Lauren Child
About Author
Lauren Child grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire. She is the middle of three sisters and both her parents are teachers. She went to Art School in Manchester and London and has had a variety of jobs from waitressing to designing exotic, elegant lampshades and working as an artist's assistant to Damien Hirst.
Lauren Child is probably THE most talented, funny and individual picture book author/illustrator today. She burst on to the childrens book scene in 1999 with two picture books, 'I Want a Pet' and 'Clarice Bean, Thats Me'. Her fresh and funny books were an instant hit. In 2000 Lauren won the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal for 'I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato' and in 2002 'That Pesky Rat' won the Gold Smarties Award.
Lauren also published her first novel in the same year, 'Utterly Me, Clarice Bean', which was a runaway success and has been sold in ten foreign editions. A second novel, 'Clarice Bean Spells Trouble' was published in 2004 and 'Clarice Bean, Dont Look Now' followed. The wonderfully witty Clarice Bean and the ups and downs of her eccentric family have become household favourites with children all over the world.
Quentin Blake selected Lauren for inclusion in the Magic Pencil Exhibition (British Library), a gathering of the very best of current British children's illustrators, including Tony Ross, Angela Barrett and Raymond Briggs.
The animated series CHARLIE & LOLA on CBBC, produced by Tiger Aspect, launched in 2005 and has become one of the most popular series on tv and won several awards worldwide including a recent British Academy Award in November 2007.
Author link
rubyredfort.com; www.milkmonitor.com;
Interview
RUBY REDFORT: FEEL THE FEAR
HARPERCOLLINS CHILDREN'S BOOKS
NOVEMBER 2014
LAUREN CHILD, the creator of Charlie & Lola, has also developed a career in writing for older children. As well as her internationally-successful Clarice Bean series, Child is writing a series of books about a young teenage detective and brilliant code-breaker, Ruby Redfort (HarperCollins Children's Books), which is aimed at readers aged ten years plus.
The fourth book in the series, Ruby Redfort: Feel the Fear, has recently been published, in which Ruby Redfort - who had managed to escape a variety of deadly incidents in her previous adventure - now thinks she simply cannot die. The secret agency she works for are less convinced and label her a liability; Ruby is desperate to find a way back onto their books. Could a recent spate of thefts help her to regain her place as a trainee spy?
We were able to put some questions about the Ruby Redfort series to Lauren Child:
Q: What appeals to you about writing for older children, alongside your picture books?
A: When I began writing the Clarice Bean books, the character was younger but during the course of the series, gets older. Writing these books made me realise that I was interested in exploring more complicated ideas. I decided that I wanted to carry on writing for older readers, there is something freeing about it, although I would also continue to write for younger readers. You can explore ideas in a very different way when you're writing for older children.
Q: Why did you decide to write a series about a young detective, Ruby Redfort?
A: Ruby Redfort came from something I'd written in my books about Clarice Bean. In those books, Clarice is looking for a girl hero in a story so I created the Ruby Redfort character for her.
Then I got a lot of letters from readers who wanted to read the Ruby Redfort books -- but of course they didn't exist. I had never intended to actually write the books but because my readers asked to have them, and because Clarice's teacher tells her they are silly books and not worth reading, I started to write them. After all, why can't children just read what they want, just like adults do, even if the books are a bit silly?
I took the main characters from the Clarice Bean books -- so Ruby Redfort and her best friend who is the son of an ambassador -- and started to write the Ruby Redfort books, although these books are a bit more sensible than the ones Clarice Bean talks about....
Q: So you're writing crime thrillers for children?
A: Ruby Redfort is meant to be a fun book, a comic thriller, but I'm also trying to write crime books for kids, yes, with plot twists and codes. It's a very different challenge from my other books.
I read a lot of crime fiction and I love it but I'm also very aware that it's very difficult to write crime fiction. You have to be fastidious about drawing together all the threads, it can fry the brain!
Also I don't plan my books ahead, I have a fuzzy idea of how things will work; I know where it's set and I know the mood of it and roughly how it will plan out. It's always very hazy except for the ending; I do like to know how the story will end. Working this way does mean a lot of wasted writing; I junk about half of what I have written after the first draft.
Q: Why did you decide to make your detective an ace at cracking codes?
A: In the Clarice Bean books, I said that Ruby Redfort was a brilliant code cracker, she can make and break codes. This meant that my Ruby Redfort had to be brilliant at coding. Well that's fine until you start trying to convince people of that but I'm no good at making codes, so we asked Marcus de Sautoy to come on board.
Marcus turned out to be the perfect person for this. He's a great mathematician and is determined to make maths exciting for children. We usually meet up when I'm planning the next story and I'll give him an outline of the kind of coding skills I'm looking for.
