Malorie Blackman on receiving 82 rejection letters from publishers

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• 00:13

  Welcome to Desert Island Discs Postcards.

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  I'm Lauren Laverne.

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  We've cast away thousands of people to our imaginary desert island, among them many writers.

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  Today's castaway, Mallory Blackman, has written more than 70 books for children

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  and young adults, with her Norton Crosses series perhaps best known among them.

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  But getting her first book published was hard,

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  she told Kirsty Young in 2013. When I was in my mid-twenties, I had enough of computing.

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  And I thought, OK, what can I do?

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  And I tried acting classes for a while and I was a dead loss.

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  Absolute rubbish.

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  But I used to come up with sort of scenarios for our improvisations.

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  And after a while it was, oh, Mallory, what do you think we should do?

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  So at the end of the course, the tutor said to me,

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  Mallory, have you ever thought about writing some of your ideas down?

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  Because you come up with some really good ideas.

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  And that's how I started on my writing classes and kind of tried to get into it.

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  So then when you wanted to take that step out of, I'm sure,

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  a pretty well paid job in being a financial markets analyst

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  and in full time into writing, did you worry about the cash?

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  Did you think, how will I pay the gas bill?

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