The Starlight Claim: Q & A with author Tim Wynne-Jones

 The Starlight Claim

Written by Tim Wynne-Jones

Candlewick Press

978-1-5362-0264-9

240 pp.

Ages 13+

September 2019

On September 10, 2019,  Tim Wynne-Jones's newest YA thriller, The Starlight Claim, was released and I reviewed it here on CanLit for LittleCanadians.

As the book will launch over the next few weeks here in Ontario including tonight in Toronto, I had the pleasure of interviewing author Tim Wynne-Jones about his book.

Enjoy the writing revelations Tim Wynne-Jones shares with us here about The Starlight Claim.

HK:  The Starlight Claim is an action-packed novel that includes characters from your earlier book The Maestro. However, rather than following The Maestro’s protagonist Burl, you chose to focus on Nate, Burl’s sixteen-year-old son. Why choose to make The Starlight Claim an intergenerational sequel?

TWJ:  A great question and one that made me laugh. For years readers have asked me what happened to Burl, since I leave it kind of hazy at the end of The Maestro. They also often want to know what happened to Burl’s evil dad. Mostly, they hope something awful! So what took me so long to write a sequel? Life – that’s what. Anyway, by the time I finally got around to writing this book, it had been twenty-four years – long enough for Burl to have a sixteen-year-old of his own. And I couldn’t resist letting Nate (named after the Maestro, himself, of course) brave his way up to Ghost Lake, alone. 


HK:  The Maestro was published in 1995. How difficult was it to write a sequel over 20 years after the original book? Were there some obstacles that you found impossible to overcome?

TWJ:  Some books are harder to write than others, taking two or three years. This book was the other kind. I was SO happy to return to the same magical setting as The Maestro, with the added dimension of making it late winter. This story not only addresses what happened to Burl and his dreadful father but also looks at a true story about my own “Ghost Lake” and the ramifications of a haunting tragedy. It was a dream to write, full of built-in conflict and very high stakes.


HK:  At its heart, The Starlight Claim is all about conflict: conflict within, as Nate struggles with his guilt over a friend’s death; conflict with others, as he eludes criminals and grapples with family dramas; and conflict with a landscape of epic beauty and unyielding hurdles.  Surprisingly, though Nate is dealing with all those tensions, he is an amazingly grounded young man. He is smart enough to accept fear but keeps his head and more than survives.  How did you conceive of him, especially knowing where his father came from?

TWJ:  Well, first of all, thank you for your kind words. Luckily, Nate is his father’s son and if you know Burl, you know what a resourceful soul he was, even as a kid. And Nate has all the savvy and inner strength of his father. And I do have to add, here, that he’s modeled on a good friend who has been kind enough to let me fictionalize his own story. Make no mistake, this is a work of fiction, but Nate’s grounded personality is very much a reflection of a real person. The person I’d most want to have handy if I was ship wrecked on a deserted island!  


HK:  While Nate is very much in the present, dealing with nefarious characters in a remote setting, struggling for his own survival, the past is everywhere.  It’s in the history of the camp, in his knowledge of his grandfather and in his memories of his friend Dodge.  What does The Starlight Claim tell us about the role of the past in the now and perhaps in the future?

TWJ:  The past is always with us. And I think never more so than when we lose someone that matters a great deal to us. Especially if you have to grapple with the fear of your own complicity, real or imagined, in the tragedy. It seems fitting, somehow, that as Nate travels up to the lake, burdened by a sorrow even heavier than the pack on his back, he should venture into the world of the past, so to speak, where his grandfather lurks. He says at one point, while he’s on the train heading up to the family camp that he’s travelling backward through his father’s history, stop by stop. So you’ve put your finger on an underlying theme.   


HK:  Japheth Starlight advised Burl in The Maestro that “You made the mess–you clean it up. That’s the way you become master of your own destiny” and it seems all the men in Burl’s family demonstrated that they learned this lesson to various degrees, even the repugnant Calvin Crow. How do you think Cal finally recognized this wisdom?

TWJ:  When readers talk to me about Calvin Crow they just about growl. That makes me so happy; the truth is -- I think any writer will tell you – writing the “bad guy” is so much more interesting than writing any other character. Cal is my “favourite” bad guy! That said, he’s human. Aren’t we all! So, I needed to find what made him tick. There is nothing so shallow as a bad guy who is just plain bad. We are all motivated by things that happen in our lives. There was something of this in a monologue of Cal’s in The Maestro and I wanted to expand upon it. I think that novels are often about redemption. I wanted to give him another chance.
    

HK:  As the story progresses, the reader realizes Dodge, the friend whose death Nate is  haunted by, is not the person Nate has held him up to be in his memory.  Moreover, Cal has his own issues with how he remembers things with his own son. What do their stories tell us about the capacity for memory to reflect something other than reality?

TWJ:  These are profound questions, Helen, thank you. One of the fondest wishes any writer can have is that the reader who cares to dig deep will find things to think about. I will defer to the wonderful English writer, Aidan Chambers, who has said this: “My personal conviction is that we are not changed by our experience, as common wisdom has it. What changes us are the stories we tell about our experience…” This is important: it’s not that we “make up stories” about our lives and therefore fictionalize them – another word for lying! It’s more to the point that we shape the experience into something tellable. We all do it. Have you ever had the experience of telling someone a family story within earshot of a sibling, who immediately jumps in and says, “That’s not the way it happened!”? That’s what I’m talking about; we see the world from our point of view. The delight of being a writer is imagining all kinds of points of view. 


HK:  The Maestro was a middle grade novel written for young readers ages 11 and older whereas The Starlight Claim is recommended for a slightly older audience, 13+. What in this new book prompted the publisher to propose that The Starlight Claim is more appropriate for a YA audience?

TWJ:  I’m not privy to that kind of decision-making, but I would guess it’s the addition of hardened and violent criminals to the mix. I think that any eleven-year-old who loves adventure stories will love this book – I sure would have when I was that age. And to be frank, they’ve probably seen a lot worse characters, in movies that get a PG rating. 


HK:  I could see continuing Burl and Nate’s stories, perhaps Burl’s after The Maestro but before The Starlight Claim, and both of their stories after The Starlight Claim. Would you consider this and why or why not?

TWJ:  Hmm, that’s a good question, as well. I’d have to say it’s unlikely, at this point. I don’t naturally steer toward sequels. That said, I’ve written two trilogies in my life: The “Zoom” picture books and my Rex Zero middle grade novels. They lent themselves really well to follow-ups. It took me twenty-five years to write a sequel to The Maestro. Maybe in another twenty-five years… But I never say never.

Many thanks to Tim Wynne-Jones
for again gracing CanLit for LittleCanadians with an interview
and providing insights into his newest novel and its writing.

Thank you also to publicist Winston Stilwell
for facilitating this endeavour.

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Best wishes to Tim Wynne-Jones on The Starlight Claim,
a story that I'm sure will capture all readers,
whether fans of thrillers or YA or great literature of any genre.


(And don't forget tonight's launch in Toronto and also in Kingston and Ottawa. Sadly Perth's was yesterday. Details here.)