Transcript
Speaker: Ooh, a spicy question.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
Speaker: Like you can fix plot holes, but if the writing... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
Speaker: So it's kind of, it's kind of a gamble.
Speaker: Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
Speaker: My guest this week is a poet and a novelist whose debut novel Crossing the Line, which is written in the fascinating style of narrative verse, came out earlier this year.
Speaker: It's Tia Fisher.
Speaker: Hi, welcome.
Speaker: Tia Fisher Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: I'm still sort of, I'm going to play that poet and novelist over and over again.
Speaker: I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker: This is so brilliant.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Oh, you're so welcome.
Speaker: Thanks for coming on.
Speaker: I wasn't actually familiar with that sort of narrative, the style that you use in Crossing the Line.
Speaker: For me at least, I feel like a part of me feels like you kind of have to see it to fully understand it.
Speaker: But since this is an audio only podcast, how would you describe the style of Crossing the Line?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We'll start off with it's a story.
Speaker: So it follows all the same rules as an ordinary story.
Speaker: You know, you're hitting the same beats.
Speaker: So midpoint happens and all the rest of it.
Speaker: But it's told in a series of snippets.
Speaker: And each snippet is what we'll loosely call a poem, but it's free, free, free verse.
Speaker: And some of the poems...
Speaker: kind of try to work in a visual sense as well as a semantic sense so that, you know, it might say the word holes.
Speaker: Well, yeah, for the start of it, it says the word holes and the O in the holes is a big O of a hole.
Speaker: And then there'll be the bit where he's talking about going on a roller coaster and some of the some of the words actually go on the roller coaster with you.
Speaker: So some of it, not all of it, is kind of it does what it says on the can.
Speaker: And so it works on more than one level.
Speaker: And to look at it, if you just flick through the pages, it does sort of look like a collection of poems, but when you read it, it does read like prose, as you say, like it's a normal, it follows a lot of the traditional narrative structure rules.
Speaker: Everything goes from one thing to the next.
Speaker: The way I think about it, or I've laterally started thinking about it, is that they're kind of like stepping stones.
Speaker: So there you are, you're crossing over the rushing stream and you're going from the key point or emotion or action point to another key emotion point.
Speaker: And if you were writing a prose novel, you're
Speaker: you would kind of have to fill in more of the water rushing around.
Speaker: You would have to have this segue from one point to another.
Speaker: And the joy of a verse novel is that you don't have to have that.
Speaker: You're going to get your reader to do a lot more of the filling in as the other stuff.
Speaker: They have to sort of bring their own experience to it.
Speaker: and do a lot more of the working out of what's happened between the next one point and the next.
Speaker: But I think that that is one of the values of a verse novel as well, that it does do that.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's, it's almost like a new experience.
Speaker: There's not, um, as someone who reads mostly prose, uh, it, it's kind of a fun thing.
Speaker: It's almost like a puzzle.
Speaker: Um, there's some pages where you're literally like turning the book or turning your head around to be able to read certain things and that it all kind of adds to it in a way.
Speaker: How did you get into writing in, in like in that style?
Speaker: How did you kind of discover this style?
Speaker: There are two words for that.
Speaker: And I think you'll find those two words repeated a lot among British first snufflers, of whom there are still fairly few.
Speaker: And the two words are Sarah Crossan.
Speaker: I owe it all to her.
Speaker: I love you, Sarah Crossan.
Speaker: She...
Speaker: was a teacher and went over to teach in the States.
Speaker: And in the States, a verse novel is much more of a thing than it is here.
Speaker: It started off in the, I'm trying to remember, early 90s, I think, with a book called Making Lemonade,
Speaker: which was written, by the way, and this is very interesting for me, especially to encourage teen young mothers to read.
Speaker: And that's important, but it was made to be accessible.
Speaker: Anyway, so it comes from a whole history of kind of Homeric epic poetry, but it ended up there at this book called Making Lemonade.
Speaker: And Sarah Crosser went to the States, taught in the States,
Speaker: was exposed to this wonderful, wonderful style of writing and bought it back here and wrote the most amazing book.
