Interview with Jamie Jauncey

The Witness is set in a Scotland of the future. I wondered what kind of effect you were going for by setting your book then rather than in the present day.

I started thinking about this book in the late 90s and there were two themes I wanted to develop. The first was civil war. I remember watching the atrocities of the Balkan conflict on TV and feeling that though it was all so close, a few hundred miles away, we were utterly removed from the reality of it. If I wanted to write about the horror of civil war, the best way to do so with impact seemed to be to set it on our own doorstep. At the same time land reform was moving up the political agenda as devolution drew near, and I was interested in the issues it raised about our sense of national identity. Of course, conflict over land is one of the oldest causes of war. But to bring these two things together I had to project forward from the present to a time when Scotland had become independent. Part of the point of setting any book in the future is to say 'This is what might happen' , although I didn't want to make any overtly political statement about either independence or land reform. At heart The Witness is a human story about John and his relationship with Ninian. The only thing I really wanted to say about land is simply that to look after it properly you've got to care about it, no matter where you stand in the social or political spectrum.

A reviewer of your previous novel, The Crystal Keeper, praises an 'endearingly realistic' heroine in the book and The Witness promises no less in the strong character of John MacNeil who's an 'old before his years', 18 year-old. How do you go about creating your central characters? Do you discuss your characters with family and friends.

This was rather odd, because in the early drafts of the book John was aged 45, not 18. But by the time I came to write him down in age he'd been with me for nearly five years and I think I'd sorted out his basic character, his values, to the point where they were so much the essence of him that age made no difference; although that may account for him seeming, as you say, 'old before his years'. My wife is my main sounding board for my characters. As a psychotherapist she's very strong on psychological make-up and motive and I rely heavily on her insights once the characters start to step out of the shadows and into the spotlight. My two younger children, both in their late teens, were also hugely helpful once I came to re-write John as a much younger man. I remember my own late teens being a time that was full of energy and excitement, as well as drama because it was when my parents - quite unexpectedly to me - got divorced. Writing a character of this age certainly allowed me to tap back into some of that, and that's when I feel John really came to life, through his rites of passage.

The relationship between John and Ninian forms the heart of the novel and is a touching one. It's also an unusual one: a boy at the end of his teenage years and the much younger Ninian, but it works beautifully. What inspires you to write for and about what's said to be a difficult age range?

To some extent I've already answered that question. But I'm also not sure whether this is really a 'young adult' novel or an adult novel with a young adult as the main character - or whether there's really even such a thing as a 'young adult' genre, though publishers and booksellers need one for marketing purposes. These days anyone from the age of about sixteen upwards is treated pretty much as an adult. They just have a slightly different take on the world. But they're certainly not children any longer and I believe they make quite legitimate protagonists for novels that could be read equally well by adults of all ages. I don't think very hard about audience when I'm writing, though. I just try to make the characters as real and human as I possibly can, regardless of their ages. I agree that a close relationship between an 18 year-old and an 8 year-old is unusual, but I think the extreme circumstances in which John and Ninian are thrown together, and Ninian's complete dependence on John because of his unusual condition, allowed it to work.

The political situation in the Scotland of the near future forms the backdrop to the book and your previous novel, The Albatross Conspiracy, also features a strong political background. Again, it's highly unusual to have politics coming into young adult fiction: what's the fascination?

Politics for me is just a kind scaling-up of domestic life, emotion on a slightly larger canvas. There's human drama and social drama. I like using the backdrop of dramatic social shift to provide the circumstances in which ordinary people find themselves tested. So those backdrops have to be plausible. I could create conflicts which are unexplained, but I think the story has more impact if you can extrapolate from what's happening now and say 'This is where my might-be story came from'. I also think it's very hard to write anything serious about Scotland for any age group without politics coming into it - it's just the times we live in.

The Witness is your fourth book and pulls off a fast-paced plot with sensitive characterization. Does the writing process get any easier from one to another?

I'm not sure that it does. I think you just end up struggling with different things as your focus shifts. I used to worry terribly about plot. Now I feel that as long as you can get the characters to live and breathe and bleed in an authentic way, you can get away with quite a lot on the plotting front. So I worry about characterisation instead. The plotting is largely mechanical. It's the human drama that interests me most, and it takes a lot of work to get that right. For me it's the most important work in the book.

Do you ever bring back characters from previous novels/stories if their voices are still in your head or do you like to start completely afresh with a new set of characters and circumstances?

Because, to date, my books have taken me so long to write (five years on average), those voices have dimmed. I also think the relationship with a fictional character can be a little like that with a former partner. It ends for a reason, and you can choose to stay friends but you don't want them in your bed any longer. I love the process of character-creation. It's the most energising part of each new project. For the book I'm currently writing I did something I haven't done before - I got each of about ten main characters to write a three-page monologue about themselves, so I knew them really well before I started to tell the story. I have a very tight deadline for this book and so far it's paid dividends.

Can you describe your next writing project?

Another novel with an eighteen year-old main character. It's set on an island and involves green technology and white supremacists. It should be out next summer, 2008. Among other things, it's about the power of myth and legend.