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Sure Betts

Julie HoskingThe West Australian
A.J. Betts is looking forward to engaging with young minds at The Goods Shed. Picture Iain Gillespie/The West Australian
Camera IconA.J. Betts is looking forward to engaging with young minds at The Goods Shed. Picture Iain Gillespie/The West Australian Credit: The West Australian

Amanda Betts didn’t get the greatest of welcomes to Perth. Certainly not the kind that would make anyone want to call it home.

“I stayed in a hostel in Northbridge and that first night, my car was broken into and everything got stolen, my clothes, even my passport, the windows were smashed up,” the Queensland-born author recalls.

“I rang my mum and she was on the phone crying ‘come back, fly back’. But I thought ‘no, I’m not going to let some randoms influence my plans, I want to see Perth’. But I didn’t have much money by that point and I needed to get more clothes so I thought ‘I need to work’.”

So the English and drama teacher registered for relief work. “I thought I’d just get enough to get my car fixed and then I’d be off.”

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That was in 2004. Fast forward 15 years and five novels — the fifth is due out next month — and it’s fair to say A.J. Betts, as she is known to her growing legion of readers, doesn’t harbour any grudges over that smashed-up car.

Not that the thief can take any credit for her foray into the literary world. That’s down to teenage boys, or rather teenage boys’ reluctance to read.

“I was a relief teacher at John Curtin with Year 10 boys who were whingeing about the textbooks, the novels. When I had a look at them, I thought ‘yeah, you’re right, they really are boring’,” she says. “I’d already been working on a story about a teenage boy who gets into trouble, so I thought ‘right, I should write for this precise age group: reluctant 15-year-old boy readers’.”

So she decided she was not allowed to leave Perth until she had finished that book. “I’ve always written stories, made up stories, but didn’t often finish them. I was always drawn to the next attractive thing, so I set myself that task, and I got it published and then there was the next book, and the next ... and I’m still here,” she says with a laugh.

We’re sitting in a corner of The Goods Shed, Claremont, surrounded by a wild knitted and crocheted underwater world. In front is a colourful cornucopia of coral and sea life. Behind, however, things turn decidedly darker as Indonesian artist Mulyana shows the impact humans are having on the ocean floor. A Man, a Monster and the Sea, which runs until the end of June, will provide a suitably thought-provoking backdrop for young imaginations when Amanda returns to the FORM hub with a host of stellar writers for Scribblers Festival next week.

There’s a good chance some of those 15-year-olds she was trying to engage all those years ago with Shutterspeed — about a motherless teenager who survives high school by spending his spare time in the photo lab — will be among them, too. One of the teenagers who interviewed her last year for the inaugural Scribblers was just telling her how much he and his friends were buzzing about Hive, her first foray into speculative fiction. “He was saying he can’t wait for Rogue (the sequel). I said ‘really, it’s so unnerving, or unusual in comparison to what I usually write’. And he said ‘no, we are all really into it, we all loved it, and we can’t wait for Rogue’.”

Amanda isn’t one to be hemmed in by styles or genres, or what’s so hot right now. After Zac & Mia, her award-winning 2013 novel about two teenagers who get to know each other on a cancer ward, was adapted for American television — and then won a Daytime Emmy — a lesser writer might have been tempted to do the obvious. But Amanda doesn’t see a sequel in that story, no matter how successful. She had moved on before it was even snapped up in the US.

Her publisher, however, was keen for her to at least continue in the same vein, anathema to a writer who just wants to follow wherever her mind is taking her.

“At that point, I got an agent and went to him with the finished two-book series and he sent it around to the six biggest publishers and they all put in a bid,” she says. “And Pan Macmillan got it, which was great because by then I’d realised that was where I wanted to be. They said we don’t care what you’ve done before because we’re interested in the work. That was what mattered.”

Hive, which was short-listed for the ABIA Book of the Year for older children this year, is set in an enclosed world governed by strict rules, none of which is particularly threatening on the surface unless you happen to be particularly curious or different. Beekeeper Hayley, a sweet girl on the cusp of womanhood, is both. Plagued by headaches that could see her isolated permanently, she seeks refuge in a dark corner, where a drop of salty water makes her question everything and everyone. As she digs deeper, the world she knew starts to crumble. Who can she trust? And is there any way out? To say Hive ends on a cliffhanger is putting it mildly.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” says Amanda, clearly not in the least bit sorry. “I wasn’t sure if I should do it as one big book or divide it into two. But they’re set in two different worlds so I figured that two was best. I know that ending a book on a cliffhanger can be painful but I hope readers will forgive me.”

Rogue, she promises, will answer many of the questions (if not all — Amanda doesn’t like her novels tied up in neat little packages) raised in Hive and we haven’t seen the last of some of the characters.

Writing speculative fiction, with its carefully constructed other world, created all kinds of structural difficulties Amanda hadn’t encountered in previous novels. “I had to create a lot of rules and then try not to break them,” she says with a laugh. “We found out later in the editing process I had broken some of them. So I had to rewrite the ending at the eleventh hour. It’s been a great learning experience for me.”

