Steven Camden

Steven Camden

About Author

Steven Camden is one of the UK's most acclaimed spoken-word artists. He also writes plays and teaches storytelling. In 2013 he set up Bearheart, his own story-based creative projects company. Steven lives in London, but Birmingham is where he's from.

Author link

www.facebook.com/stevencamdentheauthor

Interview

TAPE

HARPERCOLLIN'S CHILDREN'S BOOKS

FEBRUARY 2014

In TAPE, a distinctive novel about music, love and destiny, two young people connect across time, each with a message for the other. In 2013, Amelia has just moved in with her nan after losing both her parents. She finds an old tape and when she listens to it, hears the voice of a boy, talking to her. Meanwhile in 1993, Ryan has lost his mother and is falling in love with a girl he has just met. He starts to record a diary on an old tape, but then catches the sound of another's voice, a girl, who seems to be speaking to him....

Debut author Steven Camden is already well-known as spoken word artist Polarbear but he says, "I always wanted to write a story, something that would be there after I'd finished the telling of it." TAPE is his debut novel for young adults.

Camden says he "fell into" a career in spoken word while living in Birmingham. "I'd been doing some writing and rapping with some friends and then we saw an advertisement for the Orange Literary Festival Slam. To me that sounded like rapping but without music so we went along and I ended up winning a phone! I'd never had a mobile 'phone before and carried on the competition because I thought we could win a 'phone for all our mates!"

With several years of spoken word performances now under his belt, Camden acknowledges that his novel writing has been "massively informed" by his spoken word work. "What it has given me is a feel for the musicality of words, the tone and tempo of the piece I am writing. I felt that I was writing how I spoke."

Music featured "before, during and after" he was writing TAPE and he has created several different sound tracks to accompany the novel. In doing so, he has drawn on his own experiences as a young teenager as the year 1993, when we meet Ryan, was a year that was marked by music for Camden. "That was when music properly got to me, when there were certain albums that came out and I was buying music myself. It was a time when everything had a song attached. I remember taking nine hours to clean my room and listened to sound tracks the whole time and just getting lost in it. As I was writing the book, it felt so important that music helped shape it."

In TAPE, he wanted to develop a "gradual accumulation of the story, a feeling that it builds, rather than 'wham bam' action", and to have a real sense of time in both Amelia and Ryan's stories, "the sense that it is happening concurrently even though what happens is set years apart; I wanted the reader to feel they were there".

Although 'real time' can feel like nothing is happening, Camden says that's fine. "I didn't want every scene to start with something new, but to keep the sense of the familiar in each chapter so it doesn't feel as if the main characters are so far apart.

"I also wanted the sense of having space and time to find things out. Everything comes so immediately to young people these days; you can just go online and look things up, but Amelia likes the idea of having the time to find things out. She spends hours looking through her mum and dads' belongings, their old photographs and the music. She discovers new tracks and it's massively exciting for her."

For Camden, creating the structure of a novel isn't about plotting to reveal things but about maintaining the momentum, that sense of time passing. "I always knew Ryan was Amelia's dad and the story isn't meant to be building towards that denouement. I wanted you, the reader, to know as soon as possible what was going on and there's a section where Ryan is on a journey to the caravan park and Amelia is at home and she finds a photo of him and Nathan, her dad's stepbrother, together at the amusement park, so the reader knows who Ryan is."

Camden has even left out speech marks from the novel because he wants the reader to feel they are there, watching Amelia and Ryan, rather than observing them from outside. "I didnt even write it in chapters initially (although those have since been introduced) as I didn't want that sense of leaving something on a cliffhanger because it was the end of the chapter; I just wanted the day to end or the camera to cut off. I wanted reading this to feel like real life with a bit of magic sprinkled around the edges."

It presented challenges, he adds. "The story will have the same afternoon for Amelia and Ryan, but will be set 20 years apart, and that blurring of the time can take ages to get right. I wrote a lot, crossed out a lot, would go away and come back to it, write scenes and then leave them."

TAPE stretches across two decades and Camden also uses it to explore the idea of legacy. "It came down to parenthood, what stays behind and what doesn't. Ryan is making a tape for his mum, who has died, and he gives the remnants of that to his daughter in the future, who changes the way he's thinking. As a parent, I feel you can't sit down and tell your children what to do because no one can tell what pattern is going to emerge until you look back in time; then you can see the pieces coming together.

"I have a girl in the novel whose parents were the result of things coming together and learning this, she finds out about herself so it has more impact. For Ryan, his daughter from the future feeds into his narrative and validates what he's doing in his present."

Things are not always easy for the characters, Ryan and Amelia, and the novel explores how they handle what life throws at them, including the loss of parents and split families. Camden is again drawing on some of his own experiences here. "Living in a split family was a reality for me and for many people who are close to me, but I never felt that that was to the detriment; I was only aware that it was anything different when I went to other people's houses and found there was a neater structure.

"Sometimes that was good and sometimes it felt weird but in my family and among people I know, things are messy and that's not a negative word. You get more influences and more things poured in - things like dual heritage, split parentage, international clash of cultures - that feels like the most modern scenario, it feels more commonplace, but back in Ryan's time it was less common."

Social media has played an important role in the book's release and developing a following for Camden as an author. Publisher HarperCollins is now also developing an app as an extension of Ryan and Amelia's story, "a kind of scrapbook of tapes and images and scripts that people can contribute to", Camden says. "I was already a Twitter user and I have a Facebook page and I am doing more promotional stuff using social media but from what I see what people are still most interested in is the story; the social media just adds to the excitement around a book."

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