Captive (25 page)

Have you always wanted to write?

Yes. I wrote my first book when I was twelve years old. It was very long and very rambling and told in a mixture of letters, diary entries and poetry . . . There were also lots
of flashbacks in it, like in
Captive
– so I guess now-me and twelve-year-old-me must not be so very different. Maybe I should dig out that old script . . .

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Try to finish things you start. You don’t know what you’ve got until you have a complete first draft of something. Don’t worry if it isn’t very good.
Most writers’ first drafts are terrible! Tell yourself to just keep going. You can fix everything later on. Writing, like everything else, gets better with practise. And believe in yourself.
Tell your inner critic to take a nice long break in the South of France until you’ve finished your first draft.

What were your favourite books when you were younger?

Definitely
Winnie the Pooh
,
The Twits
and
The Worst Witch
when I was younger, and then Judy Blume and the Point Horror series as a teenager. There
wasn’t the range and breadth of novels for young adults that there is today, so I also read a lot of my mum’s books – Daphne Du Maurier’s
Rebecca
and Maeve
Binchey’s
Circle of Friends
, for instance. However, the two books that probably had the biggest impact on me were Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
and Margaret
Atwood’s
Cat’s Eye
. I’ve read them both about ten times!

If you were prime minister, what would your manifesto be?

Education and equality, although I think one feeds the other. My first act as PM would be to introduce a national Life Swap. Everyone would have to live the life of someone
else for 24 hours. Prejudice and intolerance so often come from not being able to see something from someone else’s perspective. Spending a day as someone else would hopefully help with that.
Ultimately, none of us are so very different. We’re all human and we are all just trying to get by.

I would also declare a national ‘Craft Afternoon’ every fourth Wednesday. I love making things, but I never get enough time to do it. I reckon getting the whole country sewing would
be a pretty good incentive to finally finish a fifties-style tea dress I started making about two years ago.

A. J. Grainger lives in London, where she works as a children’s books editor. She loves writing and editing because it means she gets to talk about books all day. Find out
more about A. J. and her writing on Twitter (
@_AJGrainger
) or by visiting her website,
www.ajgrainger.com.