Hannah Peck is writing for a variety of audiences and in today’s blog, she tells us a bit more about how she does this!
Writing The River Thief
Things nobody tells you about writing for an older age group when you’ve previously only written for five to nine-year-olds: you will probably be bad at it. At least, you will be bad at it at the beginning, likely because you’ll have a romanticised view of what it means to write for older readers. Finally, you can write real prose and use long and mysterious words that will both educate and inspire young readers! You will write beautifully!
Needless to say, once I had the opportunity to write for older readers after a handful of years working on my debut series, Kate on the Case, I quickly found myself swamped with detailed descriptions of water-mill mechanics and historical research, unsure how to find my plot thread in the sheer volume of what I was playing with. I realise I was not writing a tome, but if your average Kate on the Case book is 11,000 words, The River Thief is about seven times the length – nothing if an organisational nightmare if you (me) label your files things like ‘April!’ and ‘Sentence Examples 3’.
It was only in revisiting the skills I learnt writing the Kate series that I was able to wade through my ideas. Obviously having an excellent editor and agent helped immensely, but I’d be lying if I said I found the leap an easy one to make – not so much in terms of generating ideas or crafting the writing, but with plot and pacing.
The great thing about writing for younger readers (5-9) is their constant need for action – the plot must push forwards with every scene or exchange of dialogue. There is simply neither space nor attention span (understandably) for pointless scenes, however witty or imaginative.
Once you get into the swing of this economical pacing, it becomes easier to let these extra scenes go. Due to the neat size of the Kate books, I rarely felt I was cutting anything I had spent too much time invested in and usually found it easy to recognise which ideas were worth keeping.
This wasn’t the case in the early days of The River Thief – while I had my set-up, cast of characters, motivation and an ending, the cursed second act was prime material for my overthinking. I had too many ideas that could all feasibly work in the world I’d created and loved them all, even if they couldn’t sit next to each other for continuity reasons. I’d also spent more time with them, and perhaps felt more connected to them on a personal level that I had with themes the Kate books – whose ‘whodunnit’ scaffolding perhaps made it easier to see what did and didn’t work from a plot perspective.
In the end, it became clear I had to detach from the fantasy of writing for older readers in exchange for the reality in front of me, and sacrifice some of my ideas for the sake of the plot. I spent a Christmas at my parent’s house locked in my old bedroom sticking bits of paper to the wall like I was solving a crime and emerged in the New Year with a tight plot and a sigh of relief – and no doubt a large one from my publisher, too.
I had to let go of a lot of preconceptions when making the leap to writing for older readers, perhaps most importantly the notion that my ideas alone could carry a book.
Now I’m on the other side of the process and starting to think about writing again, I still want to allow myself the pleasure of being swept away by new ideas, but this time, will perhaps hold them a little lighter.
The River Thief by Hannah Peck, it out 24th October 2024, published by Piccadilly Press.
