A WASTE OF GOOD PAPER

Posted on 10th May 2012

My novel A WASTE OF GOOD PAPER came out a few days ago, published by Frances Lincoln Books and available here.

It was interesting writing it. I was meant to be working on something different, but was having a read of TRACY BEAKER by Jacqueline Wilson, and the idea for the novel suddenly arrived.

I scribbled out a rough plan. And it came pretty much fully-formed. There were some shifts along the way, but I was still working from the original two-page plan when I got to the last pages of the book.

If you can make any sense of this over-excited scrawling (click on the image to enlarge, though that probably still won’t help…) you’ll see that the story is in a diary format.

The diary entries are written by a boy at a special school for young people with behavioural difficulties. I’ve taught in that sort of school. And, once I started writing, all kinds of recollections and imagined incidents…dramatic, moving, unexpected, funny…flooded out on to the paper. I wrote the novel in ten weeks.

It’s a gritty book. There’s a fair bit of violence, some explicit images of drug-taking. It’s not always comfortable to read. But if I’d written it differently it wouldn’t be right. The work I’ve done with young people with behavioural difficulties has been uncomfortable a fair bit of the time.

It has also been work marked by a lot of laughter, and some breakthroughs, and moments of effort, courage and creativity that take you by surprise. I hoped to come out of the book with some of these positive things in there too. And I didn’t have to try very hard. They were all there, as soon as the characters came to life.

What’s pleased me about early responses to the novel (reviews here for example) is the warmth people feel for the book’s narrator, Jason. I didn’t know if that would happen. He loses control, acts violently and doesn’t seem especially sorry about it. But there is another side to him, that’s typical of a lot of young people with behavioural difficulties. In spite of the low horizons of their lives, the cut-off options and unfinished stories, some, like Jason, manage to hold on to a fierce sort of cleverness and humour. Things which deserve to be celebrated…not just numbed out of them.

The back of the book says it’s “A searingly honest, funny and totally brilliant debut novel”. You don’t have to believe that. It’s just what the publishers are saying! Have a read, if you can, and decide for yourself.