Sue Whiting is a children’s and young adult author and editor who lives and works in a small coastal village south of Sydney. She has written numerous books in a variety of genres: fiction and nonfiction, picture books through to YA, including the best-selling Missing, and the CBCA 2019 Notable Book, Beware the Deep Dark Forest. Sue is passionate about storytelling and the power of story to transform lives, and aims to write stories that are thought-provoking, page-turning and full of heart. The Book of Chance is her 68th published book, and her third novel for upper primary / lower secondary readers.
Today, Sue’s on the blog to tell us a little bit about how the solving of a mysterious cold case inspired The Book of Chance. Read on …
Sue Whiting
I remember quite vividly the moment when the first seed of an idea for The Book of Chance planted itself in my brain. It was a muggy mid-January morning and I was slumped in the deck chair on the front verandah, sipping coffee and aimlessly scrolling through the headlines on the news feed on my phone, while thinking about the editing job I was planning to tackle that day. It was a typical morning, a typical routine of mine. Then a breaking news story out of the US appeared in my feed in attention-grabbing red and white. And everything changed.
The story was about a crime committed in 1998 that had been miraculously solved – some nineteen years later, 2017. As I watched the story unfold that day, I became transfixed, maybe even a little obsessed; I needed to know everything. The facts. The history. The background. I started Googling madly. The more I found out about the case, the more intrigued I became. This was especially so of the teenage girl snared within the sticky threads of the crime. This intrigue soon turned to worry and the worry swiftly morphed into wonder. What it would be like to be that girl? How did she feel? How was she going to cope? What would become of her? My curiosity was piqued, my senses on high alert. And I had that fluttery anxious but also slightly intoxicating feeling of a new story idea sprouting.
Novels are rarely formed from a single idea and this was certainly true for The Book of Chance, because these initial wonderings about what life would be like for this girl swiftly collided head-on with a long-held preoccupation of mine. Namely, the truth. In particular, how can we ever know what is true and what is not? It is a curly question that makes me squirm and wince and wonder – a brain-ache question. And it is a question with particular relevance in today’s modern society: a society that is bombarded by Internet trickery, fake news, and social media channels that allow people to present manufactured lives, fictions really, and floods us with images that are often doctored and filtered, and far from the truth. This is difficult for anyone to navigate, but for young teens it is almost impossible.
So the collision of musings about the truth with the intrigue about the girl embroiled in the breaking news crime story resulted in the development of my young protagonist, twelve-year-old Chance Callahan: the no-nonsense, black-and-white thinker, straight-talking truth-seeker, who on a quest to find her own truth, discovers that her life is in fact a big fat lie – #biggestfakeever!
Of course, after that initial research and flash of shiny new idea inspiration, it was time to roll up my sleeves and get to work shaping these ideas into a story. There were many different threads to weave together in my planned story, so I needed to do much and varied research. First stop was the coastal city of Wollongong. The story is set primarily in the “Gong” and although this is a city I am familiar with, I spent much time roaming the streets, noting details, taking photos and sound grabs and videos. The houses that Chance and her neighbour and almost-sister, Alek, live in are based on two actual houses in Wollongong and I am certain the occupants must have wondered about the strange woman with backpack, notebook and phone camera who seemed to be constantly lurking about.
The crime at the centre of The Book of Chance is similar to the crime that sparked the idea, but there are also some significant differences, and in order to ensure my invented crime was plausible and the police procedure authentic, I spent many long hours watching true crime documentaries and was fortunate enough to interview a Detective Senior Constable from the Wollongong Forensic Command – and I still have the table napkin on which she drew crime scene diagrams. But most importantly, I took every opportunity to chat with kids in Year 6 and 7 at school visits about smart phones, and their thoughts on and usage of social media – and that revealed much.
In The Book of Chance, I have endeavoured to write a page-turning and thought-provoking mystery that explores truth and lies and the grey area in between, the impact of social media, the importance of family, and which ultimately ponders the notion that maybe being truthful is really just a great big lie.
And to think this was all sparked while sipping coffee and staring at my phone one muggy morning.
–Sue Whiting
The Book of Chance (Walker Books Australia) is out now.
The Book of Chance
Chance is in Year 7 and thinks she has it all - a loving mother, dog Tiges, best friend and almost-sister next door.
But when a reality TV team makes over her house, she discovers newspaper cuttings from the past that cause her to question the world as she knows it and everyone in it. Then she finds herself caught between two realities, identities and worlds. Face-to-face with the truth, Chance has a very difficult decision to make, which almost splits her in two. This powerful story explores what is true and what is fake in today’s world...
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