Video transcript
2018 NSW PRC author interview - Jess Townsend

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Premier's Reading Challenge Authors Present series. I'm Yvette Poshoglian, and with me today, I'm so excited to announce that we've got Jessica Townsend, who's debut book, 'Nevermoor,' is just about out in Australia. And we're very lucky to have her here at the very beginning of her massive world tour. Jessica, thank you so, so much for being here and for talking to us at the Premier's Reading Challenge.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Thank you for having me.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: So it's kind of exciting. Your book, which we've got in many forms here, is 'Nevermoor,' and it features an incredible girl hero called Morgan Crow. And I just love saying that name. Actually, a lot of the names in the books, I just love saying. What is her story, and where did she come from?

JESSICA TOWNSEND: So Morrigan, the story of Morrigan Crow is that she is a girl who lives in a world that's not our world, and she is cursed. So she was born on the wrong day, basically. And she's known all her life that, you know, all of the troubles in the world are more or less her fault. She gets blamed for things, big and small. If there's a tear in the drapes, or if someone has a heart attack or breaks a hip or something, it's usually her fault.

And as part of that curse, she also knows that she's going to die on a certain day. And in this world, that day's called Eventide, and she's expecting that, you know, in her early teens. But then Morrigan does not die on Eventide. Instead, she meets this remarkable stranger who whisks her away to a secret city that she didn't know existed.

And she's been invited to participate in these trials so that she can join an organisation called the Wonder Society, which is a society of people with unique gifts or special talents. And the challenge there is that she doesn't have a talent, so.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: That's right. And we go on the journey with Morrigan as she has to go through the trials and find herself as well, in a way, and find out what her strengths are. And she gets help along the way. There's some fantastic characters in here.

I just wanted to ask you initially, what were some of your favourite books growing up? Or were there influences on your life, in your reading life, that led you to write about a character like Morrigan or to develop her? Or had she just sort of come to you?

JESSICA TOWNSEND: No, I mean I was definitely influenced by the books that I read growing up. And I was thinking about this recently. I always kind of read sort of quite haphazardly across genres, and I never kind of saw the links in what I was reading. But thinking back to my favourite books when I was a kid, actually, the thing that they all had in common was that they had these great girl heroes.

So the books that I loved were 'Little Women' is still my favourite book. I loved Jo March. She's this gutsy, ferocious girl who just wants to stake out her place in the world. And 'Tomorrow, When the War Began' as well, Ellie Linton, who is, I think, probably the best girl hero in young adult and children's literature. Also 'Looking for Alibrandi.'

'Harry Potter' when that came out. I started reading that when I was 13 or 14, and you had this amazing Hermione Granger who is-- I was such a geek, such a nerd in high school, so you know, she was kind of a really good hero for me. And so definitely, I think unconsciously, that's kind of what Morrigan Crow grew out of.

It never occurred to me to write anything except a young heroine who had reached this point in her life where she was kind of trying to carve out her place in the world and, you know, coming to grips with what her identity is.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Well I think even when I was reading it, you know, the worlds that I used to love falling into, worlds like Narnia or the world of Hogwarts, or you know, you get so many comparisons out there for those fantasy, magical worlds that we love. I really felt that in your story, and I really wanted to be there and see what it looked like, and

I wanted to experience the [? bully ?] Rail, and all of these really cool things, which actually did remind me a lot of London, which I understand is a place that you love. And you know, it just felt so familiar at times as well. So had you been collecting ideas for the story and the locations for a while, or?

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Yeah.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Do you sort of-- you know, because there's also a magical connection with umbrellas as well, which I want to ask you about a bit later on. But how do you collect your ideas? Were you jotting things down, or?

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Yes. Yes, so collect is exactly the right word. I feel like I've never been a collector of things, but actually looking back over the 10 or so years that I wrote that book, that's exactly what I was doing. Like, I have notebooks and notebooks and notebooks full of just names. You know I'm kind of obsessed with names and always have been. And just ideas for oddities, and things from real life.

