A former broadcast journalist and special adviser to the prime minister, since leaving politics Jo has written more than 80 books for children and adults, for publishers including Bloomsbury, OUP and Little Brown and articles for newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, Red and The Amorist. Jo also lectures in Creative Writing on the MA at Bath Spa University, and holds a doctorate in young adult literature.
Where do you get the ideas to create your characters and storylines?
Everywhere. I magpie little snippets of things from my own life, from friends, from newspapers, and then sit with them and try to expand on them, fit them into a story. It might be a name, or an image – The Queen of Bloody Everything came from a picture in my head of a grainy seventies Polaroid of two children in front of a Wendy House – or something on the TV – Joe All Alone was partly inspired by a news item about a homeless boy in my London borough of Peckham, who had been going into school every day despite sleeping rough. The teachers noticed he was dirty and alerted authorities in the end.
Who or what are the biggest influences in your writing?
Most of my influence comes from speechwriting – when I’m writing fiction I think largely in terms of rhetorical tricks, and word play, as I would do with a political speech, as well as working out how to keep my audience invested with ‘ethos’ and ‘logos’ and ‘move’ my audience using ‘pathos’. The writers I admire do this, whether deliberately or not, from David Almond for younger children, through E.Lockhart for teens, to Donna Tartt and Curtis Sittenfeld for adults.
What were your favourite books as a child, and why?
They were, and still are, funny books – Dr Seuss, Roald Dahl, James Thurber. Perhaps favourite of all was the Nicholas series by Goscinny and Sempe, which, being a precocious child, I read in French. This was an influence for my own new series The Worst Class in the World. Humour is hugely underrated as a literary device and yet children and adults will seek it out.
What do you think are the most difficult aspects of writing? How do you cope with them?
I don’t struggle to get the words down as know some do (although lockdown, and home schooling has made actually being able to get time on the computer difficult), but I do struggle with the isolation a writing life can demand. I am very thankful for the advent of social media, where I lurk even when I am writing. It’s like having an office water cooler – somewhere to air opinions or ask for a little help on a sentence.
Thank you for your continued support of Bath & NES Libraries. Why do you think public libraries are important?
Every Saturday morning my dad would drop me off in our town Corn Exchange, which doubled as a community centre and library, and leave me between the stacks of Pullein-Thompsons and Enid Blytons while he did the shopping. This is where I went on adventures, fought pirates, sided with smugglers, worked out what kind of person I wanted to be when I grew up. At the time, I thought that was ‘someone in a book’. Now, I write my own stories to play out.
Without libraries I wouldn’t be a writer – we didn’t have the money for the number of books I needed to read as a child. As it was, the children’s section ran out of reading material for me and I became one of few pre-teens allowed access to the adult floor (approved sci-fi only). Books offer children the world inside their pages, they offer opportunity and ambition, and only libraries can ensure that’s equally available to every child, not just those who can pay.
Find out more about Jo on her website: joannanadin.com
This interview was conducted in 2020