Gill Perdue: Treachery and violence stalk the playground alongside skipping and tag

Forget the sanitised image of childhood we are peddled – in her highly anticipated new thriller, author Gill Perdue tells a grim reality. Here she writes about the inspiration for ‘The Interview’

Gill Perdue: "I was struck by what I saw as the grim business of being a child"

Writers need to acquire many skills over their careers — a very particular set of skills one might say, but the most important of these is the fine art of patience. (Not one of my top skills.) We all hope for the story that arrives fully formed where the writing flows easily, as though you’re just taking dictation.

But that’s not what happens for me. What I get is a tangled bundle — like the root ball of a plant — of thoughts, memories, scenes from movies, snippets from books, poems, or articles I’ve read, things I’ve seen out and about, talk from the radio, music lyrics, conversations I’ve eavesdropped on — and I’ve to work out how they interconnect to make a story.