A Zoom Visit From S.F. Said By Prithvika A-P
On Wednesday the 13th of September, Edge Grove school had the privilege to have a live Zoom call with the renowned author of Varjak Paw, SF Said. revealed that Varjak Paw – which we studied in Year 4 – was inspired by his own cat, who had never been outside before, climbing up the garden wall and sitting there with wide eyes.
Through a great amount of dedication, all of Said’s novels have won awards, including The Blue Peter Award.
When Said was younger, his mother gave him a book to read called Watership Down. He told us that it is 500 pages long and that made him extremely nervous about reading it, but when he opened the first page he became so engrossed with it that he couldn’t stop reading! This inspired Said to write one just as engaging.
Along with Watership Down, Said was also inspired to become an author by the first Star Wars film. His first ever book was Varjak Paw which had gone through 90 rejections from publishers, until he decided to interview some authors and all of them seemed to mention drafts. Again he sat down to write, and this time he did it structurally using drafts, but it took 17 of them before it got published! When it did, it won the gold Smarties award (from which he thought he’d actually get Smarties!) He said that by then, it had taken him 5 years of his life to write that one book but he was happy that readers enjoyed it.
SF Said was promoting his new novel, Tyger. He encouraged us to read Tyger as he thought it was his best book yet and said it was inspired from the line of one of his favourite William Blake poems: Tyger Tyger burning bright, in the forest of the night.
On top of that, Said made a speech on David McKean being his favourite illustrator and how delighted he was that McKean has illustrated most of his books.
During the session, there were a few significant messages for us to think about, such as: be resilient to improve, and learn from your mistakes. He revealed that he wished he could write 100s of books, but it is more important for the reader to appreciate and relish in his work; he made us aware that authors were also just readers who took it a step further and wrote their very own books, and he even asked us to recommend some books to him! Furthermore, he remarked that even writers had other authors as benchmarks, and Richard Adams (Watership Down) was his role-model.
Near the end of the call, Said was asked if he was working on anything at the moment. His reply was yes…but he did not tell us the title!
He finished by reminding us that no one can write a perfect story the first go.
