Writer in Residence

Here’s a little something I wrote at my blog a while ago that I thought you might be interested in…

Recently I wrote about my love of Ari, the lead character from Loaded. Some literary characters are so great they just grab you and don’t let go, even long after you’ve finished reading the book. Ari was one such character, but he is not my favourite literary figure ever. That honour belongs to Ellie, from John Marsden’s Tomorrow series (and then, The Ellie Chronicles).

This is on my mind because John Marsden was a patron of the book I just edited, The Words We Found, and on Sunday I got to meet him for the first time. (As a 14-year-old I participated in a writing workshop with him, which could hardly be classified as ‘meeting him’.) Meeting Marsden was a serious thrill, of the kind that you think a 30-year-old writer and publisher would have grown out of. I almost took my battered, dog-eared copy of Tomorrow, When the War Began to have him sign, but thought it might be too weird and unprofessional. I kinda regret that now.

Anyway, what is it about Ellie? Ellie has a great voice, and her character is smart and ballsy and independent and funny. And at times, stubborn and single-minded and anxious and bad-tempered. She’s a complex and very human character, one that has grown and developed over ten books now, and one that I could still quite happily continue to read about. She’s just awesome.

And it’s not just Ellie that is great - the Tomorrow series itself is simply incredible. I read those books over and over when I was young, even up until I was at uni, when the final books were coming out. I was the perfect age to pick up Tomorrow, When the War Began, and didn’t ever feel like I grew out of the series. And it was only this year that I discovered The Ellie Chronicles at my local library, and I read them all in a weekend and fell very easily back into the world of Wirrawee. There are not many books, series or writers that you can say that of, who manage to create something that really gets you and stays with you over the course of fifteen years.

In his book Marsden on Marsden, Marsden notes how he knew right from the start the Tomorrow series would be well-received:

As I was writing Tomorrow, When the War Began I became aware that this book had something special, and I became more and more certain that it would have a dramatic effect on readers… When I read the manuscript back, having at last completed it, I was excited by it more than anything else I had ever written…It was I who suggested the caption ‘The most powerful book ever written in Australia for teenagers’ on the cover. That’s a measure of how confident I was.

How fantastic! And he was right, it is an amazingly powerful book, not only because of the topic it deals with, but because of the vividly drawn characters in the novels.

I recently found out at 3000 Books that they are finally making a movie of Tomorrow. Unfortunately, the girl they have casted as Ellie, Caitlin Stasey, doesn’t match my mental visual picture of Ellie at all! So I’m nervous about the cinematic translation. That said, in Marsden on Marsden, Marsden wrote ‘The series will never be filmed unless I can find someone who has a genuine commitment to maintaining its integrity,’ so I still have hope that the movie will be ok.

Any other John Marsden fans out there? Who are your favourite characters from books or movies?