There are very few YA books out there that deal with ADHD; why did you choose to address it in Concentr8?
There are many great schools and many great teachers, but successive recent governments seem to be obsessed with over-examining children in order to achieve measurable success according to the narrow parameters of international competitiveness. Teachers are being given less and less scope to teach in the way they want to teach, and children less opportunity to have a childhood. People who don’t comply with behavioural norms are likely to have their problems medicalised, and to be pressurised into taking ADHD medication, which offers no benefit over the long term.
We tell ourselves that we are increasingly tolerant as a society, but the burgeoning growth of ADHD suggests to me that we are in fact becoming more rigid, and less tolerant of those people who have difficulty spending childhood and adolescence sitting behind a desk. Many adults know they aren’t cut out for office work, and find productive and successful careers in practical, physical work. Children with this psychological make-up are likely to be branded as failures and (under the banner of ADHD) unjustly labelled as somehow mentally defective.
The fact that parents are incentivised into giving powerful ADHD drugs to their children by the benefits system also struck me as rather scandalous. The idea of a state that pays parents to drug children struck me as a something out of science fiction rather than a plausible political reality. I wanted to write a novel using this premise that started off seeming like the former, but as you read, reveals itself to be closer to the latter.
How much research did you have to do into ADHD?
I did a huge amount of research for Concentr8, reading every book I could find on the topic of ADHD. I didn’t know anything about it when I started, and I have no science background whatsoever, so the research for the book has been a fascinating voyage of discovery. Gradually inching your way towards some kind of expertise on a particular subject is one of the great excitements of being a writer. Something sparks your interest, and you can pursue it as far as you like.
I am now passionate about the subject of ADHD, and the ways in which children’s rights are being infringed by the spread of the disorder, which generates almost a million prescriptions a year in the UK alone.
What was your motivation for using colloquialisms in Concentr8? Writing dialogue like that is a very hard thing to get right.
Yes, it wasn’t easy, but I needed the novel to authentically represent the viewpoint of the kind of teenagers who might have taken part in the London riots of 2011. These people were represented as idiotic thugs by the media, and nobody seemed to care what their motivation might have been for rioting, or wanted to listen to anything they had to say. A novel is a good platform for attempting to understand this sector of society. I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I hadn’t volunteered as a mentor a few years ago, which put me into weekly direct contact with a teenager from a tough estate in North London. He isn’t personally in the book, but his voice was at the forefront of my mind as I was writing.
Did you take inspiration for Concentr8 from any other novels? I definitely sensed a bit of Melvin Burgess in there.
Like most writers, I read all the time. Everything you read gets mentally digested and it’s hard to say which books influence specific parts of your own writing. An adult novel, As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, which I studied for A-Level and at university was one direct inspiration, though. This novel invented the form I have used in Concentr8, where each chapter is named after a character who then narrates that chapter, creating a kind of collage of overlapping viewpoints. As I Lay Dying is the novel I have read more times than any other. I also borrowed from it the idea that the most powerful figure at the heart of the narrative only speaks once, right in the middle of the book. I’ve tipped my hat to this novel by naming the warehouse in Concentr8 after the Bundren family who are the subject of As I Lay Dying.
Almost every chapter of Concenr8 starts with a quotation, some of which come from Twitter - how did you go about choosing which quotes to use and were the tweets cited real?
I took notes on all the books I read as research, jotting down page references for the facts that most interested me. I ended up with a huge mass of material. It was then just a matter of selecting the best ones and matching them to appropriate chapters.
The Twitter quotes, believe it or not, are all 100% real. Type the word “Ritalin” into the Twitter search box, and some rather surprising worlds open up to you.
After the massive success of The Wall, did you feel any pressure when you were writing Concentr8?
Concentr8 is my 7th novel, but every time I finish a book I have no idea if I’m going to be able to do it again. Pressure” isn’t quite the right word, though. I think I’d go for “anxiety” or “terror”.
What are you working on next?
I’ve written a series of funny books for younger readers called Circus of Thieves, which is about, obviously, a circus of thieves. I’ve just finished the third one of those, which will be out next year. I’m also at the start of a new YA/adult book which I think is beginning to take shape.