Speaker: I don't know whether she still loves it, but I still love it.
Speaker: I do love it.
Speaker: I'm holding my copy now.
Speaker: I've got...
Speaker: I've got my copy, which says on the fly loop, it says the way to water.
Speaker: And it goes to Stan with very warm wishes, Sarah Crossan, because I was so embarrassed when I went to see her.
Speaker: I couldn't say it was for me.
Speaker: I felt that I had to say it was my son.
Speaker: Now I know it will be fine, but right back then.
Speaker: And that was published in 2012, but I didn't read it to about 2015 or something like that.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And I read that, didn't know, like you, I didn't know anything about verse novels.
Speaker: I didn't know they existed.
Speaker: And I read it in one sitting.
Speaker: I could not get up from the sofa before I'd finished it.
Speaker: And I cried and experienced all these amazing things with this immediate voice and the simplicity of writing, this distillation of what's happening and the emotion.
Speaker: And Sarah Crossan has this wonderful sort of slightly underwritten style that
Speaker: And then I went back to my work in progress and thought, well, it was a prose book.
Speaker: I saw that's a lot of rubbish, isn't it?
Speaker: And it was actually.
Speaker: It was.
Speaker: To be fair, it was a load of rubbish.
Speaker: And I thought, well, I wonder.
Speaker: I used to be a poet.
Speaker: I used to write poetry.
Speaker: I wonder if I can somehow blend the two.
Speaker: And I tried.
Speaker: And it was like skating down a frozen river.
Speaker: It was just like, oh, my Lord.
Speaker: I can't skate, by the way.
Speaker: That's why I imagined skating.
Speaker: Skating.
Speaker: would be like if you could do it right it suddenly felt freeing it's like whoosh whoosh whoosh I can do this this is me yeah it's not it's not necessarily my voice but it's my vehicle it's it's it's you know it's how I can get from A to B in the way I want to do it
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So the shoe fit as it were.
Speaker: It did.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Do you think, I was going to ask, so you were writing a more traditional style of prose beforehand?
Speaker: I was.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Would you ever go back to that?
Speaker: Oh, interesting question because I have.
Speaker: The book I'm working on now is a prose.
Speaker: And there's a good reason for that.
Speaker: And it's because I'm doing the MA in writing for young people at Bath Spa.
Speaker: I'm just about to finish it, much to my sadness.
Speaker: It just has been the best experience ever.
Speaker: Anyway, so there I was in the first term of that, and they do this –
Speaker: part of this module called, we call it Ages and Stages.
Speaker: It's where you sort of look at lots of different ways of writing for young people and you're encouraged to free yourself from the fetters of where you were before and try something new.
Speaker: And they gave us this writing exercise, which was about one character describing another.
Speaker: And I thought, okay, well, I could do this in verse.
Speaker: I mean, to be honest, I could do this standing on my head in verse and it would be really easy and very effective.
Speaker: And everyone would go, whoa, verse, how wonderful.
Speaker: And I thought, well, no, that's a bit stupid really, isn't it?
Speaker: Because I'm here to learn.
Speaker: So I thought, well, let's on this particular exercise, let's get as far from my comfort as I possibly can.
Speaker: I'm going to write prose, which I haven't touched for years.
Speaker: And I'm going to write historical prose.
Speaker: because I've never written historical.
Speaker: And I'm going to write young.
Speaker: I'm going to write middle grade.
Speaker: And I'm normally a teen YA writer.
Speaker: And I'm going to have one person who's my protagonist describing a disabled character.
Speaker: because I wanted to know how I could write inclusivity into a historical novel and still be okay for readers of today.
Speaker: And I wanted to do that while I had the support of the MA around me and all the feedback from my tutors and all the wonderful, wonderful help they can give.
Speaker: So that's what I'm doing right now.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I think it's, I think it's so useful to try styles that you're not, you're not like practicing that you're not comfortable in.
Speaker: I think I've done it a few times.
Speaker: Um, and I usually come out of it thinking I'm, I'm probably not going to suddenly jump into that new thing that I've been trying, but I've learned so much from doing that, that I will take lots of little pieces back to my comfort zone and I, and kind of expand that out of that.
