Jacqueline Wilson: 'I don't want to return to Tracy Beaker as an adult because we'd learn about her sex life'
Celebrated children's author Jacqueline Wilson has said she "would feel very wary" of writing about her beloved character Tracy Beaker in an adult book because "it would seem inappropriate [as] we would learn about Tracy's sex life".Dame Jacqueline has touched on Beaker as an adult through the eyes of the character's daughter Jess in her children's books My Mum Tracy Beaker and The Beaker Girls. But having recently announced Picture Imperfect, an adult sequel to her 1999 children's book, The Illustrated Mum, it doesn't look like an adult book based on Beaker will follow suit."I don't want to go there. That's my girl [Tracy] who I made everything happen for," Dame Jacqueline told an audience at the Hay Festival.
She added that she had said "no, I would never do that" before, when planning future writing projects, but noted she had sometimes changed her mind, "so who knows?"Dame Jaqueline's Tracy Beaker books were made into a popular TV series for the BBC. Beaker was a young girl who was placed in a children's home due to neglect and domestic violence. The author said that she did generally enjoy returning to some of her characters once they had grown up: "I've been thinking about it over the years, because I've invented so many different girls, and it's interesting to think what happens to them when you finish writing about them."Dame Jacqueline recently brought back Ellie, Magda and Nadine in her adult fiction book Think Again, a continuation of her Girls in Love novels.
The much-loved author, who was made a dame in 2008, is known for writing about difficult and dark issues in accessible ways.Most of her books, some of which explore topics such as suicide, mental health and divorce, are aimed at children aged between seven and 12.Her foray into adult books has brought a new kind of satisfaction, she explained."I'm an obsessive writer but worry people think I'm churning that [same] stuff out again, so it's lovely to challenge yourself."She said she enjoyed seeing many of her audiences come along to see her at events "because they read my books as children"."The children are still keen but it's the mums that get really excited! It's like a sort of farewell tour that hopefully will go on."
Writing in pyjamas
Despite having written more than 100 books, Dame Jacqueline said she still felt anxious when writing."Always about halfway through a book, even now, you think 'I've got the hang of this with all these books that I've written', but I get that terrible doubt and worry about it and and it's just something you learn. Work through it, get to the end."One habit that must help is that she writes in her pyjamas in bed, once she's fed the cat and let the dogs out first thing in the morning. "That's the magic time, and it just works for me. Apparently Michael Morpurgo does exactly the same!"But it wasn't always so easy to pick and choose her times to write.Dame Jacqueline said: "I was idiotic enough to be married at 19 and had a child at 21."My husband wasn't a terrible man in the slightest but it was an age [the 1960s] when men went out and did, and women did everything else."She said she "adored" her baby daughter but she would only sleep for two hours at a time. When she did doze off, Dame Jacqueline said she wanted to sleep too but used the short window available to write. She got a little more time when her daughter Emma went to nursery in the mornings."It gave me an urgency. I'd write for two hours and then concentrate on her in the afternoon."
Now the writing challenges are different, with the threat of AI looming over the writing profession. But Wilson doesn't seem too worried about it."I take comfort from the fact that my partner's brother-in-law... asked some AI thing to write a story for his daughter in the style of Jacqueline Wilson, and then he sent it to us. And either I've been blissfully unaware and I've been writing garbage or.... it was just unbearably awful."
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