Kate Forsyth - interview

Book: The Wildkin’s Curse
Publisher: Pan Australia
Price: $16.99 (paperback)

If we were to follow author Kate Forsyth’s recipe for a delicious kids book, the key ingredients would be action and adventure, humour and excitement, a sense of danger and heavy lashings of magic, all baked with a sense of justice where the baddies are punished properly. For Forsyth, the proof is in the pudding with 23 books published over the past 13 years and kids and adults alike eating up the results. Her latest offering, The Wildkin’s Curse, hits shelves this month.

At any given moment there are hundreds of books on offer for kids to choose from. Some will provide an initial sugar rush but not much more; others will provide their minds and hearts with important nutrients to help them grow. Forsyth admits that a junk book consumed here and there is OK provided it is the exception not the rule.

“I think a reading diet should be the same as an eating diet where you have a wide variety of foods that are both nutritious and delicious,” she says. “The books we read as children help to shape us into the kind of people we are going to be. That is why it is so important that we give them the right books. I don’t mean boring, wordy books but books that they are going to love and that will be carried in their hearts for ever after.”

The Wildkin’s Curse is certainly not junk food. A fantasy novel for readers aged 12 and over, it tells of the power of stories to change the world.

A tale of true love and high adventure set in a world of magic and monsters, valiant heroes and wicked villains that see Merry, Zed and Liliana (three very brave children) undertake the impossible task of rescuing Rozalina, a Wildkin princess imprisoned in a crystal tower. It is a book children will devour without knowing just how good it is for them.

Princess Rozalina has the power to enchant with words but it is a curse as much as a gift, her magic will be used for evil by the ruling Starkin if she is not set free and taught to use her powers wisely.

It is Forsyth’s second book in the Chronicles of Estelliana, which began with The Starthorn Tree. On the subject of trees, in The Wildkin’s Curse those of the family variety boast more branches than that of British Royalty all heavy with the fruit of Forsyth’s abundant imagination.

“I sometimes wish that I could write the beautifully simple elegant book but my imagination just doesn’t work that way,” she says. “I have a very strong idea of my characters and how they work in the story because my plots are so complex. I like to leave room for imaginative leaps. There are often big gaps between the key scenes in my mind where I don’t know how the characters are going to get from one place to another and I love discovering the story through writing it.”

Forsyth admits that having children (she has three aged between 10 and 4) has helped her to understand what kids like to read and what they find (in the words of her youngest son) ‘yicky’. “I read to my children so I have an intuitive sense of when they find the story boring, when the chapters are too long, when there are too many hard words, or when the themes in the book are too sophisticated,” she says.

Maurice Sendak, author of the 1963 classic Where the Wild Things Are, once said “You can’t write for children because they are much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them”. Forsyth agrees. “Children like what they like and they read it because they want to read it not because they should read it,” she says. “Children have a lot of competition for their time and if a book is boring they put it down and they go and ride their skateboard or watch TV. Children’s writers have to have all of the tricks of the trade. They have to be engaging, their plot has to whip along at a fierce pace, and their story lines have to be interesting enough to hold the child’s attention.”

And the parents of the world are taking note because as the lights go out at night and kids are tucked into bed, they sneak into the lounge room cuppa in hand to indulge in a guilty pleasure – reading kids’ books. Perhaps it is a bit of Harry Potter, or maybe Phillip Pullman is more their style but adults are turning to kids’ books and Forsyth thinks it is because a lot of adult fiction has lost its way.

“It is boring, turgid, badly written and it is generally not providing an enjoyable reading experience,” she says. “I think that children’s writers are excellent craftsmen while I am not so sure that is true of a lot of adult fiction,” she says. “A book should be so good that you keep sneaking back to it when you are meant to be doing something else like cooking dinner,” she says. “I think when you have finished a good book you come back to yourself with a sense of amazement because you have been somewhere and you have become a different person through the reading of that book. That is what good book is. That is what I try to do.”

Forsyth has a collection of classic books whose charm comes from the stiltedness and strangeness of the language contained in their pages - language that society now considers inappropriate. ‘Modernising’ classics is one of Forsyth’s pet peeves. “I don’t really approve of it and I think there is a tendency now to underestimate children and be patronising,” she says. “There is a diminishing of our language, of our vocabulary, of our ability to experience other cultures and other times. The old versions are a truer vision rather than this sanitized version that is being published now. I can understand that sometimes the language seems funny ‘We are going to go and have a gay old time’ does makes eight year old boys giggle but children are smart enough to understand that language changes. In fact that is a great way of showing them how language does grow and change.”

Being an author is the greatest possible life for Forsyth. She spends all day making up stories, thinking, dreaming, reading, searching for the perfect word and phrase and flirting with magic. “One of the amazing things about being a writer is the amazing magical accidents that happen during the writing of a book,” she says. “The dreams that come through at the right time or the book that falls open at a page that gives you exactly what you need. Having written as many books as I have, I now understand that serendipitous accidents happen all the time and I just have to wait and accept them.”