Shaun David Hutchinson loves writing cross genres. He writes about real world problems, so they will not seem weird anymore, but instead being taken more seriously. He also wants to add a bit of laboratory to it, based on his own perspectives. “No writing is objective”, he says. “It is always filtered through your experiences.”
Shaun is inspired by renaissance literature as for example Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer. He loves big, sweeping stories that bring up social issues and are fun, sad, romantic and more at the same time. His novel Feral youth is a retelling of The Canterbury Tales.
When people are discussing Shaun’s novels, Shaun thinks it is also about what the reader brings to the novels. He always listen to ciriticism, then sort out the best and the worst to listen to the response somewhere in the middle. “You need confidence to be an author”, Shaun thinks. “Once you have published something, you can’t change what is out there. What you can do is to let the response inform you when writing the next novel.” It is also important to remember that you are allowed to think what you think, because otherwise you can drown under people’s opinions. If you belong to a certain community or group of people it can also be good to group together for safety.
Shaun consciously include awkward people in his novels, because he wants to write about people as they are. He also thinks about representation, with starting point what representation will be left if he was not to mess it up for someone else. Thus he writes books for queer people, but has decided to not call his novels queer literature. He thinks that queer literature should be represented in all school libraries though, just like all other kinds of literature. Also all cultures and races should be represented, he adds. You need to create a space for two people, build families and support systems.
Shaun wrote We are the ants and the memoir Brave face as a response to his attempted suicide when he was 19 years old. In We are the ants, the boyfriend has taken his life before the book starts and Brave face is built on Shaun’s own life. The message in these novels are that you need perseverance, to keep going, because life will become better even if it might take some time.
In Brave face Shaun wants to be very clear with the fact that it was not his sexuality or coming out being the reason for his depression, even if he himself thought so when he was a teen ager. “Depressed you can only become because of clinical reaons or a certain situation you are going through, not because of your sexuality”, he states. Now Shaun has learned to notice periods when he needs to “hug himself an extra bit” so any signs of a starting depression will go away.
In several books Shaun brings up grief, how tricky and hard it can be. Because of that people deals with it in a lot of ways and also become more vulnerable. One character who was particularly vulnerable was Andrew in The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley. He was even set on fire by bullies. Shaun read in the news that it happened to a boy and felt so affected so he wanted to write a story about it. How the hospital environment came out was also inspired by a song Shaun heard on the radio. A line from the lyrics went: “You know I can’ see colours like this when you are not around”.
For being able to write his latest novel, A complicated love story set in space, Shaun needed to add a craft aspect. He built a model of a spaceship including engineering room, inside rooms and more, so that he could more easily imagine how the characters moved within and around the spaceship.
The writing workshop
Shaun told the students to use an own memory to create fiction, at the same time as remembering that what you are writing is what you remember, not what anyone else is remembering, because you can experience the same thing differently.
Shaun uses “the cookie date” in We are the ants and Brave face, an example. That was based on an own memory: When he was on a cookie date with his best friend and was coming out, telling anyone for the first time that he was gay. For Shaun the cookie date was a very charged moment, “the biggest moment of his life”, where he felt a safe space, anticipation and release. For his best friend Rachel they were just haning out as usual.
Shaun asks the students to write down an anectode or memoir, that is later on going to be turned into fiction. “You will use your memoires”, Shaun says. Next step is tha the students try to find something unexpected in the memory, something that means something. It could be a detail that sticks out, which symbolizes what the heart of that event is.
You need to create a feeling of care:
- What has been / begun?
- What are your ideas?
- How can your ideas expand?
- What can you turn your ideas into?
- Why do you remember the event you wrote about?
You need to start small, outline, get your words out on the page and rewrite. In a bigger perspective: What is memories about and what can we make of them?
The next step is to ask yourself: Who is your audience? In first hand, you should write a story that is fine for you. You might make someone unhappy, but that is ok, as long as you write about what you feel and things you know. You use your own life, listen to voices and “dive in” to see what happens.
“In my writing I often use my mum and best friend as starting points or references when creating characters”, Shaun says. “Then I start to ask “what if… questions” to put the character out of place in order to fictionalize him or her and create the plot in the story. The process is like you take an emotion and give it a physical ally.” Shaun gives some examples:
- A guilt appear.
- You turn invisible.
- Someone does not walk out.
- You disappear.
- A teenager get the possiblity to end the world.
- Everybody else knows something but not you.
In The apocalypse of Elena Mendoza, a young woman discovers she got the ability to heal people, but at the same time she is doing that, the world gets closer to an end. This is the conflict in that novel. To create a conflict in your story, Shaun give tip of asking yourself: What is the worst thing that could happen to your character? Then you will need to organize things carefully to make him or her overcome anxiety over loosing, a sense of incompleteness or anything else.
Sometimes Shaun gets criticized for his characters’ bad choices, for making physical or emotional conflict. Shaun thinks that not only his teenage characters but also grown ups make bad choices now and then. No matter if the characters or grown ups are having the best intentions.
Last tip Shaun give to the students is to look for inspiration everywhere: Listen to song lyrics, read novels, watch TV, read graphic novels and more. Because you never know what is going to click your brain nor where inspiration will come from. For that reason it can also be good to take walks.
