Bernard Beckett tells Graham Reid about writing for the savvy teens of today.
For Bernard Beckett - Wellington schoolteacher by day, award-winning author of young adult fiction by night - the art of writing is all in the sheer mechanics of typing.
"In the end the actual process of writing doesn't take any time at all," he admits. "If everything is going well I can get down 1000 words an hour."
But talk to other writers and that's a word count many would aim for in a day. "That is my day," he laughs. "I never really get much more than an hour. A huge part of what is required is that time offstage where things sort themselves out while you are going for a run or a walk or are driving to work. Doing those other things means you come back a day later and stuff has fallen into place.
"When I've had loads of time to write, I don't think I've got a lot done. I need time for stuff to settle, so when I come back I can see things with clearer eyes. So I tend to write in little bursts - and always have while I've been a teacher."
Beckett's recent books - he has written 10, fiction and non-fiction - are notable for the intellectual ideas and philosophical questions they throw at their sophisticated young audience. No flying wizards, but rather dystopian future societies which, in Genesis - for which he won the 2007 Esther Glen Award and Young Adult Fiction category in the New Zealand Post Awards, as well as the 2010 Prix Sorcieres - ask questions about how we should live. Familiar, in that it is post-apocalyptic, yes, but also with an interesting skew.
The world he creates is a Fortress Aotearoa of the future, where the nation has sealed itself off from the great plagues of the outside world, a New Zealand that just wants the rest of the world to stay away and leave it alone.
Beckett says it comes naturally for New Zealanders to speculate along these lines - "more so than for an author writing in the middle of Europe, that would have been a much more creative leap to create a small, isolated society" - and that he is struck by looking at a globe and seeing our geographical place surrounded by water.
In one sense Genesis plays into that local mindset, yet the world it creates of a society provocatively divided is his real intention, a theme picked up in his new book, August. He concedes the post-apocalyptic future - one he doesn't believe in - is just the story-telling technique.
"What you get lured into is a shorthand, because neither of the novels are about the state of that world but rather are using it to set up the thing they are about.
"I'm learning to create that world with the minimum amount of explanation. I don't want readers spending time trying to find out what the world is like."
A further point of contextual similarity between the two books is the backdrop of almost boarding school-like systems and rigid educational institutions.
Beckett - who attended Chanel College, a co-ed Catholic school in Masterton in the 1980s - says for many teenagers "there is something oddly beguiling about [boarding schools] and to some extent it is exotic for [today's] child. So it does have that power, whereas in another age it would have had an almost documentary feel to it.
"August makes use of religious traditions, imagery and iconography as well as the standard dystopian broken-down society stuff, and the notion of social classes. You know the reader will invest a certain amount in it, because they've already got those reference points."
If Genesis appeals to intelligent mid-teens - the story is largely static with internal and external action described rather than lived out - then August seems pitched at a slightly more adult audience, although Beckett is amusingly sceptical of such distinctions. They belong to the very adult world of marketing - "where it's more about who will buy it rather than who will enjoy it" - but he doesn't underestimate the intelligence of teenagers.
"To imagine teenagers aren't capable of reaching for the purely intellectual is to write them off. And you never write for teenagers in general, you write for a type of teenager in any given book. There are real subsets of teen audiences and a smart 16-year-old is pretty smart. And they're in an education system which asks them to concentrate, and to think in the abstract."
Genesis has been sold into 31 countries although Beckett admits - awards notwithstanding - it is difficult to know who is reading: "The path from writer to teenage reader is unusual, it has gatekeepers and filters. Most teenagers read those books because an adult has given them out either in the classroom or a library setting or as a gift. There's not a huge habit, in New Zealand at least, of teenagers running out and buying books. There's a slightly artificial market which has been created by education and by booksellers seeing that opportunity.
"Happily I've come across kids who've read the books, so one way or another they do get to them."
And they will be getting another too. Lullaby, which he is working on right now, will complete the trilogy in 2013, "in a perfect world", laughs the man who writes about very imperfect worlds.
"True, I do. But I enjoy the world I'm in. However, I'm highly capable of a cynical view of it. A healthy scepticism is stimulating."
Genesis (Text Publishing $26.99) and August (Text $30) are available now.
