Video transcript
NSW Premier's Reading Challenge 2024 – SWF author interview (secondary) – 04. Jack Heath

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KAYLEE: Hi. My name is Kaylee from Bankstown Girls High School. I'm here on the Darug land at Parramatta Riverside Theatres, taking part in Sydney Writers' Festival Secondary School Day. And I'm so excited to be interviewing Jack Heath for the Premier Reading Challenge. Hi, how are you today.

JACK HEATH: I'm really well. Thank you.

KAYLEE: Jack Heath, you have written 40 books in your career so far. Have you always wanted to be a writer? Or did you have any job before becoming an author that influenced your career? And when did you realise writing was something you wanted to pursue professionally?

JACK HEATH: I think I realised that I would like to be a professional writer when I was in year 5. I don't think I started actually writing what became my first book until I was about 13. But then, I sent it to a publisher when I was 17. It was published when I was 19. This essentially means that writing was my first real job.

I'd had other-- I'd worked in a fish and chips shop. I'd done a bit of music tutoring on the side. But writing became sort of my first real profession. But it took a few years to make it sustainable.

So like, for the first few years, I worked other jobs. I sold televisions. I worked in a call centre. And then I had this amazing job at a bookshop, where I got to learn a lot about readers and the sorts of books that they will pick up and take to the counter, versus the kinds of books that they'll put back down. And then in 2017, I was selling enough books to quit the day job. So I've been a full-time writer since then.

KAYLEE: Thank you. I recently read 'If You Tell Anyone, You're Next', and really enjoy it. In this book, Zoe try to track down her best friend who has disappeared. And even though she's really worried, no one seemed to care. Did any real-life event or experience influence the story?

JACK HEATH: I think there's 2 kinds of writers. There's the kind who write because something amazing has happened to them, and they just have to get it out. And then there's the kind of writer where nothing interesting ever happened to them, so they write just because they've learned to spend a lot of time imagining and daydreaming and stuff. I'm definitely that second kind of writer.

If I ever write an autobiography, do not buy it. It would be so boring. [laughs] So no, there was no real-life event. I was just kind of trying to lean in to the various concerns-- actually, my publisher said, look, the teen murder mystery genre is selling really well. Do you reckon you could write something like that? And I was like, sure.

So I sent them an outline. They sent back some feedback. I sent some more outlines. So I was kind of just kind of feeling my way through. My publisher treats me a bit like ChatGPT. They're like, can you just write something like this? And I go, OK.

But in this case, it wasn't until I was about a third of the way through the first draft that Zoe started to feel like a real person. So it was like, I knew what she would do in any given situation. So at that point, it felt like-- this sounds pretentious. But it felt like she was driving the story rather than me. So I almost want to say the things that influenced the story were things that happened to her rather than anything that happened in my life.

KAYLEE: In this book, The 17, which is a secret group chat, have a lot of power and influence. Why did you choose this as a major plot point in this story?

JACK HEATH: Yeah. I think when you're writing for teenagers, it's a difficult age to write for for a variety of reasons. One, is that there are certain content things that you can't touch. Even if the teenagers themselves might enjoy them, their parents would be very unhappy. So you've always got to be careful about that.

But there's also-- teenage readers are quite sophisticated, too. They certainly hate being patronised or talked down to. But my own teenage years-- I mean, my kids are both under 10, so I don't have any teenage children. It's been 20 years since I was a teenager myself. So there was a lot of research involved.

So I guess I was just kind of, again, feeling my way through what things did I experience, kind of bullying and exclusion and people doing more and more dangerous or stupid things to try to break into the cool crowd, versus what things are teenagers dealing with now that I didn't have to deal with-- things like social media and various sort of pressures around that.

I was just kind of smushing all that together and trying to work out where the conflict was. Because once you've found something that will create a problem for someone else, then you've got a story because then they have something to solve.

