{Tour} Whisper to Me by Nick Lake (Author Interview + Giveaway!)

***INTERVIEW***

Hi, Nick! Thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. We’re excited for our readers to get to know you a little better. Let’s get started!

My favorite scene to write – and it might sound weird – was a really painful scene when Cassie and Julie are on a big wheel, throwing paper cranes down onto the town below. It’s kind of the emotional apogee of the book. I wrote it on a plane from Arizona to New York and was just in floods of tears. The businessman next to me was looking at me very strangely. For reasons that will make sense to anyone who reads the book, it hurt a lot to write – but in a cathartic way. And it poured out, the words all in a tumble, all in one long sentence, which is when it feels like writing is like playing music, or something.

Not really. I don’t usually enjoy the writing process to be honest. I think there are two kinds of writers: the ones who like the actual work of putting words on paper and if anything will put off completing a story; and on the other hand, the ones who feel the story in their heads like an infection, and want to get it out. I’m the latter kind. Once the story is there, I just want to get it out, and on the screen. It’s obsessive and not very fun. But then I always want to do it again. I guess it’s like running marathons, or getting tattoos.

I am in my writing space now. It’s seat B64 on the Great Western Railways train from London Paddington to the Cotswolds, where I live. I am wearing my Bose noise cancelling headphones, which are maybe the most important part of the ritual. The wifi sucks, which is perfect for my purposes. I turn it off on my laptop, plug in the headphones, and write. When I’m working on a manuscript, I spend an hour and a half in the morning, and the same in the evening, writing in this seat. Actually one good thing I’ll say about writing: I go into a kind of trance when I’m doing it; I just disappear and the character telling the story takes over. So I literally, often, open my laptop and then next thing I know I’m home, or in London. It just cancels out the time in between. Even great TV shows – which I watch a lot of on the train – can’t do that. I always get distracted. Writing erases the commuting time.

Oh yes. Cassie starts to hear a voice and I wanted that to play out in a credible way, in terms of her symptoms but also in terms of the help she gets. So that meant doing a lot of reading about voice hearing, and also talking to mental health professionals about the intervention that would take place. Luckily I didn’t have to research the location because Cassie lives in a New Jersey town that is quite closely modeled on the real New Jersey town where I worked for a summer, at the amusement park on the beach. In fact I did the job that “you” does in the book, delivering plush to the concession stands in a pick-up truck.

That is a good question. I think I’d introduce Cassie to Violet from All the Bright Places. I feel like they’d have a lot of support to give each other. They’d make amazing roommates at college. Actually that’s how I like to imagine them – living together, sharing books, writing for the college paper.

I was telling a colleague of mine – I’m a book editor by day – about the fact that I wanted to write. I started telling him the story I had in mind and he said, “don’t tell it to me, just write it. Get the first draft down on paper and it’ll be shit but you’ll have the story from start to finish, and then you can make it better.” So I did.

Favorite advice for aspiring authors? Don’t listen to any advice apart from what shines for you. Don’t listen to any stories except the ones that shine for you. Notice when something someone says makes an electric crackle in your brain. Notice when an idea does the same thing. Then chase that. Ignore everything else. Write 1,000 words a day. Don’t write 1,000 words a day. Keep a notebook. Don’t keep a notebook. It doesn’t matter. Just look for the spark.

100%. There’s a wonderful duology of British proto-YA novels that came out years before the whole YA thing and won a couple of prizes but never really broke through – they’re called The Sterkarm Handshake and The Sterkarm Kiss, by Susan Price, and anyone who loves YA, beautiful writing, romance, storytelling and, well, novels, should seek out copies. They’re about a woman from now who travels back in time to the border region of England and Scotland during the period when the border reivers were all killing each other. She’s attached to a project, using a time tunnel, to mine the past landscape for its resources. But she ends up falling in love with one of the men from the local fortified farm, Per, who thinks that she is a fairy who has come through the hill from fairyland. With major consequences for both of them.

It’s violent, exciting, vividly imagined, deeply moving, and morally complex, with both characters intrigued and appalled by each other, for different reasons. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I think the moment when Sinead O’Connor cries real tears in the video for ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ may be the most beautiful thing I know.

When I turned 35 I bought myself a skateboard and set myself the goal of learning to Ollie within a year. I didn’t quite manage it, but I can do it now (I’m 36 and a half)…

“Nick, what is the greatest invention in history?”

“Ice cream. Ice cream is the greatest invention.”

You’re welcome.

Thanks so much for stopping by, Nick! We had so much fun!