Blog Tour: She is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick – Guest Post and Giveaway

I first fell in love with Sedgwick’s writing when I was living in London and I found a copy of Blood Red, Snow White at my local cancer shop for 50p. I bought the book and took it home and read it the same day. Since then I’ve been reading his work religiously and he’s become one of my most favorite authors. Last year’s Midwinterblood was very special to me. The writing was dark and lovely and the stories connected together in a bloody saga. The Printz Committee agrees with me as they awarded him their highest honor.

In She Is Not Invisible we follow a young blind girl in search of her father. She is a beautiful girl with a wonderful soul and you can’t help but root for her. I hope you will all read this sample and go buy the book.

You can also win a copy of She Is Not Invisible by commenting on the amazing guest post Mr. Sedgwick has provided me below. You have one week from the date posted to comment and enter. US and Canada only as it is a publisher sponsored giveaway. You can follow the tour to the next stop tomorrow on ExLibris.

Guest Post

Being someone you’re not

I’ve written books with male protagonists and female ones, and sometimes I’ve written female characters in the first person. The first time I did that was in a novel called The Foreshadowing, which features a 17-year-old girl who’s having premonitions. When I outlined the novel to my editor, she questioned whether I thought I could write a girl in the first person. She pointed out that I have never been a 17-year-old girl. I said I wanted to try writing her anyway, and I countered her argument by pointing out that it is, after all, the job of a writer to imagine things. We have to imagine all sorts of things, and above all, we have to imagine what it would be like to be every single character we create, regardless of sex, race, age and so on.

I’ve repeated the process a few times, in White Crow, for example, and now again in She Is Not Invisible. How do I know I am getting it right? Well, I don’t. No more than I can be certain of writing any character accurately, but it’s my belief that though there are obviously differences between the sexes, we share more similarities. That’s a big part of the secret I think, and though I have, from time to time, immersed myself in diaries written by women, and though I worked in an almost all female workplace (children’s publishing is heavily biased that way in the UK), and though I have many female friends, I think the main secret to writing women when you’re a man is this: your reader does half your work for you.

In fact, this is a much more general point. One of the principal things to understand about writing, and one of its very major appeals for me, is that you, as the writer, only do half the work. You set things up; you create scenes, places, people and so on, but it’s your reader who brings them all to life, all of it, in their minds, as they read. What this means is that you only need to make sure you don’t write anything that jars and confuses and prevents your reader from believing that you’re writing about whoever it is you’re writing about, and they will hopefully make them convincing in their reading of your work.

Now that’s not to say the half of the work that you do as the writer is unimportant, but it does make it very much easier than it might be.

So every character you write is made this way. That being said, with She Is Not Invisible, there was a challenge of a very different order. Laureth, the protagonist of the book, has been blind from birth. I won’t go into why I decided to make her that way here, but once I’d made that decision, and started to research the question a bit, I realized what a very big challenge I had set myself. I spent a couple of years visiting a wonderful school called New College where every student is blind or visually impaired. I had some great times there, and many revealing conversations, but all the while I was faced with the concept that writing someone who has been blind from birth is very hard to do, because how can we ever forget what sight is? How can we ever forget what colour is, or how we organize 99% of our lives based on vision? The list of differences is endless, and it would be one thing to write this in the third person, quite another to try and step into the mental landscape of someone who has never seen.

I gave it a go, and, as before, I’m sure I’ve relied as heavily on the ‘halfway’ relationship between writer and reader I described above, as I did on the research I did.

So did I manage it? That’s not for me to judge. I’ve had some good feedback from the students I worked with, and that meant a great deal to me, because if I have managed it in any way at all, it was because of their unfailing generosity, openness and honesty. I truly could not have done it without them.

About the Book

Laureth Peak’s father has taught her to look for recurring events, patterns, and numbers–a skill at which she’s remarkably talented. Her secret: She is blind. But when her father goes missing, Laureth and her 7-year-old brother Benjamin are thrust into a mystery that takes them to New York City where surviving will take all her skill at spotting the amazing, shocking, and sometimes dangerous connections in a world full of darkness. She Is Not Invisible is an intricate puzzle of a novel that sheds a light on the delicate ties that bind people to each other.

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