Girl Nearly 16: Absolute Torture

About Sue Limb

Sue Limb is the bestselling author of the Girl, 15 books featuring Jess Jordan. Her other children’s books include Come Back, Grandma, which was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. Sue lives on a remote organic farm near Nailsworth in Gloucestershire. Chocolate SOS, published by Bloomsbury in January 2012, is another side-splittingly funny story featuring the crazy confessions of charming but insane Jess Jordan.

For 7+ year olds there’s:
RUBY ROGERS - Ruby wants to be a gangster when she grows up. Not a horrid violent one, obviously - more a kind of female Robin Hood living in the treetops, preferably with a troupe of monkeys, a species Ruby adores. Her human family consists of a teasing eccentric older brother Joe, a Geography teacher father who has no sense of direction, and a midwife mum who regularly falls asleep on the sofa instead of providing lavish suppers. Ruby's best friend Yasmin is a Muslim, though not so you'd notice. Yasmin loves dolls and clothes and is shrewd about relationships. She and Ruby have a fiery but devoted friendship and through Yasmin's older sister Zerrin, Ruby gets to know Holly Helvellyn, Gothic eccentric and Ruby's ultimate role model.

For 12+ year olds there’s:
ZOE AND CHLOE Chloe and Zoe are best friends, unless there are boys around, of course in which case it’s every girl for herself. Deliciously comedic, the obsessions, embarrassments, disasters and joys of teen life are captured with pitch-perfect comic timing.

As well as:
GIRL, 15... Life can be trying when your best friend is a goddess, you are a woeful underachiever, and your love-life is as messy and as mucky as a sticky quagmire of mud. Painfully spot on, the Girl... series reveals with Technicolor precision the agony and the ecstasy (and the embarrassment) of being a teenager. With razor-sharp observation and deadpan humour we are offered a privileged peek at the life of Jess, charming, but most definitely insane. This series has a unique voice and humour that will make you want to read it again and again - if you can bring yourself to put the books down in the first place.

A Q & A with Sue Limb

Q. Where do you get inspiration from?
A. Everyday life: things I overhear on buses, embarrassing memories from my own teenage years, books I like (Jane Austen sometimes). As you go through life all your experiences form a kind of compost heap and sometimes something beautiful grows out of it. And sometimes something ugly!

Q. Is it better to write about things you know or write from imagination?
A. I always set my books in places familiar to me. Otherwise it would be like taking an exam in Physics without ever opening a textbook! I admire writers such as Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling who can let their imaginations fly into the most amazing fantasy. But I do like my own arena: everyday comedy.

Q. Do you write for you or for an imaginary reader?
A. I think I write to amuse myself and to keep myself interested in a character. I’m always delighted and rather surprised when I hear from readers that they’ve enjoyed a book. When I was younger, if I was stuck with a book I used to imagine I was writing it as a kind of letter to amuse somebody I fancied. I suppose this would make me pull out all the stops and try my very best to impress! But nowadays I have become a bit more chilled out about life. I don't get wild crushes these days, although sometimes I dream that famous old men are kind to me…(Bill Clinton, David Attenborough, if you really want to know.)

Q. What do you come up with first the plot or the characters?
A. If a character is interesting, and she or he has a plan or an agenda, and then obstacles crop up which interfere with the plan, the plot will take care of itself.

Q. How do you plan a story?
A. Sometimes I just have a character with an ambition - the ambition can be very minor - and then just take it from there. I think it's always useful to have surprises in a story - somebody behaving very differently from normal because of a secret reason....

Q. Should you know the end before you start writing?
A. No! I never do. Many writers feel their characters take over and grab the steering wheel! I've only just completely rewritten a book (Zoe and Chloe: Out to Lunch) because the outline I had originally sketched out didn't work, and I realised I had to start at the beginning again and move one of the characters across a whole continent so he could participate in the story more.

Q. What do you think is the essence of a good story?
A. It should unfold with surprises, grip you and involve you. The character or characters should be interesting people you would like to meet. You should, when reading it, be unaware of your immediate surroundings and find the book really hard to put down.

Q. Who should you ask to read over your work and take advice from?
A. If you're still at school, your English teacher. I have editors at my publishers who do that kind of thing for me. My daughter (who is 22 so was recently a teenager) offers helpful advice when she thinks my choice of words is too old-fashioned.

Q. What is the first step to getting your work published?
A. Send it to publishers and agents, and if it keeps getting rejected, just keep on sending it.

Q. How should you present your work to publishers?
A. Follow the advice in The Writers and Artists' Yearbook. Always present your manuscript double spaced and only on one side of the paper!

Q. What’s the best advice anyone has given you in your writing career?
A. "Give your characters difficulties and don't try too hard to be funny all the time." Oh – and never stop reading, and as you read, notice how other writers are working.