Author: CrispinOTooleBateman

Title: The Treehouse (ONC longlist 2020)

Genre: Fantasy

Fantasy and children's fiction author Lloyd Alexander said: "I never saw fairy tales as an escape or a cop-out... On the contrary, speaking for myself, it is the way to understand reality."

The term fairy tale might scare some readers away from a story, so instead, I'll refer to @CrispinOTooleBateman's story The Treehouse as a fairy adventure. And a grand one! It has all the seasoned trimmings of the Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland, and the Grimm Brothers' compendium.

The novella is nostalgic trek for anyone who has had the good fortune to live the country life of wandering forests, climbing trees, and rising to the challenge of siblings. The experiences of such a childhood are visceral and real, ever present in the story. They become the foundation for the protagonist Sarah as she embarks on a wondrous journey where her courage, compassion, and integrity will be repeatedly put to the test. With every turn of the page, she climbs a new branch to overcome fear and adversity to blossom into a new maturity. For those familiar with Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey, you will not be disappointed.

Sarah is wonderfully likeable and compelling. The author has placed her on a stage that is recognizable to a majority of readers, young and old. Adult readers will relive fond moments of childhood, while younger readers will enjoy reading and living in the present that best captures their own adventures. These tender moments linger, unharried and unrushed, so that the reader may see through Sarah's eyes as she grows, becoming the true hero of the tale.

The Treehouse is not just a magical place. It is both setting and character... and even an antagonist in some cases. Things are not as expected, just as the wardrobe that is the doorway to Narnia had its secrets.

The reader is accompanied by a talkative, narrative voice that is both conscience and tour guide. The craft is solid with page-turning chapters that spur the reader to keep going in order to see what happens next. This story pays homage to the quiet time of the soul. It is a time that digital natives have not experienced and might perish if they did, when the world was less complicated—with no internet, cell phones, or other digital diversions and distractions. Though subtle, this was a very much appreciated theme.

At its heart The Treehouse is a tale of make-believe become reality, a magical innerverse in an equally magical setting: the Welsh countryside, which is full of its own cultural legends and myths. It is as entertaining as The Nutcracker with equally compelling characters, allies, and surprising villains. A worthwhile read for advanced middle-grade children and adults.

Reviewer: SoelleKhiss  

Interview with the Author: 

Let's start by getting to know you better. Tell us a little about yourself.

Well, I'm 45, married with four children, and I'm a full time writer. I've been writing since I was a young teenager, and always dreamed of being a writer, but it wasn't until I met my wife that I had someone support me enough to actually do it. I've been writing professionally for about eight years now, and on Wattpad for the past three. At the moment, most of my actual writing income comes from writing boring business stuff, like articles about mortgages, or estate agent websites, but I'm also a professional ghostwriter and have written a few novels that are published under other people's names (I'm not allowed to tell you what!). My fiction work is growing though; I have a self-published series on Amazon for adults (which started as a Watty-winning story on Wattpad), and a children's book that is part of the same world as The Treehouse.

You mentioned that you started writing in your teens. When did you realize that you wanted to write as a career?

Sure. Books were always a big thing in my house growing up. My mother was an English teacher and always promoted reading, so I was never without books. When I was 10, the local library did a promotion to get children reading through the summer and offered a badge and a certificate if you read ten books over the holidays. My sister and I took it all a bit seriously, and had a competition with each other to collect as many badges as possible - one for each ten books. I read 200 books that summer (twenty badges!). I can remember the really nice librarian laughing as she tested me on the plot of each one to make sure I wasn't cheating. We even went away for a week in the middle, and all I had in my backpack was books to read in our caravan! For me, that summer was a huge drive in me wanting to become a writer. The idea of getting a book in the library was huge for me (and I have since done so!). Then, in my teen years, I became a Dungeons and Dragons player (and Dungeon Master). It really let my creativity flow, and as well as writing all the adventures for my players, I would write up the sessions as stories. The quality of the writing back then was terrible, but I worked on it enough that by 20 or so, I was a pretty decent writer. Real life demanded I 'get a real job', though, and I ended up in computer programming (my other love at the time). It wasn't for another 20 years that I managed to concentrate on writing properly.

