Start the Story
2
Ali Sparkes works ridiculously hard.
Issue 1 , June 201 2
Since her first children's novel was
published in 2009 she has gone on to
write dozens of books, from series like
Monster Makers, to standalones like
Frozen in Time, which won her the Blue
Peter Book of the Year Award in 201 0.
The biggest delight is
in engaging those kids
who really didn’t think
writing or reading was a
part of their world
Welcome to Start The Story. I suppose
the first question has to be how you start
your stories?
Mostly I try to think of something curious or
odd or scary or flabberghasting and then
try to work out how a person might react to it;
how their lives might be affected.
So if we take Frozen In Time as an example I
was thinking about how odd it would be if
kids from the 1 950s could see what the world
was like in the 21 st Century – how much
childhood had changed. Then I started to
think about it in more detail. The kids in
question were partly inspired by Julian and
Anne out of the Famous Five (a big thing for
me in my childhood) and also partly by my
mum and dad, who represent the real kids in
1 956 – Polly and Freddy.
Then I tried to work out how to get Polly and
Freddy, alive and well, to 2009. And I didn’t
want to do time travel as such, so I turned to
science (sort of) and opted for cryonics – and
just froze ‘em for a half a century! The rest of
the story follows quite organically really – it
almost writes itself.
You visit a lot of schools. What do you
feel pupils and teachers get out of a
successful author visit?
If a school does a good job of promoting you
beforehand and plans it well on the day, the
kids involved can get a tremendous amount
out of it. For me the biggest delight is in
engaging those kids who really didn’t think
writing or reading was a part of their world.
When they hear how I started out, as a poor
reader and a struggling writer at school and
how the love of reading finally found me and
A once struggling reader herself, Ali works
hard to promote literacy in schools across the
country, running workshops for both pupils
and teachers alike. She recently took time out
to talk to us about her wr