Sam Gayton

Sam Gayton

About Author

Sam Gayton, a former teacher, lives in south London where he works part-time as a journalist and a writer. In 2009 he completed the Writing for Young People MA at Bath Spa University. The Snow Merchant is his first book. He loves American novels, Italian food and the English countryside. When he's not writing, he likes playing old board games, strumming his guitar and joining as many rock bands as possible (currently at seven...)

Interview

THE SNOW MERCHANT

Andersen Press

September 2011

About The Snow Merchant:

Lettie Peppercorn lives in the cold land of Albion, running an inn and keeping her gambling father out of trouble. Forbidden from setting foot in the town outside, Lettie's only friends are a sick pigeon called Periwinkle, and the howling Wind. But when an Alchemist comes through the door, things change. It seems Lettie's life is strangely tied to the Alchemist's newest invention.


Q: How did you get into writing for children?

A: I trained as a drama teacher and worked as a secondary school teacher and that's when I started to come across these brilliant books for children that I hadn't read as a child, books like Holes (Louis Sachar) and Skellig (David Almond) and it made me want to go into writing rather than teaching.


Q: What's your day job?

A: I work part-time as a journalist, I write features for women's magazines like, 'my dog ate my grandfather', that sort of thing. (I'll be very sad if that particular story ever happens!) I write books for three days a week when I'm not working.


Q: Did you have a strange encounter with snow that gave you the idea for The Snow Merchant?

A: What sparked it was a snowfall. I was doing an MA in creative writing at Bath and the place I stayed at while I was there had a floor to ceiling sash window, it was gigantic and I would often look out when I got bored.

In January we had this incredible snowfall that came out of nowhere. Being a writer, I had been scurrying around inside my head for a few days and hadn't really noticed the weather. When I did, my first thought was, 'Where did that snow come from?'. And that gave me the main character in my book, the Snow Merchant, and the idea for the invention of snow.

Q: You have some strange and wonderful characters in this story, a bird made of stone, a woman with a teapot for a head and a man who becomes a bottle - which are your favourites?

A: I think that has to be the sailors in the story - the mean whalers who get roped along into going on this adventure to steal snow for themselves. I liked inventing how horrible they were and then giving them a horrible demise.

It's not being mean to be horrible to horrible people, that's what they are there for in books. Children have a very keen sense of justice and injustice and if they see someone behaving in a way that isn't fair, they want to see their comeuppance.


Q: Why did you decide to create a boy who can grow plants out of his body?

A: This boy, Noah, travels around a lot and gets very lonely. I like the idea of him having some kind of companion but he travels a long way, so what kind of companion could it be? Lottie, the main character, has an animal so I decided to give Noah a plant and invented this continent where everyone has a plant growing out of their shoulder.


Q: You use the idea of alchemy, the old 'science' of turning lead into gold. Did you need to do much research into this area?

A: I was thinking about it for a while after I read the work of poets like Shelley and William Blake at university. I like the idea of it being a metaphor, that your head is like a cauldron and you can put in your imagination, mix it around a bit and all the ideas that come out are new.


Q: What has been the best modern invention for you?

A: iPods and gadgets like that, they have changed my life. I do a lot of travelling on tubes and trains and I listen to music and it makes me feel like I am in my own film or something, especially when I listen to epic music on a subway; you're in a story and no one else realises it.


Q: Are you well travelled, then?

A: Unusually in today's world, I am not very well travelled, in fact I have never been out of Europe. But I do go to a lot of places although they are not very far away.

I really like Cornwall and Sussex and I love visiting cities like Bath and York. In my book they visit cities rather than countries as I don't have much experience travelling to other countries... Most of my travelling is in my head.


Q: What's top of your reading list?

A: Books like When You Reach Me (Rebecca Stead), it's so perfectly structured, and Private Peaceful (Michael Morpurgo), Holes (Louis Sachar) as well.

I guess you would call these books for young adults, although I never really think of books as being for 'teenagers' or someone else.

I also really liked an American book called Feed by MT Anderson. It was written about ten years ago and completely predicted the way the Western world was going with consumerism - the way we consume people's social lives and status. It predicted Facebook and things like instant messaging.


Q: Did you find The Snow Merchant a hard or easy book to write?

A: The only bit that was easy was the first 200 words and that hardly changed at all in the finished version. After that, it was hard to write because I was still trying to find the story.

It wasn't until I found out why Lettie needed the snow that the book started to write itself! But before that, I had written about 500,000 words - of which 45,000 words made it into the finished book.


Q: What is your advice to budding writers?

A: I think I'll go back to something Steve Jobs said, the founder of Apple who passed away recently. He made a speech to university students and his closing advice was, 'stay fresh', and I liked that.

That's how you need to be as a writer. You need to stay hungry for good stories - then they will come to you. Sometimes even silly things can turn into good ideas - having a boy with a twig growing out of his shoulder may sound stupid, but in this book, it worked.

Author's Titles