In your dreams: James Phelan on ‘The Last Thirteen’

James Phelan’s The Last Thirteen: Book One: 13 (Scholastic, September) is the first book in a new series for younger readers about a battle to control the dream world. The author spoke to Meredith Lewin. Read Lewin’s review online here.

Can you tell us where the idea for The Last Thirteen came from?
I’d always wanted to write a high-concept story about the dream world. The Last Thirteen started with the simple premise: what if your dreams came true? From there it spiralled into a massive storyline that looked at a battle between good and evil to control the dream world. I mean, if your dreams started to come true—who would use that for good, and who for bad? And what if you could learn to control your dreams? What if someone else could control your dreams? What if that someone could get the power to control all our dreams?

A 13-part series must involve a lot of planning. How different did you find writing a serialised story compared to other novels you’ve worked on?
The planning was intense but necessary. The first few months were spent putting together a 50-page outline for the series, which dealt with the story mythology and the characters that populate it. That outline has become a series bible, which over the past three years has evolved into a monster of a document.

I plotted out each character’s arc and journey, and spent a lot of time researching dreams as well as historical figures, events and places. All that work meant that the day-to-day writing was just full-on storytelling, and then in my redraft I went back and inserted all the finer details that I had planned earlier.

Prior to Thirteen I had written an open-ended series of adult thrillers, which in comparison was very easy in terms of tracking characters and plot points. When I say easy, I am an economical writer, with little editorial wastage, and each of those stories had to stand on their own. My ‘Alone’ novels (Lothian) taught me that writing for teens is tricky, and a trilogy brings with it complications, not least of which was not creating book two as a filler between two book-ends.

Thirteen books has been challenging. In my planning I broke it down to an intro book and then four trilogies, so that I could better manage arcs and climaxes and character growth and twists and turns in the main story. There was so much planning and finessing involved that each book is a bit like an iceberg—what you see above the surface has a lot of substance and weight underneath it.

This first book certainly ends on a cliffhanger. How do you feel about the device, both as a writer and a reader?
The device works when used properly. In book one of Thirteen, it was very much something that happened on reflection. My first draft, which was unchanged for the better part of two years, ended differently to how it is published. Once we had several novels finished, we had a better idea of the individual scope and rhythm of each book, and the cliffhanger in book one—in which the fate of a pivotal character hangs in the balance—was a logical choice. I think serialised storytelling in modern television, for example Game of Thrones, is where the device is used at its best. 

The writing has a particularly cinematic feel. Are you just as influenced by visual media as you are books and, if so, which ones?
Yes. I also have a very visual mind, and often storyboard scenes as I go. I read as many film scripts as I do novels, and I do like that they are so economical—the same amount of story as a novel, only a screenwriter has 120 pages instead of 500. While writing Thirteen I’ve been watching Game of Thrones and some of the favourite adventures from when I was the age of my target readers (Indiana Jones, Star Wars) and all the good superhero movies. It’s all about good, fun storytelling that keeps you guessing and wanting more.

With dreaming and manipulating the future, the storytelling possibilities are virtually endless. How mind-bending are things going to get for Sam and his fellow Dreamers further into the series? 
Not as much as they could have been. The characters do certainly have vivid and often scary dreams, but I’ve kept them fairly much steeped in a world that we know rather than fantasy. As the series progresses and the characters’ dreaming and waking worlds are under ever-increasing stress, things in both realms get more crazy.

What was the last book you read and loved?
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (various imprints), about a young man’s spiritual journey of self-discovery, set during the time of the Buddha. I re-read it every year, and I think all young men should read it.

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Category: Features