It did actually. No matter how much you plan what’s going to happen, when you start writing the book always takes on a life of its own. You might roughly know what’s going to happen at the beginning and the end, but you don’t know how you’re going to get there. For instance, when I started, I didn’t really know which of the kids were going to live or die. And I’d originally planned for there to be a lot more about the gang war between the two groups of children – the kids in Morrisons and the kids in Waitrose – but when I started writing I found that I wanted to move the book past that point and focus on their battle with the adults instead.

DO YOU FIND IT EASY TO KILL OFF CHARACTERS?

Yes and no. If you’ve decided early on that a certain character has got to go, you start to distance yourself from them. But there were other characters that I’d thought I was going to kill off, and then realized I’d become too attached and couldn’t do it. But even when you’ve decided that you’re going to get rid of someone halfway through and you manage to go through with it, you need to look back and make sure they’ve been given enough of a presence before that point to really make their death hit home. And that can sometimes be a bit painful. When I was doing events for Young Bond, kids would often say they really enjoyed the books but that they always knew that James was going to be all right, because he grows up to be James Bond. So with The Enemy, I wanted to make it clear from the start that no one was safe.

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spinebreakers.co.uk

spinebreaker (n)
story-surfer, word-lover, day-dreamer,
reader/ writer/ artist/ thinker

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