KAYLEE: Many students out there might know you as the author of 'Minutes of Danger' and the 'Minutes of Mystery' series, which are collecting of short story featuring several plot twists and turns that keep reading guessing or stressed out until the very end. What strategy do you employ to keep this book engaging and unpredictable, and how does writing this short story differ to your novel?

JACK HEATH: It's funny because I have an anxiety disorder. So the question, what's the worst that could happen, is always just there in my brain. So writing the 'Minutes of Danger' series came very naturally to me. I was like, what if I get buried alive? OK, here's what would happen. What if I got stuck in space without a spacesuit? Here's what would happen.

But as for keeping it engaging goes, I think it's important to start in the middle of the story rather than at the beginning. Because they're short stories, you don't have a lot of time to cover the characters' early life for how they get-- you need to on the first page, or even in the title of the story, capture what the threat is going to be.

And it's engaging if the main character is likable as well. But again, you don't have a lot of time to flesh them out. So I've found the fastest way to do that is to have them demonstrate that they care about someone else. That's the fastest way to make them sort of likable.

So if you've got immediate danger and a likable person in that immediate danger, that combination tends to create an engaging story. And the reader is on the hook for long enough to get to the end of it.

KAYLEE: You've been-- you publish a lot of books for both children and adults. How do you balance writing for different ages, and what's the main difference to you?

JACK HEATH: Yeah. I think writing for children and writing for adults is more similar than anyone would like to admit. As a culture, we take the adult fiction seriously and the children's fiction not at all. When in reality, the craft, it's all suspense. It's twists. It's character. It's setting. It's plot. It's foreshadowing. The ingredients are all identical.

The only differences I've found that are important are, firstly, with books for children, and up to a point, teenagers, everything needs to be kind of turned up to 11 all the time. Whereas, when you're writing for adults, I can start at a low simmer, and then gradually build to a crescendo.

And the other difference I found is that children and young adults are willing to suspend their disbelief a bit further. Adults would read a book and go, but that would never happen in real life, and then throw it away. Whereas, a kid would go like, that's awesome. They don't care if it would happen. They only care if it's awesome.

KAYLEE: Your most recent YA book, 'The Peak', is the start of a new mystery series when a teenager is recruited to become a spy at a special training academy. How would you describe this book any readers out there who haven't discovered yet? And how many books will be in the new series?

JACK HEATH: OK. So the elevator pitch for this is Harry Potter meets Alex Rider. Basically, it's a kid who's recruited at a secret school for spies. But the school for spies has been infiltrated by someone else, and he's the one who's going to have to prove who it is and save them, but-- sorry, not save them. He doesn't save the bad guy. [laughs] So there's that.

As for how many books will be in the series, there's another one coming out in August called 'Spy Academy: Doomsday'. There may be a third one as well, but I have a lot of different things on my plate at the moment. So I have an idea for a third one, but I have a lot of series going at once.

And ultimately, while I love my job, it is still a job. I have to go with what makes the most sense. Which series are selling the best? Which ones have the most potential to sell internationally? Which ones are most adaptable for film, that kind of thing?

So I'm always walking that tightrope between what I want to do creatively and what I think will keep a roof over my head. In the case of 'Spy Academy', it's too soon to tell which camp it'll fall into.

KAYLEE: If you could only choose one of your books to become a movie, which one would it be and why?

JACK HEATH: That's a great question. I think-- I have a few books under option at the moment for TV series that may well be adapted. But it's interesting that the screen is a very different medium. It's much better at showing you how something looks and how it sounds. It's much worse at showing you how something feels and at showing the inner life of a character and stuff.

So I guess the one-- my favourite books that I've written are often the most interior ones with the emotional lives of the characters, but those ones would make the worst movies. So the one I would most like to see adapted as a film would probably be '500 Minutes of Danger', because that features a giant lizard stomping through a city. And that's the kind of thing that's fun to see on a screen.

KAYLEE: Thank you so much for letting me interview you today.

JACK HEATH: It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

KAYLEE: It's been amazing to talk with you. I hope everyone watching out there today enjoy reading your incredible novel as much as I did, while they work to complete the Premier Reading Challenge.