Speaker: Is that kind of
Speaker: Did you get that kind of feeling from doing that?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Although I actually do hope that this, this is a, this is a whole book now.
Speaker: Oh, great.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I am hoping it's highly unlikely to be the next one or this, you know, the author brand business will, will get in the way of that.
Speaker: But, you know, consider my draw for a number of years.
Speaker: The second world war isn't going anywhere.
Speaker: Hopefully.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it can sit there until it's the right time for it to be published.
Speaker: And I love it to pieces because –
Speaker: I was editing Crossing the Line while I was doing the MA.
Speaker: And it would have been, you know, you have to work on a manuscript, you have to decide what you're going to do.
Speaker: And doing two grimly, gristly, realistic, current affairs-y verse novels would be impossible.
Speaker: So it would have done me in.
Speaker: So this was, it sounds a bit weird, but The Second World War was my little, little pearl of joy.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You have to wait until you read it and you'll understand.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Whatever floats your boat.
Speaker: Let's go back to, to crossing the line quickly.
Speaker: The, just talking about the story and stuff, you said you are predominantly a sort of YA writer and the story is about a teenager in a, with a very difficult kind of family life that kind of gets led down a,
Speaker: bad criminal path.
Speaker: The story itself is very real and grounded, which at first I thought, having sort of seen the book and you actually showed it to me when we met it at launch.
Speaker: And I, at first I thought it's, it's kind of strange to have this very real and grounded source material sort of basis for the book juxtaposed with this rather whimsical styling.
Speaker: I mean, there's even- Whimsical?
Speaker: Now there's a word.
Speaker: Yeah, because I mean, there's, you know, there's paragraphs where the paragraph is shaped like a roll of toilet paper or like boxes stacked in a tower.
Speaker: But weirdly, like going through the book, it really adds something.
Speaker: And it's, you know, like the moments where you do have to kind of rotate the book around to read it.
Speaker: There's something about that, which feels almost interactive, like more interactive than a normal book.
Speaker: And it kind of, I guess in some ways it forces you to stop and really process the
Speaker: the thing you're reading and the scene that you're in, in that moment.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess you can't, I mean, we all do this.
Speaker: We all skip bits of description, don't we?
Speaker: No, I would never.
Speaker: Apart from the very best books like yours, Jamie, we will skip a little bit of description every so often.
Speaker: I don't think you can really do that.
Speaker: I mean, some reader will come along and say, I skip most of it, actually.
Speaker: But, you know, I don't think you can really do that.
Speaker: And like you say, you have to work that little bit harder in some ways so that it does kind of engage you.
Speaker: But I mean, I've had the best feedback on this book.
Speaker: I am so excited.
Speaker: And this is something which I didn't know before.
Speaker: When I started writing it, I knew it had to be a verse novel.
Speaker: And I knew it had to be a verse novel because verse novels are accessible because the person I was writing for was a 14-year-old boy.
Speaker: But I didn't know how successful that strategy was going to be because I'm getting now, I'm getting these amazing feedback.
Speaker: People sending me shots of their teenage children reading going,
Speaker: Oh, so-and-so hasn't read a book for two years.
Speaker: And I gave him yours and he's reading it.
Speaker: And it just seems to engage people, this format.
Speaker: I think the combination of, as you said, this very grounded, very real story and this playful, fast reading, scrolling format is working really, really well.
Speaker: I'm very excited.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think there's also something about, I have a few books where it's very small font size and there's not much spacing and you open the page and it's just, it looks like a wall of text.
Speaker: But with yours, it's, and I don't want to say blank space because it's not blank space.
Speaker: Cause it's not, that's, we call it white space.
Speaker: White space.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I was going to say negative space, like the artsy version.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, opening the page, there's something very welcoming about you kind of flipping the page and being like, oh, there's actually not much, you know, there's not many words here.
Speaker: I'll just flick through this one and then it's, oh, no, I'll just do the next one and the next one and the next one.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: My total hero, Jason Reynolds.