Who is your favorite Children's Fiction writer? What is your favorite childhood book? Did they have any influence on you while writing your stories, especially The Treehouse?

Growing up, I had a huge passion for the work of John Christopher. His work is quite hard to find now, though some of it is on Amazon. He used to write this great post-apocalyptic fiction back in the 1980s, the most famous of which was the Tripods series. I loved the way his books all started off as some different world science fiction feel, that you slowly realised was the real world in the future after some disaster. I'd recommend it all for any children's fiction lovers! There's so much written since that uses the same tropes, but really the man was ahead of the game with it all! When I got into fantasy, I devoured everything. Writers like Weis and Hickman (who wrote lots of D&D-based novels), Terry Brooks, David Eddings and the masterful Robin Hobb - all of them shaped my writing. As I have four children (the eldest is 14), I have also read a huge amount of contemporary children's fiction, from little kids books like The Gruffalo and Munch (everyone should read Munch!), through things like Harry Potter (of course), Skullduggery Pleasant, Artemis Fowl, and the brilliant work of Jonathan Stroud. The Treehouse is one of a set of things set on the mythical world of Uun (which I'm sure we'll get into in more detail), but is actually the fourth or fifth story I've written there. I liked the idea of having a narrator who chats to the reader about the story, and really that's what forms the Uun stories. You see it quite a bit in The Treehouse, where he talks directly to the reader, explaining things. I'm not sure where the idea came from, but I dare say I picked it up along the way.It's worth mentioning that the amazing Rainer Salt, here on Wattpad, wrote a book for 2019's ONC called Bunker Bird, that reminds me so heavily of the John Christopher stuff. If you do want to have a look at that sort of thing without straying too far away from Wattpad and where we are, then Bunker Bird is definitely something that should be considered. Rainer's skills with words and world-building are substantial.

Was The Treehouse your first work of Children's Fiction? Where did you get the idea for the story, and how did you start writing it?

Well, like I said, it's my first children's fiction work here on Wattpad, but not my first overall. The Uun series started because my children are home educated and have never gone to school. When my eldest girls were about 8 (they're 14 and 13 now), they were upset because all the books they read were about children who went to school. They complained that very few stories were about children like them; who didn't go to school and learned in a different way. To fix the problem, I wrote the first Uun stories for them. The main one was a book called "Agi" which you can still find on Amazon (it's written under the name "Crispin Bateman"). The idea was that only home educated children can get into Uun, and enjoy the magic there. Agi slips through a crack in the pavement and finds herself in Uun and that really starts off the series. At the same time, I was writing a series on online articles for the card game Magic: The Gathering. They were fun, and in one of them I'd invented a character who was narrating the articles. It was a bit of a hit, so I stole him from the articles and used him in Agi! When it came to write The Treehouse, it was easy for me to slip back into the same feel that I had enjoyed before, and have the narrator do his talking. Originally (in Agi), he was there to sort of explain difficult words and concepts, because I didn't want to feel stopped from using words just because younger people didn't know them. I hate that dumbing down; to me, reading is about expanding your vocabulary, so I wanted to just put stuff in and explain it if I needed to. As for the treehouse idea itself, it was written for the ONC, where we were given prompts. I can't remember exactly the prompt, but it was something to do with going into a tree and finding something there. I thought 'what if there's a monster' (who ended up being April), and worked from there. I'm sure part of my mind was inspired a little from fond memories of Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree series!

Your own children provided the inspiration for the story. Knowing that they are growing up, are you planning to write more Children's Fiction in the future?