The hardest code we've done so far is for smell. The new book is based around a touch code but the person who created it in the story isn't a coder so we had to keep it quite simple.
The book also uses a code based around a book of poems -- I did consider writing all the poems myself to show how it worked but it would have meant writing 27 sub-standard poems...
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about Spectrum, the spy agency that Ruby works for?
A: I had written about Spectrum in Clarice Bean. I'd described it as this secret place that could be everywhere and nowhere and you enter it in a really strange way. It appealed to me because it's about your imagination; why couldn't there be a secret agency under your floorboards...?
Q: Ruby Redfort is a real action hero, and a girl. Was it a conscious decision on your part to make your lead a girl? Did you miss characters like this in fiction when you were growing up?
A: I think this is an even broader issue than what I found in books. I think I felt when growing up that film heroes were always men and the fun activities were always directed at boys.
I remember when skateboarding became all the rage and it was something that boys did. I could have done it but I felt that while it was okay if boys fell off their board, if a girl did it you'd become a focus for ridicule. I was very sporty but also very self-conscious and I just couldn't bring myself to do it because I cared too much what other people thought.
That's why I brought Parkour into the story [a training discipline using precise movements to navigate obstacles]. There's no reason why a girl can't do it as well as boys or men. I researched it and met these wonderful women who had studied Parkour and ran a centre in London. They run courses for women and girls only, for that very reason - that it can be hard for girls to do things around boys.
I was amazed they ran separate days for them because I'd always thought that there'd be a certain kind of girl or woman who would be prepared to tough it out against the boys, but I've had to rethink that. I think this issue goes really deep in our society. It's the same with activities like snow boarding and surfing -- yes, girls and women do it, but it's male dominated and it can be intimidating for women.
You just need to go to the cinema and see how many roles there are for men in a film compared to women, and compare that with how many films are made with women in mind -- and how typecast those films are. It's the same old stuff!
Q: How did Parkour - a kind of 'free running' - fit into this Ruby Redfort adventure?
A: Because Ruby has been through so much, especially in the last book when so many things nearly killed her, I thought I would make her really fearful for this book, which makes it harder for her to function. But I found it really hard to write the book.
I was chatting to a friend about it who suggested flipping it so that Ruby would actually become quite fearless because she had walked away from so many things that should have killed her -- now she thinks she's indestructible.
I could see how this might happen because I had a very bad car crash a few years ago but was lucky to have walked away with very little injuries. Before that crash, I'd been very worried about driving but after that, because I'd survived the crash, it made me much more relaxed about driving.
That's why Parkour works so well in the story. It's the perfect opposite of the kind of recklessness that absorbs Ruby. It's about assessing risk and working out the dangers before you approach obstacles - rather than diving in feet first! I did think about trying out Parkour myself but I was very busy working to a deadline on the book and there just wasn't the time -- plus I thought I might be rubbish at it!
Q: How many more Ruby Redfort books are you planning to write?
A: I probably have two more books to write and they are all linked. The overarching plot is heading towards an unveiling of the main villain.
Sometimes people come up to me and say, 'I know who the villain is in Ruby Redfort!'. But I still don't know who the main bad guy will end up being. I haven't thought that through yet and so I've got two books to start planning it.
Because I don't plan ahead, writing becomes a very creative process but you have to think hard about what you have written before. I am constantly re-reading the earlier books so that I don't forget anything. Whenever people ask me what I'm reading a the moment (and I get asked that question quite a lot) I have to say, 'my own books'!
I have to be totally immersed in Ruby Redfort's world to write about her. Luckily Rachel Sterling is doing audio recordings of all the Ruby Redfort books so by the time I start writing the next book, I'll be able to listen to the books instead of having to re-read them.
Q: Where do you do your writing?
A: I always used to write in cafes and restaurants and places like that because I quite like being somewhere busy but alone, or I'd go down and stay at a friend's house in the country, but then it became harder to do that because life in London is so busy.
More recently I've been writing at home and in my bed, partly because that was the most comfortable place to be after I had a back operation, and partly because we had moved to a new house and the heating broke down and it was freezing cold!
But I also spend a lot of time on the road doing events, so now I do some of my writing in hotels.
Q: What is your favourite escape?
A: It's very difficult to do this but my favourite escape is to go to the cinema, which I rarely do at the moment because there's no time. Or I love to just people-watch. The other thing I like doing is to walk around London. I love going anywhere in London, especially somewhere I don't know, and especially walking around East London, there's so much of it and it's so old, I love doing that.
You can watch Lauren Child talking about Ruby Redfort and her work with primary children on ReadingZone Live:
http://readingzone.com/index.php?zone=sz&page=szlivefull&id=2073
Feel the Fear (Ruby Redfort, Book 4)
