Sally Green
About Author
Sally Green, whose debut Half Bad was published in 2014, studied mining geology at a university in London before moving into accountancy in Lancashire. She left work when she became pregnant and did some further studying, an Open University courses in social sciences, before spending a weekend at a story telling festival inspired her to sit down and write her own story. Her first novel formed the basis for Half Bad, which she went on to write after three creative writing courses through Open University. Her trilogy has now been optioned in several countries and has attracted a film deal with Fox 2000, which was behind the Twilight films.
Author link
Interview
HALF BAD
PUFFIN
MARCH 2014
Sally Green's debut novel Half Bad, a story of witchcraft thriving in our everyday world, is already attracting the kind of attention that JK Rowling was enjoying in the early days of Harry Potter, although unlike JKR, Green had already signed a film deal and earned a rumoured 1m in advance of her debut's publication. Half Bad is, therefore, expected to be 'big' and to attract both teenaged and young adult readers aged 13 years upwards.
Green's novel grapples with a world in which witches live side-by-side with non-witches and are fiercely divided into their clans of black and white witches. Nathan, the child of a black witch and a white witch, belongs in neither clan and his life is made miserable by the 'Council' of white witches who control his every move. At age 14 he is kidnapped by the Council and imprisoned in a cage to prevent him being given his 'three gifts' when he turns 17, which he needs to become a fully-fledged adult witch.
Green says she is still grappling with the speed of moving from unknown to the 'new writer on the block'. "I still don't quite understand how it's all happened," she says. "At school I was interested in reading but I never felt I had much imagination and was encouraged into the sciences and studied mining geology." From there, she went on to accountancy and entered the world of finance. "I enjoyed my work initially. I wasn't doing any writing at all although I always enjoyed the written part of my job, and very little reading."
Then, aged 40, having had enough of the stress of her job, she left work and became an 'earth mother', looking after her new son, keeping chickens and growing vegetables. As he got older, she started to look for something else to "keep my brain going".
"I read a lot and did some Open University courses in social sciences and I started to go to story telling festivals." After one weekend immersed in folk lore and stories, she decided to write down an idea she had had for a story. She says, "I thought I'd have finished with it in an hour or two but I became obsessed by the story and the character. By the end of the week, I had decided I was writing a novel." While her first attempt - also a witch story - was rejected by agents, it was enough to make her decide to sign up to a creative writing course.
"I did three writing courses in the end and although I thought it impossible to ever get published, I decided that that was what I would try to do; I didn't want to go back to working in finance. I looked at my story again in April 2012 and knew I could do better. So I left the first story and started again."
This time last year, spring 2013, she was still committed to the writing course but had also completed the draft of Half Bad. She says, "My starting point was the first book and I kept a number of the original characters including Nathan, the main character in Half Bad, and his half siblings Deborah, Arran and the evil Jessica.
Green says, "The main difference between my first and second book was that the first story was from a girl's point of view while Half Blood is written from a boy's perspective, Nathan's. It meant I could make it a lot more edgy, gritty and dangerous and by then, because of my writing course, I knew I could do it.
"I had also learned my style. The first book I wrote was a love story which I realized wasn't really my strength; the second is more about psychology and what is going on with Nathan and his troubles."
The starting point for Half Blood was the idea of three gifts that witches receive on their 17th birthday, through which they make the transition into adulthood as a fully fledged witch. Without these gifts, they die. Other than that, Green says, "I'm not good at plotting things in advance, I'm very character-driven and when I started Half Bad, the world was formed as I wrote the novel. I had the mood and the feel of the world inside my head."
Green's awareness of witch folk lore focused on the idea that there are white and black witches. "One is meant to help and the other is meant to be evil and cruel, but I thought it would be fun to play with that; once you get to know the witches on both sides, you realize that they are very similar. There are some nice black witches and some horrible white witches, but the society they have developed pushes people to behave in certain ways."
A lot of the issues she explores in the novel - particularly the divide between white and black witches - came from her course in social sciences. "We explored issues like judging people, dividing them into 'us and them'. Should you label people and then judge them from that label, and does how you label people affect how they see and think about themselves?", she says.
Nathan's treatment at the hands of the white witches includes being imprisoned in a cage for several years, alongside beatings and torture. Green explains, "I did a lot of thinking around the idea of nature versus nurture. As I wrote, I had to think how Nathan would develop given how he is treated. The whole point of writing is putting yourself in that person's mind and I spent a lot of time imagining what Nathan would do in various circumstances."
Despite the clear distinctions Green is making between the world of white and black witchcraft in her novel, she says she was not reflecting any "political idealogy". "It was all in my imagination and I didn't have any racial issues in my mind either, I was thinking more about the characters as I was writing them and the absolute animosity between the white witches and the black witches; not in colour terms but in their levels of ignorance about each other, what is going on on the other side."
Nathan is brought up as a white witch but his treatment is based on assumptions about black witches and not on experience. "It's a problem that pervades society in terms of judging other nationalities on the basis of very little knowledge," Green says. "I started off wanting the white witches to be the 'good guys' and we'd learn gradually how horrible they were, but when I was writing they fell fairly quickly down the moral slope."
During her creative writing Green had taken the time to catch up on reading some contemporary YA fiction. "I went through the Carnegie Medals list and read some really good books by people like Aidan Chambers and Patrick Ness and re-read some of the books I read as a teenager, like Catcher in the Rye and authors like Camut. I enjoyed them even if they were quite heavy and depressing and it made me realize that you can't shy away from things like that when you're writing for this age group," she explains.
"I also decided that I didn't want to shy away from the violence. It's important to show it as being horrific and if you shy away from it, you're saying it's not that important but it is important to show it as terrible and to show the result of it on Nathan. He can recover quickly physically but I wanted to show how he would cope mentally. When Nathan does eventually escape from the Council, he's not happy, he's traumatized."
She was also determined to "anchor the story in reality" so the world she describes is our recognisable, everyday world in which witchcraft intrudes, and she is familiar with all the real life settings of the novel. "Knowing your setting well lets you loose with your imagination, you don't have to worry about the practical location of things," says Green. "Keeping as many things real as possible helps to anchor the story in reality. Virtually every location in the book I know and have been to, the wood by Nathan's gran's house is a wood by my son's previous school where I spent many hours walking, and the place I mention in Switzerland I know very well." Wales, which also features strongly, "is somewhere I used to go and a lot of the writing processes, thinking about the book, happened while I was walking in Wales."
While plotting might not be important to her, Green already knows what the end point of the story and the trilogy will be but she is giving little away at this stage.
Much of her writing is done in total silence, late at night - the quiet times after her 11-year-old son is asleep. "If I am writing at night and it's going well I will carry on until 2am. I drink gallons of coffee and the evenings is when I feel at my most creative. During the day I'm busy doing the school run, ironing etc."
Given her own experiences, would she recommend doing a writing course to other budding writers? "Yes", she says, "there are things you can learn and it can be great fun, although the costs have gone up considerably since I did my course so you'd be making a very different decision now." The Open Universtiy course she paid 800 for now costs nearer 2,000. Perhaps the best thing to do is to "find writing buddies to give you feedback - and you need to learn to take it on the chin when things need improving in your own work!", she adds.
For now, after a pre-publication tour in the UK and US ("which was brilliant") and the buzz of the film deal, Green is concentrating on writing book two. Half Wild is out in 2015.
Half Bad