I always wanted to write children's fiction and definitely would love to do more. It's a matter of viability - if people read the stuff and like it, then I'll write more (especially if they go out and buy it!). If it doesn't get much interest, then it sort of falls away. The main Agi series is meant to be a trilogy, but only the first part is available for people to read; so I should really get back to it. It was on my list of things to do for 2020 - publish Agi book two - but then 2020 has been an odd year! I definitely don't want to be stuck in one genre, though. I have some serious adult fiction, fantasy fiction, some sci fi, some comedy stuff... I like writing everything and have a million ideas, so it would be a disaster for me to have to stick to a single area. If people like the Uun stuff and want more, though, there's definitely a ton of it. I have enough sketched out for about 50 books (no joke!), so I could write it for years to come. Decades, even. And there's plenty of ideas for non-Uun children's fiction, too. I keep playing with this idea for a series about gargoyles, and I love writing about trolls, too! I have lots of ideas for stuff where the main character is a troll... Now the children are getting a bit older, they help in other ways too, my eldest girls are both great artists, so I'm hoping I can get some covers out of them. My eldest actually did the art for Agi back when she was 8 or so, and she's embarrassed by it now, but I love it. I keep thinking I should repackage the original book with new art, to make it more appealing to a wider audience, but it's hard to do for me as I love the art she did for it. Haha; that's a good incentive for anyone wanting it - buy Agi now in its original and get that early art, cos if I do publish Agi II, then it'll mean an edit and new art for book one. It'll make that original with the early art a bit of a collector piece.

What were the challenges of writing Agi or The Treehouse? What were the most difficult scenes to write? What has been your proudest moment in writing Children's Fiction?

Oooh, good question. I think the hardest thing about The Treehouse was making it all come together. With children's fiction you can get away with a lot - for example, you can think 'yeah, I want a character who is a huge wind-up toy' but then sometimes you get stuck as to what to do with that. Children are both forgiving, and willing to accept a character like that without caring too much about the logic, but also demanding and want it to go somewhere. Some of the ideas I had would go down on the page and then just prove problematic a day or two later! Writing for the ONC meant that there was a deadline (and I was writing two other entries, too!), and there were plenty of times I was like 'eep, don't have time to fix that!'. The version on Wattpad is definitely a 'first draft' because of that. I do plan to clean it up for Amazon publication, and there'll be some work done making more sense of those hanging threads. So yeah, just making it all come together with a deadline was hard. The Treehouse does have years of experience behind it that Agi didn't have though; there are fewer mistakes there. In Agi, for example, I have a dragon turn up, and when I first wrote it, I had no idea how to describe him without using the word 'dragon'. There was a chapter with the word dragon in it about 50 times! My wife (who edited for me) went crazy about it... there are no similar problems in The Treehouse - my vocabulary is wider, and my skill at noticing things like that is improved.

So I had more time with Agi, and thus it's more polished, but I had more experience when writing The Treehouse, and so it needs less polishing anyway! I think when Agi 2 comes together, it'll benefit greatly from both more experience and more time. As for the hardest scenes... I tend to just throw away scenes that are too hard to write, and keep in ones that flow easily. There's a bit in The Treehouse where everything is pillars of flame, and that was an example of an easy-to-write sequence, because I got the idea and wanted to do it. If it had been hard to write, or caused any sort of problem, then I'd have simply not bothered with it and replaced it with something I could do easily. That's the power of being the writer - you can write what you like and chuck out anything that gives you too much of a problem.

In terms of being proud; it's all about the feedback. I live off feedback. If someone writes a message saying they liked it, or comments on a chapter in any way, then it really inspires me to keep going. Having someone come and ask me if they can interview me, for example, is a great boost!! I think every writer looks at their work and thinks 'not good enough' - you need other people to come along and tell you that it's good.

What do you think makes a good children's story and a good story in general as we are talking about challenges and ways to deal with them? What advice can you give to younger writers, so they can make a good career in the profession?