Like I mean, I moved to London when I was 22, and a lot of Nevermoor has come directly from London. In my head, Nevermoor is just like an alternative London. It's a London in another universe. And so yeah, a lot of those kind of oddities were just things that, I'd moved to the city and everything was kind of--

I'm from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, and it was just so different to my experience, and I was not expecting to love it as much as I did. And the things that I loved were just learning about the strange little bits of history and facets of everyday life that were just kind of different to my experience, things like the London Underground, which is-- have you lived in London?

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Mm-hmm.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: OK, so you probably--

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: You can't explain it to kids until you've been on one of the tubes, because they're jam packed.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: They're insane.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: And they're just totally different to anything we have here.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Yeah, so I mean, for anyone who has not been on the London Underground or any kind of metro system like that, it's this network. It's like this maze of train lines underneath the city and criss crossing all over the place, and above ground and underground. And it transports seven million people or something ridiculous every day, all over the city. And to me, that's just like a miracle.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: [inaudible] how it works.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: I know that's it. And the amazing thing as well is like, you know, Londoners are so kind of polite. And you would think that that would be chaotic, and yet, you know, there are these weird little systems in place, and little bits of etiquette that everyone abides by and everyone follows that makes that stuff work. So that's kind of what fascinates me about big bizarre cities and all that sort of stuff.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: But you know, even the names of [? the ?] characters, apart from Morrigan who's sometimes affectionately or unaffectionately known as Mog, and Jupiter North who is an incredible character, who just is very closely associated with Morrigan. She's got wonderful friends and some foes, but the names for me are things that I just loved, because they just stuck in my mind. Did you craft those names, or did they just come to you out of the blue, or?

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Yeah, a bit of both.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Morrgian is a really strong name.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Yeah, yeah, and that's kind of what I wanted for her. I wanted a name that was a heroine's name. Like, I wanted something that was kind of memorable and strong, and as I said, I've always been name obsessed. I was such a weird kid.

So when I was a kid, I used to like collect names, really. I would write lists and lists of names, and I would be like, OK, I'm going to have to either have 20 children or write books. There

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: There' still time for both to happen.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: I've changed my mind about that first one.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: So that is just the life and mind of a writer, and someone who's super creative. And we're going to get to asking you a little bit more about how your creative process works every day if you're willing to share about that.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Yeah.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: But you know, the world of Nevormoor and some of the other interesting places that exist between Morrigan's world and the new world that she finds herself in. There's kind of like some hazy areas too in the middle, and even the place like the Gossamer Line.

To me, it's just like fascinating sort of place, because I was trying to think, you know, say in 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,' we knew that the entry into Narnia was the back of the wardrobe. But in Morrigan's world, it's quite mysterious how it all works.

So are these worlds that you plan out when you're writing, or how do they come to you? Or do you just see the world like that, as a place with many different hidden parts? Like the London Underground is a hidden sort of place.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, I can be quite meticulous in the planning of this kind of world. Oh, I'm meticulous, it's too generous a word. Because I'm actually extremely sort of haphazard, but can get quite obsessive when it comes to the detail of like, you know, you can drill down into things like the transport systems, and, you know, the everyday kind of functionality of what a made up world, or how that's going to operate.

But then also, yeah, you do have this weird kind of dichotomy, because you've got a city that is designed to resemble cities in our world and have that complexity, but then also, you do have things like the Gossamer Line, which is this kind of hazy concept that even a character like Jupiter North, who is our character who kind of feeds information to Morrigan, and he's very much the wise mentor kind of archetype, even he doesn't completely understand it.

And so I think that part of that is just, you know, you do have that kind of mystery aspect, and further down the line in other books, it will be explored a lot more. But I mean, for me, it's important that the reader is discovering Nevermoor in the same way that Morrigan is discovering it, because this is a secret, hidden city. She knows nothing about it before she arrives, and then sort of, it's revealing itself to her in increments, and that's the experience that I want the reader to have.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: That's right. And of course, the thing that the readers will love so much about this character is the pressure that she's under, the trials that she has to perform and excel at, and it's not always easy. There is a lot of people who are unsure about her or against her, or trying to stop her from achieving. To me, that was some of my absolutely favourite parts of the book, because I got to really understand her strength, and she's a really strong character, like you say, wanting to create a really strong heroine.

