So the final draft wasn’t dramatically different from Oseman’s original idea? “Yeah, it wasn’t like I came up with a story and went ‘I don’t want to do this’. I’ve got a folder of so many different plans.” So I started coming up with plans for it before Solitaire came out - a few months before it came out - but I didn’t finalise the plot for almost two years after that. “With book two you’ve get deadlines, there’s the pressure of it being as good as the first one. Any author who’s written their second book will tell you that it’s the worst book to write in your career just because you wrote the first one from your passion for writing, you just wanted to do it, and there were no deadlines,” she says.
The finished product went through dozens of drafts. Oseman is in her final year of studying English literature at the University of Durham and she had to fit the writing of Radio Silence around her studies (or, conversely, her studies had to fit around her writing). It is, predictably, a more mature piece of work a bold, confident and, above all, important book (but not in the way you’d expect) with Oseman’s wit and insight shining throughout.īut the road to this point was not easy. Oseman’s first book was a breathtakingly accurate portrayal of teenage ennui - The Times called it “The Catcher in the Rye for the digital age” - and Radio Silence ventures into darker territory, featuring characters a little older than Solitaire’s protagonists. Radio Silence isn’t a dramatic departure tonally or thematically from Solitaire but it’s just as strong.
Had Solitaire been published a year later it could have been swallowed up in a now-saturated genre but Oseman’s remarkable honesty, engrossing characters and bone-dry humour earned her plenty of fans from the off and marked her as one to watch. She had her first novel, Solitaire published when she was 19 (“I hate using my age when talking about Solitaire,” she says) and contemporary teen fiction was very much on the rise. Alice Oseman is, if you don’t know, the author of Solitaire and - as of now - Radio Silence.
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