Speaker: Do you know Jason Reynolds?
Speaker: I know of Jason Reynolds.
Speaker: I'm not too familiar.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So he's a first novelist and he was also the equivalent of the poet laureate in the States a couple of years back.
Speaker: And he is, I mean, he's a demigod, frankly, but he's got this great YouTube clip where he says, right.
Speaker: So talking about trying to get young people to read and trying to get young people who are very disengaged with reading and the whole educational process to read.
Speaker: Well, you're using the wrong tactic.
Speaker: If somebody's afraid of dogs, you don't bring a pit bull into their house and expect them to spend time with it.
Speaker: Well, if that's the case with young people and reading, then don't bring these massive great tomes of, as you say, tiny fonts and closely written books.
Speaker: Bring in, and he calls it the palm-sized pup.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: The palm-sized pup of a verse novel.
Speaker: Put that into their hands.
Speaker: It's friendly.
Speaker: It's friendly.
Speaker: It's, you know, it's non-aggressive and just beguile them and get them to have the satisfaction of finishing a page, of finishing a chapter, of finishing a book, finishing a book in two days, in one day.
Speaker: You know, just the amazing sense of achievement from someone who has struggled with reading and hasn't fallen in love forever.
Speaker: with stories.
Speaker: That's an incredible thing to be able to do.
Speaker: And he does it in spades.
Speaker: He's just brilliant.
Speaker: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker: That's a nice metaphor as well for it, comparing it to fear of dogs and things like that.
Speaker: Speaking of the book, I was interested, because you did mention as well that with the MA that you're doing, you're sort of looking at writing inclusivity and making books.
Speaker: You're obviously quite aware of sensitivity in terms of that thing.
Speaker: I saw you worked with
Speaker: Was it the Children's Society?
Speaker: Yeah, I worked with the Children's Society.
Speaker: So what we haven't mentioned so far is that the book is based on the true story of what happened to one of my best friend's sons, who's the same age as my eldest son, went off the rails and we didn't know what it was.
Speaker: And then she, my friend, found out what it was and told me and said,
Speaker: I'd never heard of county lines.
Speaker: That was back in about 2018, something like that, 2019.
Speaker: And I looked around and there was pretty much nothing, nothing on the shelves about county lines.
Speaker: And as we all know, people need to see themselves reflected in books, you know, mirrors and sliding doors and all that stuff.
Speaker: So I started researching.
Speaker: And first of all, I researched with a film director called Henry Blake, who's made an amazing film.
Speaker: called County Lines.
Speaker: He used to work in a pupil referral unit.
Speaker: So I spoke to him and then it was all so incredibly scary that I actually didn't write about it for a long time because like you said, the sensitivity thing, I thought, well, I don't have...
Speaker: I don't have the right to do this.
Speaker: Although I had, my friend's son really wanted me to do it.
Speaker: He really wanted to tell me his story because he wanted other people to be able to at least look into the gaping chasm of what they might be getting into and make a decision based on that.
Speaker: Anyway, I ran away from it because I was too scared and I thought I couldn't do it.
Speaker: And then, no, I did, I did.
Speaker: Before Hockey said they were interested, I did then go to the Children's Society because one of the things I found was a storyline, a really bad storyline, in one of the soaps whose name I can't remember.
Speaker: Oh, Hollyoaks, that's it.
Speaker: And I found out that they had consulted with the Children's Society.
Speaker: And the Children's Society are one of a few charities who do amazing work with county lines.
Speaker: They advocate for children and drive laws through, get in working with children, work right from the top to the bottom, trying to work with all the organisations who children will be involved with and trying to do what they call disrupting exploitation, which is totally important.
Speaker: Anyway, so they were brilliant.
Speaker: And I was allowed to interview one of the case workers and then the sensitivity read the book.
Speaker: when it was drafted to make sure that it was plausible and credible and didn't said all the right things, which fortunately it did.
Speaker: Yeah, that must have been daunting, having them kind of look over it.
Speaker: No, it never could.
Speaker: It shouldn't have been daunting.
Speaker: No, I was just so grateful.
