Interview with Samuel Bonner

Q: Hello Samuel and congratulations on the publication of your debut novel ‘Playground’ hitting the shelves later this month. Thanks so much for letting me read a copy and for this opportunity to discuss your work with you in more detail. Let’s start by talking about how this book came about and how you found a publisher. You finished a Film Studies and Creative Writing degree at the London Metropolitan University in 2008. Did you start this book as part of your degree, or was it something that you worked on after graduation? What was the path you followed that led to the publication of your book by Janus Publishing?

A: I just wanted to write something. I came away with the Creative Writing major but didn’t really know what to do with it. I’ve really been into writing stories and stuff like that since a young age and started taking it a bit more seriously when I was at Uni. We once had this author come to talk to us there and she won some kind of prize for her book, and I read an extract and had a feeling I might be able to write something better, and since that moment it stuck in my head that when I finished I would try and bang out a novel.

My basic plan was to do one just for practice, have a go at writing something at length just to work all the kinks out of my style and really try and sharpen my creative blade. I wrote some werewolf story (as I always kind of had a thing about werewolves) which was only about 100 pages long, then I dabbled with a Sci-Fi story that was about 200 pages. Then I wrote ‘Playground’.

Q: Once you started working with the publisher how has the process worked? Have you been collaborating with editors? How did the book-jacket come about? What are your expectations in terms of your own efforts to sell the book? I know that you are planning to join me for a book swap/author panel event I am planning for a charitable event I am involved with and I’m very much looking forward to that.

A: Well, I got into a bit of a panic when after six months I hadn’t got a job, so I got the Writer’s Yearbook and applied to every relevant publisher and I was getting jerked around and stuff like that. I nearly gave up but then I decided I’d go around and phone them all up, and only Janus gave me the time of day, which I was extremely thankful for.

I started working there part time (unpaid) just to learn the ropes and to put a building block on my CV, while I was also working in a sports shop and trying to write my book. I finished Playground in July and had asked a designer friend of mine to design me some front covers cos my initial plan was to take my manuscript to an agent with a front cover already designed and then make them do all the work in trying to get me a deal. But what actually happened was, I showed the front covers to the Managing Director at Janus and she sort of fell in love with them. Then she was like ‘have you got your book on you?’ and I’m like ‘only the first draft,’ so what she asked me to do was give it an edit, get it into some kind of shape, then give it to her to be test-read. The review came back positive and I was offered a contract.

I gave the book two edits and on the third draft I gave it to a friend of mine to read and she came up with some pointers. Then it was proofread through the publishing house and since then it has just been a case of getting rid of all the little bugs.

As far as sales go, well I don’t really know. I really do believe that I have a good book, with a great front cover (which I’m going to attribute about 90% of the sales to), but I know the state the publishing industry is in. I’m a first time author and I’m not Katie Price, so I probably won’t get the kind of Waterstone’s attention that a genuinely good book deserves. But, I got a really good PR woman working on it and she read the book and got all excited and is talking about big things, and plus my old Creative Writing teacher (who is also a published author, Sunny Singh) is giving me a lot of help and attention.

Apart from all that, Facebook, Twitter and all that stuff is helping generate a buzz. I’m just trying to be hopeful and pray for a miracle.

Q: It’s a commonly held perception and often misconception that a writer’s debut novel is heavily autobiographical. That said, I know that you grew up on a council housing estate in North London. How much of ‘Playground’ is based on what you have experienced or seen in your own life? In my review I cited several other works (the books ‘Boy A’ and ‘Lord of the Flies’ and the Brazilian film ‘City of God’) that I drew parallels with. Who or what are the influences on your work?

A: Well see here’s the thing. None of ‘Playground’ is based on me or anything like that. I’m a good guy. But I grew up in an area that was, shall we say, very working class, and had a lot of bad stuff happen in it. And I had to seriously consider if ‘Playground’ was the type of book that I wanted to write because me personally, I hate all that Kidulthood stuff and those films that are about gangs in London. It makes me cringe a little bit. But I knew I could use London as a backdrop to tell a scary story, something dark and disturbing. I like horror novels and horror films, and that was what I was really aiming to do, use London and the epidemic of teenagers killing each other, and show the evil in it. I mean, the papers try and say that kids stab each other to death because of rap music or because their influenced by American gang culture or whatever, and there may be some truth in that. Though what I tried to do with ‘Playground’ is show that some people are just evil, or that they can be manipulated and influenced to do evil things.

