INTERVIEW:Laura Jane Cassidy used the music she loved as a teen to inspire her novel about a 15-year-old musician who starts to have strange dreams about a murder, writes ANNA CAREY
SOME WRITERS can only work in perfect silence, with no noisy distractions. Laura Jane Cassidy, however, needs a soundtrack. “I can’t work without music,” says the 24-year-old author. “I listen to certain songs on repeat – it has to be a song I know and have heard before. It feels like time isn’t passing, so I’m able to work on a chapter for ages and not feel like I’m running out of time.”
Music is also important to Jacki, the teenage heroine of Cassidy's debut novel Angel Kiss. An aspiring musician, 15-year-old Jacki reluctantly leaves Dublin – and her band – to move to a small country town with her widowed mother. There she finds some new friends, and starts writing some new songs. But she also starts having strange nightmares and visions that seem to be linked to an unsolved murder that happened in the village more than a decade earlier.
Although Cassidy’s gripping tale taps into the current craze for supernatural teen fiction, she says she really wanted to write a mystery rather than a fantasy novel. “I love reading crime writers like Tana French, Alex Barclay,” she says. “I like trying to figure out who the killer is. I didn’t set out to write a supernatural book, but it turned out this way.”
She started writing the story about four years ago, while studying Drama and Film at Trinity. It was the first time she’d written fiction since primary school. “I didn’t write any fiction in secondary school or college, until I got this idea.” But when an agent showed interest in the story and Cassidy began rewriting her first draft, she realised she had to make a decision. “When I do something I like to put my all into it, and I felt like I wasn’t devoting enough time to the drama or the writing.”
Having discussed the issue with her tutor she decided to take a break from her studies, but says that her time as a drama student fed into her writing. “They’re quite similar, really. It was really easy to write dialogue because I’d read so many plays. And building characters up was something we did all the time.”
Having made the decision to write full time, Cassidy has found fellow authors to be very supportive. “Everyone seems to know everyone in the children’s fiction world,” she says. “They’re all so friendly and welcoming; even when I was unpublished, everyone was so supportive when I asked for advice.”
She found a workshop at Inkwell Writers’ Workshops very helpful. “It was really good to see how authors worked. [Young adult author] Sarah Webb was there and [her workshop] was very visual, using scrapbooks and pictures.” Cassidy followed Webb’s example. “When I was starting off I found it hard to get past the first chapter, but once I brought the visual element in and started making scrapbooks, it really took off.”
She filled a scrapbook with everything from random pictures that, she says, “gave me an idea for an event in the story”, to pictures of clothes from teen magazines and photos of a small Roscommon village that inspired the novel’s setting.
But this wasn’t the only way Cassidy gathered inspiration. Music not only helped her concentrate on her writing, it also helped her get inside her heroine’s head. “When I was 15 or 16, music was a major part of my life and socialising – going to a gig or battle of the bands – was the main event of our weekends. Listening to certain songs and thinking about the music scene really brought me back to when I was Jacki’s age.”
That inspired her to make Jacki a musician. “I was listening to a lot of the music that I liked when I was 15, so I got the idea to have Jacki write her own songs.” Most of the lyrics of Jacki’s songs are songs that Cassidy wrote for her own band as a teenager. “For the next book I’ll have to write some new ones! But I’m not really very musical – writing songs is more like poetry.”
Cassidy is working on the follow-up to Angel Kiss, called 18 Kisses, which continues Jacki's story. And she hopes readers will like her brave, creative heroine as much as she does. "I really like stories with strong heroines – I was obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayerwhen I was younger," she says. "It's nice to have a strong female lead who makes important decisions herself."
Angel Kissis published by Razorbill/Penguin, £6.99
The rise of teen fiction
“When I was growing up it was very hard to find teenage fiction set in Ireland apart from books by Claire Hennessy,” says Laura Jane Cassidy. “But now there’s great stuff. I really wanted my book to be noticeably Irish. When you’re a teenager it’s good to read books set in different places, but it’s great when you can identify with the setting.”
This has never been easier, because the last few years have seen a big increase in Irish young adult fiction. Sheena Wilkinson's Taking Flightand Geraldine Meade's Flickdeal with serious issues, while Denise Deegan's And By The Waylooks at the complex lives of privileged teens. Meanwhile, Bridget Hourican's The Bad Karma Diaries, Deirdre Sullivan's Prim Improper and my book, The Real Rebecca,offer a mixture of comedy and teen angst.