Speaker: No, it's fine, because I talked to them before.
Speaker: Oh, right.
Speaker: I think if I hadn't had all the first-person input from my friend's son, I mean, he and I spent so long on the phone.
Speaker: There's a point in the book where fiction and reality part company because I needed to write a story and I needed it to do certain story things.
Speaker: But all the grooming, the part about the grooming was absolutely great.
Speaker: what happened to him.
Speaker: And so I knew that I was right there and I didn't really need to change anything at all.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Scary when you're, you know, you watch or you read something and people are like, it's like, oh, which part do you think is, is the real bit?
Speaker: Which part is the fiction part?
Speaker: And you're really hoping that certain bits of it are the fiction part, but.
Speaker: No, I'm afraid not.
Speaker: No, I'm afraid not.
Speaker: I'd love to dive into a bit of the, the business side of stuff, the publishing side of things.
Speaker: So narrative verse, as we've, as we've talked about, it's a little bit different.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: It actually reminds me in many ways of more kind of experimental literary fiction kind of stuff, as opposed to like what you would expect to see in the YA shelves or children's shelves.
Speaker: Was it difficult when you sort of were pitching this to agents?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So one of the reactions from agents and also from publishers when we went on sub was sort of, well, we've got a first novelist already, which is sort of hilarious because if you apply that to prose, it's kind of like, no, we've got somebody who writes prose already, you know, regardless of the fact that it's a different genre, that it's for a different age, it's completely different subject, you know, it,
Speaker: It's really, really strange how it's regarded as the one thing.
Speaker: And could you imagine a poetry magazine saying, sorry, we've already published a poem.
Speaker: So you get that answer.
Speaker: Although from the people who responded...
Speaker: both agents and publishers, if they were responding positively, then really it was all about the craft.
Speaker: It was all about, did I have the right character?
Speaker: Did I have the right scene?
Speaker: Was my writing good enough?
Speaker: So it was kind of like once I got through an initial barrier to talk to the people who wanted to,
Speaker: to talk back to me, then it was fine.
Speaker: You were on the same rules as any other writer, really.
Speaker: But there are still very few verse novelists.
Speaker: And I did a bit of a written essay.
Speaker: It's a big essay.
Speaker: They call it an article.
Speaker: For my MA, I've written, which is sort of an article, sort of an essay.
Speaker: And so I went out about this, about why there are not more verse novels.
Speaker: And I went out to talk to a number of writers, a number of agents, a number of publishers and booksellers and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: And it has been so interesting.
Speaker: And while I was talking to writers, I discovered more writers than I would expect who'd had the bums rush from their agents and had been told that that's a lovely book.
Speaker: I don't suppose you could write it in prose, could you?
Speaker: Which is a bit not the point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, my agent, I am the only verse novelist with my agent.
Speaker: And I was taken on by her pure serendipity, really.
Speaker: The lovely Eve White, the amazing, the formidable Eve White, took me on with a verse novel which had a character who played a cello in it.
Speaker: And it caught her eye because her daughter played the cello.
Speaker: I mean, how unplannable is that?
Speaker: It caught her eye, got over the first fence, and then wonderful.
Speaker: And then she supported me so much through two first novels that died on sub, and then finally the third one, which made it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So you sort of writing this one, crossing the line, did you write this and you were already with Eve throughout the kind of entire existence?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So there was always a sort of back and forth and you were working with her throughout the whole process.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: This, I signed with Eve.
Speaker: This is my fifth book.
Speaker: If we count the two prose books, which we will never, ever mention.
Speaker: I think they're a bonfire.
Speaker: I hope I've lost them in an old computer thing.
Speaker: So this is my third first novel.
Speaker: And Eve took me on for my first first novel back in 2009, 19, I think she took me on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then, yeah, that one was another issue based.
Speaker: I think I would always be, certainly for verse, I would always be an issue based writer.
Speaker: I can't help it.
Speaker: I get very hot under the collar about things.
Speaker: And it was about assisted dying, weirdly enough, which is one of the things I care about.
Speaker: Not the most obviously teen subject.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Which is probably why I died.
