Featured Interview With Helen MacArthur
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Campbeltown on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland. The Beatles’ Paul McCartney was so inspired by the place he bought a farm (600-acre place called High Park) thereabouts and wrote a song about the mists rolling in from the sea. The place is home to single malt whiskies including Springbank (peat, leather and tobacco smoke notes, according to my dad), cheddar cheese and fishing boats (not as many as there once was).
I grew up in a small village called Clachan, about 28 miles from Campbeltown, and spent most of my childhood with best friends Hazel and Rowan running along beaches, climbing rocks and cantering on wind-smacked trees shaped like horses.
While Paul McCartney was drawn to the area because he “liked its isolation and the privacy and the end-of-the-world remoteness…” this was the very reason I had to leave. What’s more, I’d run out of trees and rocks to entertain me.
I studied English Literature in Stirling and started my first-ever job as a trainee journalist in Dundee at publishers DC Thomson & Co, home to The Beano and its characters such as Dennis The Menace and Minnie The Minx. I’ve pretty much worked on magazines here, there and everywhere – Australia, Glasgow and London – ever since.
As well as writing fiction, I contribute to e-commerce sites writing copy containing lots of persuasive language to whip shoppers into a ‘must-have’ mindset. Those tartan culottes you bought but never wore and never will? Blame me.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Even before I could read, I discovered that books had the power to burn potatoes. My mother would stand in our kitchen, nose in book, transfixed, bewitched by words on the page. She would forget the world around her, the water in the pans would boil to nothingness and our dinner would go up in smoke. In light of this, I learned how to butter bread before I could read.
I started to write for a living when I landed a job on a weekly women’s magazine in the UK. Fresh out of college, aged 21, armed with a degree in English Literature, I was so excited at the prospect of creating headline-grabbing features and conducting exciting interviews. I was a little less excited when the Editor informed me that I would be writing the horoscopes. The horoscopes? “But…” I protested, flustered, “I know nothing about the zodiac or the position of the planets or lunar phases!” That was the moment I learned that Editors aren’t interested in what you haven’t got or what you don’t know, or how it’s not possible, all that matters is creating respectable, readable, entertaining content that meets its target audience and a deadline. Hello, Aries. I learned fast.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Whenever I read great sentences, truly great, memorable, gorgeous sentences that have been exquisitely stitched together like haute couture, it makes me want to kiss the feet of the person who wrote them. Like, for example, “Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.” John Irving, Hotel New Hampshire.
Or “Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word – musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.” Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace.
Sentences that are written to be remembered and quoted and loved and shared. It’s the stuff writers’ dreams are made of.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
I did what writers are not supposed to do – I jumped genres. My latest book, You Again, is aimed at the Young Adult market. I usually write contemporary women’s fiction and now I was attempting something quite different. “Won’t this just confuse your readers?” questioned my mother. “Let’s do it!” said my Editor.
I didn’t have doubts but I knew that storytelling is selling; therefore, I had to make sure that this was a good product. It might be a different genre to the one I was used to but I was excited about the characters and plot. It was something I desperately wanted to develop into more than storyboard notes and scribbles.
You Again was written in 30 days. I took part in the NaNoWriMo project in November 2014, which involved writing 50,000 words in one month. I made the deadline but it was nowhere near the publication stage. I let the manuscript “rest” during December – I didn’t look at it once. Then I opened the files in January and worked with my Editor on the pages until April 2015.
If I had to sum up the book in three words it would be: “Girl meets boy”. It is about first love, murder, friendship and corruption. Angie Anderson and Lennox Jones are the two main characters who discover that the truth throws light on dark secrets. It brings them together, it tears them apart, it makes them question everything and everyone around them.
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