But the trials, just the incredible concepts. I'm going to ask you about your inspirations too, apart from other books. But I think Morrigan actually, you know, I want to know where the second book's going to go, too. But those trials, and for her to overcome the trials, to fight her way through, to find herself, was that difficult to write, or was it, you know--

JESSICA TOWNSEND: In some ways. To me, like the point of the trials was, in one way, like just from a mechanical point of view, it's important for this book to have something to hang itself on. So the way that I write, I kind of write in, you know, like tentpoles, is probably what they would call it in movie language.

There are these big events throughout the book that, sort of, the plot hangs on, and they're the important, you know, big, high stakes, high intensity kind of moments. And the trials just provided that perfectly. And also, just in terms of Morrigan's kind of character development as well, she, as you say, she is a strong character.

But she's not strong because she's perfectly gusty and perfect and confident, or whatever. She worries about things, and she's very conflicted about her place in this new, big world that she's, you know, come into. And she doesn't think that she has a talent, and she's sort of--

I mean, I think we probably have all been there when we were kids, where you're comparing yourself against all of the other people around you, and you so much doubt that will-- you know, am I as good as all of these other children who seem to me to be so capable and talented and blah blah balh. I mean, I say as children. We do that as adults as well.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: We do. I think that's fantastic. That's a great way to look at it, because I think we do learn a lot about her character, you know. She does learn a lot in this first book in the series. Basically, with a story like this which we've been talking about, building the world of Nevermoor, and the character mainly of Morrigan, who's a heroine, has this story been sitting with you for a long time, and you know, how does it come out onto the page? Tell us a little bit about how it all came to be.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: That's a good question. Yeah, no, it's been with me for a long time. I think the thing that came first was the character of Morrigan, but she didn't come to me in her current form.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: OK.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Come to me, that makes it sound so mysterious.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: It is.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: It's not. So I first sort of created Morgan as actually an adult character in a different story that I was planning to write. So I think I was 18 or 19, and I was sitting in some conference for something and not listening, because that's me. Standard. And I was instead doodling ideas for this story that I was thinking of.

And it was going to be a story about a little girl who went to live with her aunt Morrigan, and her aunt was this kind of very capable but sort of mysterious and eccentric and funny and slightly magical sort of character. And then just as I began forming these ideas, I realised that she was so much more interesting than the person who was going to be the protagonist.

And I started thinking about, well, like, what would she have been like when she was a child. Like, how did she grow up and where did she grow up that she became this interesting woman? And she also had this best friend as an adult called Hawthorne Swift. And so Hawthorne was always part of the story from the beginning as well. So yeah, it's been kind of percolated for quite a long time. It took me probably, I always say like roughly about 10 years.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Wow.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Yeah, I wasn't sitting hunched over, writing for 10 years like a mad woman, but you know, a lot of that time was kind of plotting out an entire series, and creating the world of Nevemoor. And you know, I think that probably any young kids, you know, I was always writing when I was younger, and I always had this kind of impatience of, have to finish it now, have to, you know. I need to have a novel finished in 12 months, and you know, it just didn't happen like that.

But I think that that is a really good thing, or it ended up being a really good thing, because the story and the world kind of needed that incubation period for me so that it could kind of develop and become quite complex. And now, in this book, you know, what I know about these characters and this world is kind of the tip of the iceberg, and I'm just sitting on this whole other kind of world that's going to emerge in time.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Well, we perhaps spent too much time interviewing you, because you've got to work on it and write it, and give it to the fans. They're going to want more, so. Look, the other thing that I did want to talk to you about is, a lot of students who do the Premier's Reading Challenge, obviously, they love reading but they also love writing.

And a lot of them write to us and say, look, I've started a book or I started a short story. When you sat down to write this book, I mean, you'd also been doing other things too, which I wanted to talk to you about. But is it a case where you just sat down and wrote the first page, and then it flowed really easily, or is it something that you just went back too, and you know, left for a little while. How did it happen?

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Yeah, so I mean, it depends. On any given day, it could be either one of those things. There are times when things just spill out easily onto the page, and that's great. We live for those moments. And then there are just long periods where it's agony. You know, it can be really difficult.

