Zana Fraillon is an award-winning author of books for children and young adults. Her work has been published in over 15 countries and is in development for stage and screen. Today we’re chatting to Zana about Song of a Thousand Seas, her latest verse novel, with illustrations by Aviva Reed.
The publisher provided Alphabet Soup with a reading copy of this tile.
From the publisher:
Houdini the octopus lives in an aquarium, but she misses her home in the wild Sea. She doesn’t like the visitors who bang on her tank. Or the way she can’t feel the sun on her skin or the wind rippling the water. Then one day she meets someone who is different to the other visitors. The singing of the Sea is growing stronger and harder to resist. Can Houdini make Juno understand what she needs before it’s too late?
Your verse novel is written from the point of view of an octopus. How did you approach finding Houdini’s voice?
This novel was a bit different to the way I usually work. Usually, the character’s voice is the first thing that comes to me, but this time around it was the opposite. I actually had a dream that I was an octopus. I was looking out through octopus eyes at the sun filtering in through the water, and tasting things with my skin – it was all very surreal – but this dream stayed with me when I woke and kept nudging at me during the day. I knew this was a story I wanted to write, but the dream had been utterly silent and peaceful, and I felt by giving voice to the character I was somehow destroying that peace. I looked at a lot of ways to get around this – I tried very hard to sell this as a graphic novel, but that wasn’t something my publishers were keen to explore. So I was a bit stuck!
When I am stuck on something, I know the best thing to do is to come at it from a different angle. So instead of trying to actively find and force the voice, I threw myself into research. This led me to approaching Sea Life aquarium in Sydney, who were wonderfully supportive and invited me to come meet their resident octopus – Houdini. As soon as I met her, the voice of my octopus came to me as clear as day. I find that the more I know about a character, the stronger their voice is in my head. I suspect the initial silence was due to me not knowing anything about octopuses. Research is definitely a writer’s best friend.
How do you decide whether to write a story as a prose novel or as a verse novel?
I don’t really decide – the story decides for me! When I get a sense of the character, their way of talking and expressing their world and their place within their world becomes evident pretty quickly. For some, especially characters who are not people, this comes through as verse. There is also something about the musicality and rhythm of the more-than-human world that I want to try and capture in my words, and this seems to work best through verse.
I also just really love writing verse novels, so if a character lends itself to this style I am all for it! I love how playful you can be with the words in a verse novel, and the way they are set on the page. I love that the words themselves can be saying one thing, while the way they are written on the page can be saying something else. For example, if you have a character saying how brave they are, but those words are tiny and small and set off over in the corner, the reader understands that the narrator isn’t that brave at all. I also really love how verse novels leave space for the reader’s imagination – the breaks between verses is like a breathing space that allows images and ideas and connections to grow.
Could you share a favourite octopus fact?
Octopuses are amazing creatures – so alien and monstrous and also so very, very human. They are curious and funny! Octopuses have been known to target certain people and squirt those people with water any time they come past. To me, this is deliberately humorous behaviour! I think my favourite fact is that octopuses watch other animals to see what those animals are scared of, so that the octopus can then mimic that in order to protect itself. It shows such self-awareness and planning and thought. It is also just an excellent superpower.
Do you have a tip for young writers who would like to write a story from the point of view of an animal?
Pay attention to the animal – as in, watch the animal, notice everything you can about what they do and how they do it and try to figure out why they behave in that way. Put yourself in their position as much as is possible and safe. For example, when I was writing The Way of Dog I took my dogs for a walk and when they stopped to sniff a tree, I would stop and sniff that tree. I curled up in their bed, and under the table. It is amazing how different the world looks from just this small change of perspective. For Song of a Thousand Seas I looked out at the world through the glass of a tank. I went swimming and looked up at the lights through the water and listened to how sound changes. Also – use your research! Find out as much as you can about the animal and that will give you hints about how the world seems to them. For example, octopuses taste with their suckers – imagine tasting with your hands and feet!
Could you tell us a little about what you’re working on now?
I have two picture books which are coming out in the next year or so – I really love writing picture books and collaborating with an artist on a project that I could never do on my own. I love how the illustrations can tell a whole other part to the story, and how the story couldn’t live without both parts. My ideal writing life would be one where I spent all my time collaborating with other creatives. I haven’t worked out how to do this on a large scale yet, but I’m sure there is a way!
A friend of mine also suggested I should make a verse novel trilogy – having written one from the point of view of a land animal, and one from the point of view of a sea animal, it makes sense to write one from the point of view of a sky animal … Now I can’t get this idea out of my head. We’ll see … (but if anyone has any sky animal recommendations, please let me know!)
Song of a Thousand Seas is out now! Ask for it at your favourite bookshop or local library.
AWESOME EXTRAS
Zana Fraillon talking about Song of a Thousand Seas [YouTube]
Visit Zana Fraillon’s website for more about the author and her books
alphabetsoup.net.au 