Speaker: And then the next novel was about climate change because I was doing lots of stuff with Extinction Rebellion.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And I was very hopeful at that point that, you know, we might make a difference.
Speaker: Just like many parts of Extinction Rebellion, I'm afraid that one died as well.
Speaker: But attached to that one when it went out was a little snippet about crossing the line.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: So it stayed.
Speaker: That was out on Sub.
Speaker: It had this little snippet because you know the way that – here's advice to writers.
Speaker: When you go on Sub, you have to have book number two.
Speaker: and it had better be something you like and that you actually want to do.
Speaker: Because what happened with Hotkey is that eventually, after sort of not responding for the best part of the year, they came back and said, well, actually, we don't want the one about climate change, but we're really interested in the one county line.
Speaker: Have you sold it yet?
Speaker: No, I hadn't sold it.
Speaker: I hadn't written it.
Speaker: I was getting nowhere on sub.
Speaker: I was desperately upset.
Speaker: that nobody wanted me, that I was a rubbish writer.
Speaker: And I thought, I can't do this grim book because it's so hard to write.
Speaker: It's so difficult.
Speaker: And then I found remarkably that when a, when a publisher said that they wanted me to write it, how, how much I could write it really, really quickly.
Speaker: I wrote it very, very quickly.
Speaker: Oh, that's great.
Speaker: When you, when you did time with Hotkey and you, you were working with, with an editor, was the editor familiar with the, with like narrative versus the style?
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: I mean, hockey are stunning.
Speaker: They are amazing.
Speaker: So, yeah, for many things, but for two things which matter for me, which is that they really support writing for teens.
Speaker: So, and that is, you know, that point between middle grade and YA,
Speaker: where there are not nearly enough books.
Speaker: And when I was getting rejected, I was getting rejected.
Speaker: A few of the rejections were, I'm sorry, there's no market for teens.
Speaker: And Hotkey really believe in teen writing.
Speaker: And they publish a lot of first novels.
Speaker: So they publish Elizabeth Acevedo in the UK.
Speaker: And they've got a lovely first novelist called John Shabani, who wrote a book called The Silver Chain, which is so beautiful.
Speaker: So yes, they know those novels.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: Cause I was worried that you, because as you say, personal stories, a rarer breed within publishing, I was worried that you would, it might be an awkward situation where you work with the editor and the editor is, I'm sure would be very keen and excited to learn, but you'd almost have to be teaching the editor how the system works.
Speaker: It never, it was never a problem.
Speaker: It,
Speaker: Being edited by the lovely Emma at Hotkey, I think has got to be one of the high points of my life ever, ever, ever.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: It was brilliant because the agent got my book.
Speaker: But then when I went to meet with Emma, she really got it.
Speaker: She understood it as well as I did.
Speaker: And she could see with a clarity that I couldn't see where the weak bits are, where the structure needed changing a little bit, where it would be better.
Speaker: And she...
Speaker: It was like having this sort of massive safety net underneath you that somebody really understood what you're trying to do and could probably see how you could do it better than you could.
Speaker: It was fantastic.
Speaker: But the other special thing about Hotkey was that when you, and especially about verse novels, is that when you get onto the copy edit stage, that's when it differs massively from a normal book.
Speaker: And it's...
Speaker: Honestly, it's really hard work because with a normal book, you're looking to make sure your apostrophes are in the right place and that you haven't contradicted yourself and that somebody hasn't suddenly grown a moustache.
Speaker: But when you're doing it for a verse novel, you're doing all of those things.
Speaker: But you're also counting line breaks between stanzas and counting whether your indent rule, which you stupidly set for yourself, which is what I did.
Speaker: I set the sort of indent rule, which I'm still seeing places where I got it wrong and I missed it, when your indent rule is happening.
Speaker: I first of all started crossing the line with putting each poem on a separate page and
Speaker: And then we got to the end of the edit and I planted in this manuscript.
Speaker: It was about 500 pages long.
Speaker: It really wasn't going to work at all.
