Analysis of The End

Oh my god I haven’t written an essay since 1984 and that was about Fair Isle knitting. No, honestly, it’s true. Analyse my own work? It’s a double-edged sword, because of course as a writer I can’t help feeling like The Cat in The Hat – Look at me, Look at me, Look at me now! But on the other, hey, I write for teenagers, analysis implies my work is worthy of that kind of intellectual vivisection that may ultimately prove that the work is dead all ready, completely empty.

So maybe not analysis, maybe something like analysis. This extract is the beginning of what I hope will be a new novel for what is called the Young Adult market, by that they mean the tiny sliver of young people who read books after the age of 13, and who aren’t yet reading adult fiction. It’s a sort of twilight world where mention of sex still shocks (see last year’s row over Doing It) and nobody uses the f-word.

This extract is called The End but it doesn’t have a proper title. Actually titles are one of the things I am really rubbish at. My books all tend to have cop-out default titles, which are just the protagonists names.
 
Trouble is when I start writing I am never entirely sure how the story will pan out. And I’m currently about half way through this, in the swampy middle where you begin to wonder if you’re really doing the right thing, if these people you have created can go the distance. It’s written in chapters that have headings and this, the start of the story, is called The End.
 
I usually start a story with a protagonist and a situation and see where it goes. In this case it’s Josh, a good-looking mixed-race teenager whose mother dies at the start of the story. She has been ill with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Josh will have to go and live with his father in London. The story will cover how Josh and his father learn to understand each other and how he tries to get over an affair with his mothers’ carer as well as his mother’s death.

That sounds exceptionally dull. There is, I hope, much more for the reader. There’s a love affair with London and like life, lots of other things going on at the same time including a girl called Savannah and a horse called Tulip.

Upheaval and change and powerlessness are common themes in teenage fiction, young people cannot yet make their own choices and are often forced to live in the wrong place with the wrong parent or attend the wrong school. Teenagers are at the whim of others in a way that adults are not. The pressures of wanting so many different things, to please, to cut loose, to be trusted, to take risks, make it a very interesting age. There is also the sweetness of so many firsts, of finding and making relationships whether friends or lovers or re-establishing relationships with parents or grandparents.

And of course the tyranny of school. What adult would submit to school uniform, endless worksheets and awful food? For so many students life is unimaginable beyond school and the relief when you realise that in the real world no one is going to ask for your Key Stage Sats result or even GCSE results is tangible.  I do a lot of school visits and every time I thank my stars that I don’t have to go anymore.

So, back to The End, it was the death that drew me in of course, as I hope it will draw in readers. Most young people these days don’t loose their parents until adulthood, so the loss is more acute, And I suppose the kick-start came for this story on a holiday with my friend, a filmmaker who has lived for 10 years with MS. We go on holiday with our children every year and she brings along her carers. Last summer one of her carers was a young German girl. She was stunning in that blonde-haired brown-skinned outdoorsy way. I would go to the supermarket with her and the effect on local men was staggering.

There are other themes of course; I suppose people expect me to write about racism. But I think lots of white people forget that it is part of everyday life for many of us. We’re accused of always banging on about it, we should let sleeping dogs lie and not make a fuss. And most of the time we don’t. But it can’t be ignored.

Racism is funny, in Britain, as I get older I am more fearful of leaving London. The looks and stares and occasional refusals of service in restaurants no longer make me laugh. I love my heritage, and the viewpoint it gives me. But I no longer feel at home in the countryside, unlike my protagonist Josh, in The End who has to learn how to be a young black man in London. Josh goes from being one of us to one of them and back to finding himself. (I hope).

So that was the beginning. I like to think that any story I write is real but not real. Fiction writers do have to be convincing liars; their people and their actions must seem absolutely real.  I would never write about real people in real situations, it must be a bit like stealing someone’s soul. And I think it must be impossible to write truth because everyone’s truth is slightly different.

I like to see fiction as telling the truth with lies.

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