But Zach & Mia was the more emotionally draining. Because Amanda wasn’t just writing about teenagers with cancer, she works with them all the time. She’s been a teacher at Perth Children’s Hospital (and Princess Margaret before that) since she started relief work with Hospital School Services (now the School of Special Educational Needs; Medical and Mental Health) not long after her arrival in WA. She went full time until her books required more and more attention but is still there two days a week.

“Zach & Mia was hard. Even though it’s fiction, it was influenced by real teenagers I worked with, some of whom lived and some of whom didn’t. Having the, I don’t know,” she pauses, looking for words to describe the enormity of the situation, “it’s not courage obviously, because I’m not being courageous in writing a story, but deciding to keep going even though the real situations were very draining and very sad.”

Amanda was buoyed by the support of parents who really wanted her to write the book. “Being around teenagers with cancer has really changed my life, it has changed my outlook and I’m so in awe of these young people,” she says. “I think we can all learn something from them and the way they look at life.”

Amanda is engaging company. She is a natural listener as well as an entertaining conversationalist, something that would endear her to her students as well as her literary fans. While her books are marketed for young adults, this somewhat older reader can attest to their much broader appeal.

The second oldest of four children, Amanda grew up in north Queensland (her dad drove sugar-cane harvesters) and lived in her imagination from an early age, reading and re-reading L.M. Montgomery, Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl before graduating to Sue Townsend, Douglas Adams and on to fantasy and Spike Milligan — eclectic tastes for a budding writer.

Amanda studied teaching and then promptly took off overseas, juggling teaching gigs in London with travel around Europe.

“I never really felt at home in Innisfail. I always felt like I needed to find my place. Those who stay, there’s an expectation that you’ll go into a secretarial job, or you marry a farmer and have lots of babies. That’s what a lot of people I know were doing and I just had that desire for more,” she says.

When Amanda finally returned home to Queensland after four years, those restless legs were still rather itchy.

“I thought I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was a teacher but I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. So I thought I’ve travelled so much of the world, I need to see more of my own country,” she says. “So I got in my little Nissan Pulsar and I drove around Australia.”

Until she arrived in Northbridge. “Honestly,” she says, laughing at the memory, “If that hadn’t happened, I would probably have stayed in Perth for a week and then kept heading north. Instead I turned it around — I wanted to make the most of this opportunity.”

WWK WA children's author AJ Betts at The Goods Shed, Claremont. Picture. Iain Gillespie The West Australian
Camera IconWWK WA children's author AJ Betts at The Goods Shed, Claremont. Picture. Iain Gillespie The West Australian Credit: The West Australian

I’m not sure I’d see being robbed of most of my worldly goods as an opportunity but Amanda has a point. She certainly made good on her promise to herself, though she also acknowledges that if her first novel hadn’t been accepted, she would have moved on from that, too.

“If I’d had one rejection, that would have been it! I would have gone ‘this is obviously not for me, I’ll try something else’,” she says. “I think I knew in the back of my mind, though, if I returned to Queensland I would just fall back into full-time teaching and I wouldn’t be able to pursue this notion, this dream, of being a writer. I love teaching. I’m very proud of being a teacher and think it’s an excellent profession but I really didn’t want to return to it full time because when you’re a full-time teacher, you don’t have the energy or head space for anything else.”

Now she is happily devoting as much of the five days she’s not teaching to writing — when she’s not visiting schools or doing the festival and bookstore rounds to promote her novels. Last year, she also went over to Los Angeles for the Daytime Emmy Awards (at her own expense for anyone thinking a call from Hollywood means an author is suddenly raking in lucrative offers), and is hopeful now that Zach & Mia has been picked up by Viacom Distribution International, the series will find its way to Australian screens soon.

“As of last week, it’s on French TV, I saw some trailers,” she says. “It’s so funny, I love it, I really hope it comes here.”

Not that any resurgence in interest the series might generate will tempt her down the sequel path; the story just isn’t there. “I don’t force myself to write, I wait until the idea grabs on to me and annoys me enough to make me do it.”

The 43-year-old is planning to leave speculative fiction behind for the next novel, which has been germinating in her head for ages, though she’s yet to put fingers to keyboard.

“I want every book I write to be a new challenge for myself as a storyteller — I don’t want to get bunkered down,” she says.

“It’s not even thinking about readership, it’s thinking about myself. I wouldn’t be motivated to return to the laptop day after day if I felt like I was rewriting the same thing.”

Like her first three books, her sixth novel will be set in WA but it will be a bit lighter than previous outings. “I want some humour, ’cause I haven’t really done that, I’m wanting that challenge.”

Maybe she could incorporate the story of the robber who helped a travelling teacher on the road to literary freedom. Now that’s funny.

A.J. Betts is a guest at Scribblers Festival, The Goods Shed, Claremont, May 11-12, see scribblersfestival.com.au for full program.

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