Speaker: So we had to make this toilet roll decision that it was going to be sort of every poem was going to follow another with a certain number of line breaks in between.
Speaker: which I am so happy now that we did.
Speaker: I was forced to do it, but actually it works brilliantly, I think, in terms of the speed of read.
Speaker: It's just one long, continuous read with just chapter breaks.
Speaker: And I really like that, and I'm really, really happy with that.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I can only imagine the sorting out layouts and design for each page must be a whole... I guess it's actually weirdly similar to doing the graphic novel in that you're thinking very carefully about... I know that with graphic novels, there's a lot of emphasis on when you turn over, do you have the double spread?
Speaker: And when do you want that impact of the double spread and what panels are where and stuff?
Speaker: I hadn't thought about that before.
Speaker: There are many similarities between verse novels and graphic novels.
Speaker: And that is another one then.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: I mean, I decided that I had to have my chapter openings on the recto, not the verso, on the right page, not the left page.
Speaker: And you can't break stanza.
Speaker: So that is really, really difficult.
Speaker: There are so many rules that were put on there.
Speaker: So you can't break a stanza.
Speaker: You've got to have Leroy and you've got to end on this page.
Speaker: What happened was, I had a marvellous, marvellous editor at Hotkey.
Speaker: She and I spent two whole days sitting next to each other
Speaker: editing this on the hoof and I was having to occasionally actually make up poems on the hoof and take lines out and put lines in to make it all fit which yeah it really was a wow I think she went away and had a quite nervous breakdown afterwards
Speaker: I'm having a quite nervous breakdown just thinking about it.
Speaker: My God.
Speaker: And now that you, now that you, it seems obvious, but now that you've said it, I'm really like, wow, the, the complexity of copy editing, the like late stage of a book like this is must be, I mean, not even to mention just getting the formatting right on like a loo-roll shaped paragraph.
Speaker: The loo-roll.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I've got to say, I've got to confess the loo-roll.
Speaker: The loo-roll.
Speaker: So I'm, I'm what I would like to call an iterative writer.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That means that I come up with lots of good ideas quite late in the game and change my mind a lot.
Speaker: So the loo roll thing was right on the late stages, right on the really, really late stages.
Speaker: When I looked at this poem, which hadn't been shaped like a loo roll, I thought, oh!
Speaker: It's a loo roll.
Speaker: I remember sending it to editor and copy editor, expecting them to sort of turn around and go, oh, that's brilliant here.
Speaker: And my editor wrote back and said, that's the last time.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Leave it alone.
Speaker: She let me have it though.
Speaker: Bless her.
Speaker: She let me have it.
Speaker: I'm so pleased.
Speaker: Oh, it's great.
Speaker: It's iconic.
Speaker: Before we get onto the final question, I just want to quickly ask, would I like to get a bit of people's experiences and what they've kind of learned through publishing?
Speaker: This has been your debut novel, first time through the industry rollercoaster.
Speaker: If you could go back to when you first started writing Crossing the Line, would you do it all the same or would you do anything differently?
Speaker: I wouldn't embarrass myself so much.
Speaker: Why not?
Speaker: Well, I think back now to some of the things that I said, and everyone has been so polite and so nice.
Speaker: And as you go through the process and you realise that, you know, chasing up your agent and saying, have you done this?
Speaker: Can you chase them, please?
Speaker: Oh, God, did I say that?
Speaker: I actually look back at some of the emails before this interview.
Speaker: I look back at some of the email threads between me and my agent and various publishers.
Speaker: to get to remember what happened and I can't I'm just I'm so yeah um okay so learnings are you know that the publishing industry is extremely slow and that when they don't answer and then you can't chase them up it's actually not done you know and uh I don't know um try to learn to be patient and
Speaker: not change my writing quite so much quite so late in the game i think i would try to sort of decide when it was done and then walk away yes that's a learning yeah yeah because you i think there's i think most writers can continually edit and perfect something until it's gone past perfection and now it's your you know your continued editing is now chipping away at the kind of peak of what this once was
Speaker: Well, or the, you know, the critical part of your publisher.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Or you're just annoying everyone around you.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: Well, I think that that's great advice in and of itself.
