Tia Fisher on Not Going to Plan being personal
"It’s been great to revisit my past and forgive myself a few of my mistakes"
Tia Fisher, the talented author of the brilliant and important Crossing The Line, is back with another novel in verse. While Crossing The Line touches upon county lines, her new novel Not Going to Plan is about teen pregnancy. Following unlikely friends Marnie and Zed who bond together over a trade in tuition, and how Zed helps Marnie make an important decision after she had a sex with a boy who lied about using a condom, Not Going to Plan is brilliant, and impactful. We can’t wait for Not Going to Plan to start conversations in classrooms.
Guest post written by Tia Fisher, author of Not Going to Plan.
When your book-baby is finally born, it’s an emotional moment. The characters you’ve been nurturing in your head for years are leaving home to live in other heads too.
Despite the title, my new YA verse novel, Not Going to Plan, took years to gestate. It grew gradually from a pinprick of protest to a roar of rage about control, coercion and choice. It’s strong stuff, and I can’t wait to share it with my teen audience.
But it’s not enough to have a theme. If you want to make a story live, you’ve got to breathe life into the characters. I usually play Frankenstein, creating new people by splicing together random body bits and traits of people I know (like young Ravi in Crossing the Line: based on a junior school chess club nerd but with my husband’s taste in music.) For Not Going to Plan, though, there was a ghost I wanted to lay. The female protagonist is ninety percent my own tempestuous teenage self: a curdled mix of arrogance and self-loathing, weaving an unsteady path through her adolescence, desperate to be wanted.
I started to write an outline:
Creative, impulsive, sixteen-year-old Marnie is a rebel, excluded from grammar school with only months to go before her GCSEs. She’s moved to the local comprehensive – where the only seat in her new form is next to . . . Next to who? Who could be a foil to Marnie? I already knew the book would be a duologue: a ping-pong of conversation between two opposite types.
As it happens, my family is full of Yin and Yangs: highly emotional, mistake-prone artistic extroverted Yangs and logical, socially-awkward nerdish Yins. And as a Yang myself, I find parts of my grown-up non-binary autistic Yin child sometimes difficult to understand. Maybe this could be a chance to get closer to them?
We had some great conversations on topics I’d not dared touch before, and out of these, the control-keeping, mistake-averse, utterly delightful Zed was born (named for the keyboard shortcut, duh).
Zed is the class loner who hates physical contact: a donor-conceived, socially-anxious, physics-obsessed nerd, as repulsed by the smell of Marnie’s vapes as Marnie is by his Pikachu earmuffs. But to get into sixth form, they need good grades in their weak subjects, and an agreement to tutor each other turns into the unlikeliest of friendships . . .
That the friendship is severely tested goes without saying . . . where else would be the story? But, without giving away any spoilers, exactly how it’s tested should provide (ahem) fertile ground for discussion.
As I built Marnie and Zed layer upon layer, they made me cry and laugh, and I fell in love. I adore all the characters I create, but these two are special. They’re personal, and writing them has been a special journey. It’s been great to revisit my past and forgive myself a few of my mistakes, but the best bit has been the research for Zed. Creating him has allowed me to not only understand my Yin a little better, but also to tell the world how much I love them. In verse.
Not Going to Plan by Tia Fisher is out 28th August (Hot Key Books).