Oh, and I was flattered that ‘Playground’ was compared to ‘Lord of the Flies’ (which I read the year before based on my girlfriend’s little sister’s recommendation) and I really like that film City of God. Haven’t seen Boy A but my girlfriend tells me it’s meant to be really good. So anything like that that my book gets compared to makes me extremely proud.

Q: ‘Playground’ effectively starts with the ending. Did you know how the book was going to finish where you started it? Did you have a plan for it or did the book make its own way as you wrote it?

A: I didn’t plan one single part of the book. In fact, I started the book only with one scene in my head, which was the prologue. I thought it would be a really good opening to get people hooked; a boy staggers on stage in front of a packed auditorium and puts a picture of a gun on an OHP. I don’t know where the image came from, but the whole time while I was writing this long Sci-Fi thing, I kept thinking about it over and over and I just really wanted to start writing it.

Everything else just unfurled itself. I mean sometimes I’d have a rough guess as to what might happen later down the road but nothing ever stayed that way. The only thing I planned with certainty was that I wasn’t going to shy away from anything. I was going to be raw and blunt about the swearing, the nudity, the racial slurs, the violence, because readers know when the author doesn’t tell the truth.

Q: Although ‘Playground’ is essentially a tale of good versus evil, Jonah is by no means pure; he is good in a relative sense, relative that is to his old friends whose characters have degenerated in his absence. Much of his goodness is driven by his naivety although his logic and judgement prevail. Did you set out to write a morality tale and did you always see Jonah’s ultimate role as an evangelist or an ambassador for hope and informed choice?

A: No, I didn’t want to do anything like that. I actually shy away from writing that kind of stuff. The way I saw it was that Jonah had to be real. He didn’t have to be real good, just real. Some people have commented that the book is an analogy warning against gang activity and that kind of thing, but I don’t agree. It’s a story about friendship mostly, and the power your friends can have over you.

I never tried to write something that could be seen as a metaphor for kids to wake them up to the dangers of that kind of lifestyle because let’s face it – any kid with a brain in their head knows the difference between right and wrong. It’s wrong to kill your classmates, it’s wrong to gang rape a girl, it’s wrong to smoke crack. And these things have no excuse, nothing the media can safely put the blame on. It is the individual, who, somewhere down the road, decided they didn’t care what they do to other human beings, or maybe simply they do stuff because they enjoy it.

Either way I don’t care, and I don’t care to try and figure it out. If a youngster reads my book and it changes his attitude for the better, good for him. Maybe he can buy me a beer if I ever meet him. But it was never my agenda.

Q: As a thirty something white female middle class reader this isn’t an obvious book for me to choose to read, although I do have rather eclectic tastes and enjoy writers such as Irvine Welsh who are hardly light on the palate either. I said in my review, for someone like me it has the effect of making me revaluate the privileges and luxuries I was born into. When you wrote the book, who did you see as your target readership? People that need to see that they can make different choices or people who need to realise that not everyone is born with the same opportunities?

A: I don’t really think about that stuff. I used inner city London as the setting because I remember it being a scary place to be growing up. Both scary and exciting. I liked it and I knew that I had to keep my eyes peeled a lot. I understood how easily I could wind up with a case of death by treading in the wrong place or saying the wrong thing, but I’ve always been pretty observant. I didn’t consider a target audience, though I did hope that I could catapult my book on the back of this obsession and trend that’s going around about youth culture in London. I mean, E4 is bang on it and the National Lottery don’t mind forking out money for some mindless film about teenagers. At the same time though, I avoided putting slang in the book and things of that nature because I didn’t want it to be aimed at teenagers and for them to identify with it because of the way the characters speak, I just wanted to tell a shocking story. See, I want to get paid to do this full time and to do that, you need to sell a lot of books. Why not make something that will grab peoples’ attention?

Ultimately, I just wanted to write a truthful tale with a bit of intelligence. Something that had more than one layer to it, characters that were human and driven by human desires.

Q: If you were a gun, what sort of gun would you be? I think I’d be a water pistol -completely harmless and more than a little bit silly.

A: Lol. I would be some kind of magnum, the kind of thing that could make a dinosaur explode. They make noise, they get noticed.