Jen Campbell is our new favourite person! She’s 24, a writer and living in London. Currently working in book-selling, she has just finished her first short story collection. She wrote the awesome My First Love story some of you have received in our Limited edition Radio single packs….especially for us!! We wanted to know more about her and her writing……
Jen, at what age did you know you wanted to be a writer and do you remember the first piece you read that really inspired you?
The first book I remember really taking hold of me was ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’ by Judith Kerr. I still love that book; it’s just phenomenal. To get so wrapped up in someone else’s story like that, and care about the characters so much… argh! Oh and ‘Green Smoke’ I adored that; reading the stories of R. Dragon made me want to be a storyteller for definite. I’d say I’ve wanted to be a writer since the age of eight.
Where do you most frequently draw inspiration from these days?
Quite often I seem to have an idea just as I’m falling to sleep. And I used think ‘that’s ok, I’ll totally remember it in the morning…’ and I never did. Now I keep a pen and paper beside my bed and try and work out my scribbles in the morning. I have, though, just finished a pamphlet-sized collection of poems, and my inspiration for most of those came from the North-East, where I grew up, and memories from my childhood. Sadly I can’t rely on inspiration all the time, and so I sit at the kitchen table and make myself write until something good happens [or until I want to throw my computer at the wall - whichever comes first!].
Tell us about The Aeroplane Girl…
‘The Aeroplane Girl’ is a collection of short stories, and encompasses a mixture of the mythical, the absurd and the every day. There’s Linnea, who wants to become anonymous at the Edinburgh Fringe by taking on the personalities of fictional people, and there’s her sister who runs marathons wearing nothing but sellotape. There’s Anna who wants everything to be symmetrical and walks around with her arms outstretched; Nicola who finds herself written into a poem, and David and Jess who attempt to create a new civilisation by blacking out their windows and writing new commandments on their walls in glow-in-the-dark paint. [And many many others.] All of the book’s characters are essentially missing something which plagues them: their identity, a lover, the child they gave up for adoption, their sanity… I’m hoping, fingers crossed, touch wood, see pairs of magpies etc etc that ‘The Aeroplane Girl’ will, in the future, be on shelves in bookshops. I would love that very very much.
Any advice for aspiring writers?
Read read read. Buy books. Read them, devour them, live and breathe the kind of literature you want to write. Then go write it. Then edit it and make it better. Then leave it. Then go back to it and edit it again.
Other creative forms that really spur on your writing?
Music, definitely. When it’s one in the morning and you’re tired, but you really want/need to finish something and you know you could do it if you could just stay awake, and you’re on you’re millionth cup of tea… music is the answer. I was up very late finishing my short story ‘Second Skin’ because I could really feel it going somewhere, and I knew that if I went to bed I’d lose it. One Eskimo’s ‘Amazing’ on repeat kept me awake and in the zone for another hour [thanks boys!].
Favourite musicians, artists etc.
Imogen Heap, Tori Amos, Charlotte Martin, Regina Spektor, Bon Iver… and obviously the lovely Paper Aeroplanes.
Which piece of your own writing are you most proud of and is it hard to know when you’re onto a good thing?
Sometimes you can stare at a piece of paper for so long you don’t know if it’s good anymore. I’m sure we’ve all done that [late night essay nightmare!]. And then you get the days when you read back over things you’ve written and everything looks terrible. Urgh. But, I think you get a buzz about an idea when it’s brewing. When it’s been developing inside your head for a good few weeks until it’s knocking on the side of you begging to get out – that’s when you know you’re on to something good. When you can sit down at your computer and write and not realise what time it is. I’m not sure what my favourite piece of writing is – I think generally you like what you’ve just finished, but perhaps I’d go for a short story of mine called ‘Inedia Prodigiosa’. Ask me again tomorrow.
You’ve done some live performances? Tell us about them.
I haven’t done any in a while, I have to say. But for a six month period last year I performed at a lot of places in London: The Book Club Boutique, Poetry Cafe, Beat, wordPLAY etc, and also did a reading at The Edinburgh Bookshop and it was a lot of fun. I met some very lovely people.
Future plans…
Novels are my nemesis. I have an idea that I’ve been kicking around for about six months and I’d love to mould that into a long piece of fiction. Future wants: I’d love to get ‘The Aeroplane Girl’ published, and I’m going to start hunting around for a publisher for my poetry pamphlet, too. I’m also working on a full length poetry collection, I’ve been doing a couple of radio scripts, I’m starting a second short story collection, I’ve got a script knocking around somewhere that needs to be torn into shape… basically my plan is to keep going, work hard, write lots and see where I get to. And fingers crossed it’s somewhere nice [preferably a place that has tea and Jaffa cakes, too].
You can find out more about Jen on her brilliant blog here!