Presenter: Welcome to Ask the Author, the podcast where kids get to ask published authors how they write their stories.
Presenter: In this episode, we are asking the author, Katherine Rundell, all about how she works out what happens in her stories throughout the plot. Hi, Katherine.
Katherine: Hello, I’m Katherine Rundell and I write stories for young people. Today I’m going to talk to you about plot and about how I go about devising the plot for my stories, in particular my book, The Explorer.
Presenter: The Explorer is about four children who survive a plane crash in the Amazon rainforest.
Presenter: They must navigate the Amazon, find food and build a raft, and along the way they discover a hidden city and a mysterious explorer who helps them to survive.
Presenter: Let’s hear Katherine read a short extract from the story.
Katherine: "The pilot begins first of all to cough and then to shake. His hand jerked and the plane dipped suddenly to the left. Someone screamed behind Fred. The plane lurched away from the river and over the canopy. The pilot grunted, grasped and wound back the throttle. ‘Is there something I can do?’ Fighting for breath, the pilot shook his head. He reached over the control of the panel and cut the engine. The roar ceased. The nose of the plane dipped downwards and the trees rose up. ‘What’s happening?’, said the blonde girl sharply. ‘What’s he doing?’ The little boy in the back began to shriek. The pilot grasped Fred’s wrist hard for a single moment and then his head slumped to catch the dashboard. And the sky, which had seconds before seemed so reliable, gave way.
Presenter: We’ve got questions for Katherine about how she creates a plot for her stories. So let’s Ask the Author!
Presenter: Where did you get your inspiration for where it was set?
Katherine: Thank you for such a brilliant question. I was very lucky in that I went to the Amazon rainforest and I swam in the Amazon River and I ate the tiny grubs that feature in The Explorer. You can always write a story, I think, without going to the place you’re writing about because other people have gone there before you. You can read books, you can watch movies. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, I think it is a brilliant thing to be able to go to the place you are writing about so that you can experience the smell and the texture, the feel, the heat on your skin. And I tried every single day I was there to make notes, to capture what it was like to be in the rainforest, to put it down on paper. And when I wrote the book.
Presenter: Where did you get the inspiration for Max to be bitten by the red ant?
Katherine: The idea for Max to be bitten by the bullet ants actually came from something that happened while I was in the Amazon rainforest, in that we were shown many things that we had to be careful of. We had to be careful about swimming where there were piranha. We had to be careful of the caiman, which are sort of alligators. But one of the things you have to be most careful of are the bullet ants. They are so small and they look so harmless, but their bite can be fatal. And I found them in some ways more frightening than the caiman or the piranha, because you would never be entirely sure if they weren’t perhaps somewhere nearby. So I took that fear that I had while I was sleeping in my hammock in the middle of the rainforest and put it into the story.
Presenter: Why did you make the plane crash?
Katherine: Why did I make the plane crash? I know it seems quite a brutal way to begin a book with a lot of chaos and fire. I think it was because I wanted to make sure that these young people were alone in the Amazon. Because if there had been an adult, the adult might have insisted that they take charge. I wanted to create a huge adventure story which pushed the heroes of the book right to the very edge of their capacities, so that they would discover what they were capable of. I think all young people are capable of so much, they are often underestimated, and I wanted to write the kind of adventure story that would unlock the potential for huge endeavour and huge power that these children have.
Presenter: I love twists because twists are really good for a story, because it makes you want to keep on reading the story. So it’s pretty smart for an author to put a twist in a story. I want to ask, why do they come up with those twists in the first place? Like, they must have a really good imagination.
Katherine: I love that question. Twists are one of my favourite parts of writing and of reading. I love the idea that a book is something that can shift in your hands and surprise you, but a book is something that can suddenly bite. One of the ways that a lot of writers write twists is they write the story and then they go back and put in the twist later. When you get to the end of a book, you can see it far more clearly than you could at the beginning. So some of the twists, the reveals, the secrets and surprises that I have in my stories, I actually went back and put in later by taking out information, so that there would be things that would be to the reader enough of a shock to grab them by the wrist and pull them through the next chapter.
Presenter: Do you ever change the order of things that happen in your books? And is it hard to find the right order or do you find it easy when you know the book you want it to be?
Katherine: I think that’s such an intelligent question because one of the crucial bits of a story is the order in which things happen. And I often go back as I am redrafting a book and change the order in which things happen, because there might be things that you want to hold back for the climax, or things that you think will engage people so much that you want to put them at the beginning in order to draw them in. When I write my stories, I tend to sketch out the plot at the beginning. But then once I finish them, I rewrite them over and over, maybe 15 or even 20 times. And while I’m doing that, I often take big chunks of the book and move it around. And so I think it’s such an impressive way to be thinking about story, to be understanding that you don’t have to tell a story from the beginning to the end. You can move things around and moving it around changes the flavour of the book. It’s such a brilliant way to think about stories, to think about what might be different. Whenever you finish a story, think, what would I have changed if I was the author?
Presenter: Finally, let’s ask Katherine for her top writing tip.
Katherine: I think my best tip for beginning as a writer is to ask yourself, what if? Come up with a series of questions that could begin a story. So what if every cat in Britain was going to come through the doors of your school to take over the school? What would you do? What if every Thursday you could read each other’s thoughts? What if every time you sneezed, a fairy came out of your nose? And write five or ten what ifs, write them fast, and then sit back and look at them and pick one. Start from there with that question at the start of the page. That, to me, has often unlocked the beginning of a story. And then the other great piece of writing advice that I was given by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, our current Children’s Laureate, who is a great genius, and he said this. “If you want to be a writer, keep a diary”, but a diary is a very difficult thing to keep, so if you don’t happen to be someone who can keep the kind of diary where you write down everything you did that day keep a diary when you’re only allowed to write one sentence a day, and it’s the most interesting thing that day, the funniest, the saddest, the strangest, something you heard on the bus, a joke you read, a dream you had. And then at the end of the year, you’ll have 365 interesting sentences and it will have taught you to pay attention to the world and to catch it and put it down on paper. Because a writer is a person who watches the world and thinks about it and catches it and puts it down on paper for potentially thousands of years to come.
Presenter: Today we learned about how authors plot their stories.
Presenter: And how changing even just one thing can make a whole new story.
Presenter: I think I’m going to start keeping a short diary.
Presenter: There are more authors answering questions on writing stories.
Presenter: Just head to Bitesize Primary English to find them. Thanks for listening.
Description
In this episode of Ask the Author, Katherine Rundell answers pupils’ questions about plot and how she decides what happens in her stories.
Katherine talks about her book The Explorer, an exciting adventure about four children who survive a plane crash in the Amazon rainforest.
She explains how real-life experiences can inspire big story moments, why twists keep readers turning the pages and how changing the order of events can transform a story.
Listen out for Katherine’s top tip on how to decide what happens in your own story!
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