Alec unleashes his first novel

After a number of years writing for young children, Alec Sillifant has just published his first novel for the teenage market. Jake Highfield Chaos Unleashed is a thriller set in a spy school, which Alec hopes will interest modern readers aged twelve and over.

‘Generally speaking, when writing for teenagers today, you are competing with various new media, especially computer games, which offer instant excitement with the added bonus of the “reader” being in direct control of the action. As such, I think a story has to rattle along at a fair pace in an effort to engage the young mind and create a mental picture that is almost as frenetic as anything they will see on a monitor screen. At the same time, the characters portrayed need to be real and interesting enough for the reader to connect to; like the link they have to the characters they control, or are trying to defeat, in the games they play.

‘I was asked by my publisher, Simon Rosenheim, to try my hand at writing a thriller for the young adult market and Chaos was the result. Though it wasn’t the first result, as the initial ending was greeted with near universal indifference and had to be changed, which meant the first half of the story had to be rewritten as well, so everything fitted together smoothly within the new plot. So I suppose I wrote the book twice before any fine tuning happened, or at least it felt like that to me, and I’m sure it did for my excellent and patient editor, Lucy Cuthew, too.’

Now that Alec has tried writing for children of different ages, he can reflect on the different skills needed to write for each age group. ‘Each of the markets I have written for have their positives. Rattling off a good story for a picture book is great fun and can be done really quickly when things are flowing in your imagination. And once the artwork gets added to the words it is such a thrill, especially for someone like me, who is desperate to draw something recognisable one day, to see the book come alive.

‘Junior fiction is great for putting mad, stupid, crazy ideas down in 7,000 words or so and having a laugh with the reader. Chaos is my only finished novel and so that in itself was a pretty good feeling. Also the depth that you can add in a story of that length is liberating to some extent and I did at times find myself being taken in directions by the story I hadn’t planned for at all, bushwhacked and dragged off hoping it would all work out okay. I must admit it was fun... especially “the end”.

‘I wrote Chaos to be a stand-alone story finished in the one book and it is; but obviously my sad writer’s ego would like it to become a series and now that not everyone dies (part of the problem with the first draft’s ending) there are, in my opinion, characters who could prove interesting to follow in the future.’