But what I would say to anyone who is looking to kind of start out, you know, writing a novel, or writing a short story or whatever it is that you're wanting to write, for me, the thing that kept me going through all those times whether it was difficult writing or easy writing was that I had this idea that I loved.

You know, like this book is really just a big nerdy pile of pages full of stuff that I personally find interesting and funny. Like the jokes that are in there, they're just there because I laughed at them. I laugh at my own jokes. I'm sorry. You know, so instead of kind of thinking-- I think the temptation when you're starting out in writing is to think, what do other people want to read, what do publishers want to publish.

But for me, the most important thing and the thing that made me finish this book was that it was just what I wanted to read. And it was what I wanted to write, and it was an idea that kind of lit me up inside, and that's the only reason that I stuck with it for so long. So that would be my recommendation.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Yeah. If it's not interesting to you, then why are you going to bother?

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Exactly. And even if you think it's quite niche, even if you think, you know, this is so specific to me, I don't think anyone else is going to enjoy it, that's how I felt every step of the way with Nevermoor. And I do think that, you know, those little weirdnesses that you have, some other weirdo has them, definitely. Definitely, it's going to appeal to someone else in the world.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Well, I think a lot of weirdos are going to buy this book and enjoy it.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: I hope so. Weirdos find each other.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Well, you say that you were always a writer, and you know, as a kid, you were collecting names for lists of names and doing some interesting things like that. When you left school, what were you doing? Were you working as a writer, or you know, what were some of the things that you've done along the way that maybe gave you good practise at writing?

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Yes. So I mean, I spent kind of my 20s working mostly as a copywriter, but also, the way that I got my start was a bit weird. As soon as I finished high school, I took kind of a gap year from uni, and I started working at Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: Right. Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Steve Irwin's Australia Zoo, yeah. So I was 17. I was a month out of high school. My sister and I both got what was meant to be just like a summer job. We were working in like a souvenir store at the zoo. So we were like folding t-shirts and selling squeaky crocs and stuff.

And it was great, and it was such an interesting place to work. And it was really kind of a blessing that that was the place that I just thought, yeah, I'll go and get a summer job at the zoo, because actually, the zoo is this weird kind of microcosm of the world, in that there were so many different opportunities there, and the way that Steve and Terri kind of run that place, it's got like a lot of heart.

It's very much like a family kind of place. And so they like to promote from within. And I did a lot of different jobs there. I spent five years at the zoo. I started out folding t-shirts, and then I went to the guest relations. I was doing wish tours for like terminally ill children and their families.

And then the marketing department was always kind of sending stuff to me to proofread, and then I started writing things for them. And it was very much ad hoc, and that's how I became an online copy editor. And then one day, there was a marketing meeting, and we had this newsletter. And sorry, this is such a rambling sorry.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: No, this is great.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: But we had like this fan newsletter that was quarterly. And Terri Irwin walked into a marketing meeting one day and said, I want to make this a magazine. Like, I've had this great idea. She had so many great ideas. I've had this great idea, I want to make this like a proper, nationally distributed glossy magazine, 100 pages kind of thing. Who's going to do that?

And it just ended up being me somehow. I don't know how it fell to me, but somehow this great job just fell in my lap, and I was 20. And I had no idea what I was doing. I literally googled how to make a magazine. So the first week of my job was just me like looking up what magazine tones were, and finding out what a masthead was and stuff like this. I had no idea. I was 20.

And I mean, it was, again, just such a blessing, because what a bizarre and big opportunity. And so it kind of made me see that I could kind of create something from scratch, and you know, obviously with the support. So yeah, it was kind of a weird job in a weird place to work, but in a really good way.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: And how many magazines did you work on? Or issues, or?

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Issues. So it was like a quarterly mag. I can't even remember. I think I did that for a couple of years before I then went to London, and then I came back again. And I was working. When I came back, my sister took over from me when I left.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: It's a family business.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: It was that. It's very much a family business. So my sister took over the job, and then I came back and was working with her. And super fun, super fun.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: That is awesome. Well, we know that you're from the Sunshine Coast, and you're here in Sydney to talk to us, so we're really thrilled that you could join us here today.

JESSICA TOWNSEND: Me too.

YVETTE POSHOGLIAN: And it's been so much fun hearing about how you got your start in writing. Thanks so much.