Speaker: Which brings us to the final question, which as always is, Tia, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book would you take with you?
Speaker: You should see my face now.
Speaker: I'm wiggling.
Speaker: I'm trying to get out of this.
Speaker: Could you not revise this in the same way that this does?
Speaker: It says, we give you this and we give you that and then you go back.
Speaker: So could we not have a thesaurus given to us?
Speaker: A thesaurus?
Speaker: Because I'm going to be stuck there.
Speaker: No one's talking to me.
Speaker: I'm going to lose my language.
Speaker: What remains in middle age, I'm going to lose my language skills.
Speaker: I'm going to lose my words.
Speaker: And it's a good opportunity for trying to increase your vocabulary and your lexicon.
Speaker: So I was going to say I would like a thesaurus.
Speaker: And of course, that's very big.
Speaker: And once you've learned a page, you can use it for kindling or something.
Speaker: But then I thought, nah, because I love creative writing as well.
Speaker: So what I've got in front of me, right, I went through my shelves and I've pulled out one of my books is missing, so it can't be in this pile, but I've pulled out seven books.
Speaker: Do I get to tell you what they are or do I just have to tell you which one I'm going to close my eyes and shuffle and pick?
Speaker: Oh, is that how you're doing this?
Speaker: I'm going to.
Speaker: I'm literally.
Speaker: I've got them in front of me on a shelf.
Speaker: And I'm going to turn myself around three times.
Speaker: So I don't know which bit I'm grabbing out to.
Speaker: And I'm going to pick them.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Give us a quick run through of what they are.
Speaker: I'm going to tell you about that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Two Max Porters, Lanny and the thing with feathers, because they are beautiful and amazing.
Speaker: And he is the most amazing, intelligent person.
Speaker: Man, Katya Ballen's The Light in Everything.
Speaker: I love any of hers, but I've chosen this one because it's the most recent one I've read because she writes, oh, you have to pick up the Katya Ballen, read it, and then decide for yourself what it is
Speaker: that creates that amazing lyrical and yet sparse style.
Speaker: I think I know what it is, but it's just there's something that she doesn't include in her writing and it's just so beautiful.
Speaker: Weight of Water by Sarah Crossan because you know why.
Speaker: Two books which people might possibly not know.
Speaker: It's Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by John McGregor because of the style, his beautiful, beautiful lyrical prose.
Speaker: It's so amazing.
Speaker: And Evie Wilde's All the Birds Singing, which again, it's beautiful poetic writing, but...
Speaker: In that book, it's got the most amazing narrative structure.
Speaker: She's done something so clever with the timeline of how she writes it.
Speaker: I won't say what it is because you've got to go read it and discover it for yourself.
Speaker: It's brilliant.
Speaker: And Elizabeth Acevedo, the poet X, because she's just another genius.
Speaker: And it could have been the Jason Reynolds, but I chose Elizabeth Acevedo.
Speaker: So anyway, I love them all and I love them all because of their
Speaker: the voice the voice yes is all important okay so i'm gonna turn myself around three times i'm gonna not fall over i got my eyes closed well this is a first on the podcast yeah okay i have i've looked i've looked at what is it oh it's easy wild right there you go i'm taking easy wild all the birds singing amazing a great choice narrowed down in a completely random way
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much, Tia, for coming on the podcast and telling us all about narrative verse novels and your writing and your kind of journey through publishing.
Speaker: It's been really, really great chatting with you.
Speaker: Oh, it's been brilliant talking with you.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: I really enjoyed it.
Speaker: And if anyone's listening and they want to keep up with what Tia is doing, you can follow her on Twitter at Tia Fisher underscore, on Instagram at Tia underscore Fisher underscore writes, or you can head over to her website, www.tiafisher.com.
Speaker: Make sure you don't miss an episode of this podcast.
Speaker: You can support and follow along on Patreon, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
Speaker: And for more Bookish Chat, check out my other podcast, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes.
Speaker: Thanks again to Tia and thanks to everyone listening.
Speaker: We'll catch you on the next episode.