Good stories are about characters. You can write any setting, any plot, any twists and turns (or none at all), and if your characters are good, it'll work, and if your characters are bad, it'll fail. People connect to characters, and the rest is just icing on top of the cake. Children's stories especially follow this rule. People don't talk about 'the rise and fall of magic in contemporary England' - they talk about Harry Potter and his friends Hermione and Ron; they don't care about 'the evil galactic empire and the rebels' - they care about Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia; and so on... Get your characters right, love them, believe in them, and your book will follow. The second thing is dialogue - again, especially in kids' stories. Dialogue breaks up the page and makes it more inviting to look at, and it can tell so much of the story. Great characters having great conversations is the backbone of any good book. As for advice for younger writers... It's the same old thing you'll be told by anyone - write EVERY DAY and read EVERY DAY. When I was a young aspiring writer, I met Anne McCaffrey who was a very successful fantasy author. I said to her about how I wanted to be a writer and she said 'do you write every day?'. At the time I didn't, and said 'no', and she immediately came back with 'then you are not a writer'. It was really horrible and hard to hear, but she was 100% right. Write every day, even if it's just a diary entry, or a long email. That's what makes a writer. Eventually, you'll get good at it! And listen to feedback! If someone says your work is rubbish, don't be upset, ask them what they didn't like, and what you can do to improve. Chances are they're right. Negative feedback is always better than positive feedback, too. Someone saying they like something makes you feel good, but doesn't help you improve. Someone saying they don't like something and telling you why, lets you learn and get better. I am always after negative feedback, lol!

*We were talking about how reader feedback makes writers proud and of course every writer is really interested in selling a lot of books ect, because it means he is giving good content... we are writing for people to read! As a writer, do you let your readers inspire you especially on wattpad where both reader and writer are connected, do you let them control sometimes? Or do you prefer to surprise the reader and to be always unexpected? You know some people write what readers want to read.

Oh I love Wattpad for being influenced by readers! There are definitely times when someone has made a comment and it has changed what happens next in the story. This actually happened really recently with my current work A Very English Necromancer. I'm writing Volume 3 at the moment, and one of the readers made a comment about how to deal with a bad guy (I won't tell you what, as this is a children's profile, and it was quite graphic!). Anyway, it made me smile so much that the next chapter had that exact thing in it.

In terms of things like The Treehouse, that did happen less. I wrote a lot of it quite quickly as the deadline approached, and it wasn't being read enough by enough people that there were many comments at the time (the interest came later), but getting positive feedback for it has definitely influenced my desire to do more Uun stories. In fact, this morning talking to you is inspiring me to get that Agi book two finished and up for people to read.

I always listen to my readers - and I suggest everyone does. When I was younger, I used to think that I wrote for myself and as long as I liked it, that was fine. To a certain extent, that should be true. But as an adult, who now writes for a living, I know just how important it is to write the stuff my readers enjoy and so listening to them is my first thing! Of course, my readers and I tend to enjoy the same thing, so I'm still writing things I love, but I'm more willing to adapt. If I have a trusted reader come up with an idea, then the chances are high that I'll consider incorporating it.

I've had readers affect things in big ways, actually. Again, in A Very English Necromancer, I had some major plot ideas changed and altered based on reader feedback. I had a couple of characters die just because they were beloved by readers and I wanted that emotional impact! And I've had characters stick around when I thought they were pretty rubbish, again because some readers love them.

I believe in using tools to make your writing better. There's a lot wrong with Wattpad in my opinion, but as a learning tool and something which provides instant and insightful feedback, it cannot be beaten.

I think it should be a balance though; you are the writer, and the story is yours, so maintain control at all times, but definitely listen to your audience. Being a successful writer, whether we want to admit it or not, is about selling your work - and you cannot sell something no one wants to buy! Find out what people want to buy, find something in that that you want to write, and fill that gap. That doesn't mean writing things you hate (you'll never write anything good that way), but it does mean being willing to write things a little differently to how you first imagined them. Adaptability is a core skill for a writer.

I mentioned at the beginning that I also do ghostwriting professionally. That's a whole other conversation which I know we don't have time for today, but as a quick aside, I can tell you that there is nothing better at teaching you to be adaptable than writing someone else's story!! It's an incredible experience, and I can recommend it for any aspiring writer.

To conclude, what message do you have for WattPad Readers?

I'd just like to say thanks to anyone who does take the time to read my work - and I hope they enjoy it. Please do leave a comment and feed the hungry author! And my thanks to you, too. It's been really great to talk about this stuff, and I hope a few of your readers find something useful in everything I've said. I promise there'll be more from the world of Uun!

Thank you for accepting our profile's interview invitation, these lovely answers, and for giving the world all your creative works!

Interviewer: zeusea