological thriller about a deeply disturbed teenager trying to track down his mother's killer. I have a fourth book under contract with Random House: Without Looking Back, about a family on the run.

In the last interview we had, you spoke about wanting to venture into writing books for adults. How is this going?

At the moment, Random House want to build me as an author and so they are only publishing one of my books each year. This, in part, prompted my decision to branch out into adult fiction. It's not easy making a living on one book a year. Another reason I wanted to write for adults was because most of the fan mail I received for A Note of Madness (which is set at university) has been from older teenagers and adults of all ages. Nonetheless, I do plan to keep writing for teenagers too.

I have just finished my first novel for adults, Maya which is based on a relationship between a father and his young daughter. It's about a man who loses everything. It's about letting go. It took me seven months to write.

My agent is sending it out to publishers at the moment. It does mean starting out from scratch in a way, which is a bit daunting, because my current editor only publishes books for young adults.

I have recently started work on my second novel for adults which aims to be another psychological thriller. It will be based on the idea that the people closest to us are not always who they seem to be.

Perhaps we could also talk about the writing process itself. What do you start with? And how do you proceed from there?

I start with a character, or an idea. With A Note of Madness, I was trudging through the snow one winter in Helsinki, listening to Rachmaninov on my iPod. That's when the character of Flynn came to me: a Finnish concert pianist suffering from bipolar disorder. I was severely depressed at the time (hence my choice of holiday destination), and everything sort of fell into place. Flynn became very real to me, more so than the people around me, a character born out of my passion for classical music and my fascination with the link between mental illness and the artistic genius. I came home from my tour of Scandinavia and instantly started writing, without any plan or any real idea of where the story was going. Things just came to me as I wrote, and I wrote as much for myself as for anyone else.

With my second book, From Where I Stand, the process was a little different. I had secured the contract for book one, so this time I was writing to be published. I deliberately moved away from the first book and chose to write something more plot-driven, with a twist at the end; yet still retaining the psychological slant. This second book was much harder to write because I knew it was going to be read -- at least by my editor if no-one else -- so it was a struggle not to feel self-conscious. There was suddenly a lot more at stake: I had something to lose, and I knew A Note of Madness was going to be a tough act to follow.

Other writers have said they find starting a story to be the most difficult part of the writing process. How similar or different is your own experience?

The starting point of a story comes to me quite easily -- it's the rest which is hard! A scene appears before me, I see it in my mind's eye, as vivid as watching a film. A chair in a psychiatrist's office; a teenager standing at the window waiting to be taken to his new foster family... The starting point is always obvious, somehow.

I try to write plans, but I'm not very good at it! I always start off with a very real sense of my main character -- I make sure that I know that character really well before I write the first word. I will also have a general idea of the outline of the story, kind of like a rough charcoal sketch. As I write, I fill in the detail and ideas come to me as I go along. Often the characters seem to take over, and starts pulling in directions I had not previously thought about. I'll go with them, and sometimes this results in a very different book from the one I set out to write. But it also means that the end result is almost always richer and fuller than the idea I started with.

Sometimes, however, things do go awry. You take a wrong turn, and suddenly you find yourself writing a scene which doesn't work, or which is taking you in a direction that doesn't fit with the rest of the book. Then I will have to backtrack -- find the point at which the story changed, and see if you can bring it back on course. That can be really frustrating: suddenly realising that the intensive labour of the last few weeks was all in vain. But it's all part of the writing process: often you have to explore different avenues before you find the one which feels right.

This article was first published on OhmyNews International.

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Tabitha Suzuma [Interview_1], Conversations with Writers, April 30, 2007

[Interview_1]Tabitha Suzuma

Emerging novelist Tabitha Suzuma studied French Literature at King's College in London and has taught English as a Foreign Language. She has also worked in I.T., and has done some translation work as well as worked as a Year 1 teacher in Slough. She wrote her debut novel, A Note of Madness while she was teaching full-time.

In 2003 Suzuma left classroom teaching and divided her time between writing and peripatetic teaching. This gave her time to write three more novels for teenagers and young adults, From Where I Stand (a psychological thriller), Without Looking Back, and A Song for Jennah (a sequel to A Note of Madness).

She is currently working on her fourth novel. She says she decided she wanted to be a writer when she was about six years old. "I remember discovering the magic of books at that age and saying to my mother 'I want to be able to do that.' I then found an exercise book and started writing my first story."

The authors she read as a teenager, particularly K.M. Peyton and S.E. Hinton, also influenced her. "I would write to my favorite authors telling them how much I loved their books and many of them wrote back, encouraging me with my own writing," she says.

It took her six months to write A Note of Madness. "I found writing the whole book quite easy, to be honest," Suzuma says. "I had no idea that it would be published so I was very unselfconscious and just wrote whatever I wanted. I think the beginning of a book is always the hardest, but once you get into it and gain some insight into your characters and your story, it gets much easier."

The writer also found that, in itself, writing was therapeutic. "I loved writing the dialogue between the three main characters. I loved writing about their friendship, and how it evolved. I also enjoyed writing about the hero's experience of depression and mania," she adds. "It was very therapeutic."

Suzuma says she drew on a lot of her own personal experiences when she was working on A Note of Madness. "This was influenced by my love for music, my brother who is a pianist, and my own experiences with severe clinical depression," she says.

The three other novels Tabitha Suzuma has written are due to be published over the next three years. "Each book is very different from the last. A Note of Madness is perhaps the most personal as it is based on so many of my own experiences. My next book, From Where I Stand, is coming out in May 2007. It is a psychological thriller about a deeply disturbed teenager hunting for his mother's killer."

She says that, as a writer, her main concerns are whether people will want to read her books, whether the stories she wants to write will be the stories that people want to read and whether she will ever be able to earn enough from writing to make it her full-time occupation.
"I write gritty teen fiction with a psychological slant. My first book is about mental illness," she explains. "I don't want to be a typically 'commercial' writer but at the same time I need my books to sell well so that I can continue doing what I love."

As a first-time author Suzuma worries about if she will be able to earn a living solely from writing and getting her books publicized. "People won't go into a bookshop saying 'I want to buy Tabitha Suzuma's latest novel' because they won't have heard of me. It is also a challenge writing for the teenage market," she says.

Her books are aimed at older teens and young adults, but in the United Kingdom teen fiction is still under the umbrella of children's fiction and is usually found in the same corner of the bookshop. "A lot of teenagers are understandably reluctant to browse in the children's section, which means that older teens and young adults are missing out on a book that was written essentially for them," Suzuma says.

In an effort to deal with these concerns, the writer tries to do her own publicity. She has approached the press and given some interviews. She has contacted mental health charities about her book and she has created her own website.

Suzuma is now working on a book for adults to keep herself from being trapped in just one section of the writers' market. "The book I am currently working on is a book for adults about a custody battle between a biological and a non-biological father," she explains.

In spite of her fears, and if the success of her debut novel is anything to go by, Tabitha Suzuma is set to become one of the most influential writers for teenagers and young adults.

A Note of Madness, which was published in May 2006 by Random House in London, received glowing reviews and has also just been shortlisted for the NASEN & TES Special Educational Needs Book Award.

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Related article:

Tabitha Suzuma [Interview_2], Conversations with Writers, July 20, 2007