Meg Rosoff talked about writing for teens at the 2009 London Book Fair. Profwriting student Fiona Egglestone reports back.

Meg Rosoff is warm, engaging and darkly funny. She describes herself as ‘a cheerful depressive'. It’s this black humour which underpins her teenage fiction, and perhaps makes it so successful.

The prompt to write

She admits she started writing late – mainly because she didn’t think she could write a story due to problems with plot.  She was finally prompted to start writing after her younger sister died of cancer and she experienced what she describes as a carpe diem moment.  ‘At least if I die I will have done what I wanted to do'.

When her first novel, How I Live Now, came out Meg was in hospital herself; she’d also been diagnosed with cancer.  Perhaps it’s no wonder that she believes, like Hobbes, that life is ‘nasty, brutish and short'.  But this seemingly dark world view is tempered by humour: she says one of her first thoughts after the diagnosis was that she didn’t have to finish her second novel.

Ditch the rules

Rosoff had no expectations of How I Live Now.  ‘I assumed it would make no sense to anyone except me'. She hadn’t read children’s books for some time before she wrote it: she attributes part of her success to not knowing what the rules were.  She still doesn’t plan her novels: she sees writing as a voyage of discovery for the writer.  A sketchy first draft is part of the process of working her ideas out.

Writing for teens

Rosoff’s teenage narrators each have an authentic, distinctive voice.  She has the enviable ability to immerse herself in the character she is creating. ‘Elements of me are very connected to that time because I don’t feel I ever achieved proper adulthood'. She says that all her characters are her in some way. ‘What people call a voice is what you are. Even when you’re writing a character who is completely different from you, there are still some aspects of you that become part of that character'.

Dangerous world

She believes that children (and particularly teenagers) are living emotionally in a more dangerous place than adults.   ‘The intensity of feeling between 15–23 is incredible'.  It’s also a very narcissistic time: the teenage years are about the self.  Although parents or parent-figures appear in her novels, they’re very much on the periphery.

Daisy, the narrator of How I Live Now, is drawn from a lot of self-absorbed, self-obsessed people Meg came across in New York, she confides.  'It’s the little details that stick in your head and turn into character'.  How I Live Now juxtaposes the turbulence of adolescence with the need for survival: war breaks out not long after Daisy’s arrival in England.

Show don't tell

As the novel unfolds, Rosoff doesn’t just show us how Daisy changes – we hear it in her voice.  The narrative style develops during the course of the book to reflect the changes the Daisy goes through.   Rosoff says she’s been criticised for her treatment of Daisy’s recovery from anorexia.  But she points out that there is no room for eating disorders in Bosnia – or anywhere else where survival takes precedence over the culture of the self.  She argues that ‘the culture of paranoia comes out of our safe lives'.

Meg doesn’t believe there are any taboos in teen fiction, but the way information is handled is the difference between a good novel and a bad novel.  She derides the recent trend for ‘bucket list’ novels about terminally ill teens, which are full of cheap sentiment and bad writing.

Although her novels may deal with some bleak scenarios, there is always a hope beneath the surface.  She says, ‘My books are dark but there’s a kind of optimism – a ladder out of the hole.  That’s who I am.'