Meet Maree Spratt author of The Followers

In our debut spotlight series, we introduce you to your next favourite authors. This month, meet Maree Spratt!

About Maree

A&U: What was your favourite book or author growing up?

MS: I had a hardcover, illustrated book called The Hutchinson Treasury of Children’s Literature that I adored when I was a child. It featured picture books, novel extracts and lots of poetry. I was obsessed with reading the poems. One of my favourites– The Boy Without a Name by Allan Ahlberg –speaks to themes in The Followers. It is a poem where an adult narrator reflects on the boy he and his classmates bullied and ignored in childhood, with a haunting final line – ‘oh children, don’t be crueller than you need. The faces that you spit on or ignore –will get you in the end.’

A&U: What did you want to be when you were a child?

MS: I always wanted to be an author. The ambition emerged at seven, when I won a Brisbane City Council writing competition for kids that I saw advertised at our local library. My winning story was about a girl who finds a magic kaleidoscope, shrinks when she looks through it, and then gets to know some ants. I was awarded 100 dollars for my efforts, which at the time felt like becoming an overnight millionaire. Within a month I’d blown it all at Crazy Clark’s and Overflow, but the feeling that I was good at writing stories remained.

A&U: What is your Roman Empire? (A thing you think about far too often)

MS: The fact that I’ve been asked by year 6 students at work if Australia has ever had a female prime minister. It’s been thirteen years now, so not in their lifetime.

A&U: If you could travel anywhere in the world instantly, where would you go?

MS: Being able to travel anywhere in the world instantly would be so handy, as I do not like the idea of braving a long-haul flight with my children. I think I’d teleport us all to Berlin for a family euro-trip.

A&U: What are you reading right now or looking forward to reading this year?

MS: I’ve almost finished Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s a slim work of literary fiction that has kept me totally enthralled even though, objectively, nothing much is happening. Interestingly, Lahiri first wrote the book in Italian and then translated it into English herself. Next up will be In a Common Hour by Sita Walker.

About Writing

A&U: Tell us about your writing journey; did you always want to be an author?

MS: Yes, I did. I studied creative writing at QUT and began writing a novella which would later become the first quarter of The Followers in my final year of study.  After graduating, I tried to ‘make it as a writer’ while working at a call centre for about a year, but quickly became disenchanted with the life I’d chosen. I read a quote that said, ‘it’s an arrogance to sit down to write before you’ve stood up to live,’ and that resonated with me.

My idea of standing up to live was training to be a teacher and then moving 12 hours away to live in a mining town. It wasn’t easy, but it was exactly what I needed, and I came to love teaching and small-town life. A highlight was writing short stories for my students. Pig shooting – or ‘pigging’ – was a favourite weekend activity among my year eights, so I wrote them a short story about a group of kids who set out to murder a massive, mythical bore called ‘The Brute.’  They loved it.

I didn’t always have time for my own work, But I did make significant progress on my manuscript one summer holiday when I stayed in town instead of fleeing to Brisbane for what I dubbed my ‘Moranbah Writer’s Residency.’ Because of those weeks spent writing alone on the lino floor of our teacher accommodation, and only going outside to get coffee made by my students at the Maccas drive-thru, I was able to finally finish the novella. It was shortlisted for the Viva La Novella writing prize for 2017.

When we moved to Canberra in 2018, and I changed career, I found the time to work on my manuscript more earnestly. I developed my novella into a novel that was shortlisted for the Vogel in 2020. That was how I landed my contract with Allen and Unwin, although my starry-eyed, thirty-year-old self didn’t realise that I was still six years, two kids and three drafts away from seeing it published.

It’s a strange feeling to begin a manuscript on a desktop computer in your childhood bedroom and then finish it fifteen years later in a different city with your second baby asleep in a bassinet beside you. I’m very glad to be done.

Credit: Simon McCulloch

A&U: Tell us about your writing process. Are you a plotter, pantser – something in between?

MS: I’m definitely a hybrid model. I would consider the plot of The Followers to be episodic, with three major episodes. I went into writing each episode knowing, broadly, what I wanted to happen, although the magic of writing for me lies in the characters deciding to stray from the path I’ve laid out for them. I know the work is alive when they start making their own decisions. I won’t do spoilers, but I was genuinely shocked by something Teresa decided to do to Lacey towards the end of the book. The entire time I was writing that episode, I thought I was building up to Lacey being the one who did it to Teresa. But when I finally got to that climatic chapter, the roles reversed, and I realised it could not have happened any other way.

Interestingly, the plot of the book changed substantially between drafts. I didn’t feel very wedded to one particular series of events. I came to think about earlier drafts of my novel as wrecked cars out on the lawn. They didn’t go, but I would still occasionally run outside to steal parts from them, like the odd insightful sentence, as I wrote the final version.

A&U: Did you have a writing playlist for your book, and if so, what was on it?

MS: I can’t listen to music while I’m writing – it amazes me that anybody can!  My favourite place to work on my book was the reading room at the National Library, because it is so blissfully silent.

This said, I love music, and there are a number of songs referenced in the book. I use pop music in The Followers to evoke the time period (early to mid 2000s) and to riff off the themes or ideas in the scene where each song appears. Baby One More Time by Britney Spears, Genie in a Bottle by Christina Aguilera, Complicated by Avril Lavigne, and Dilemma by Nelly and Kelly Rowland all appear on the ‘soundtrack’ within the novel.

A&U: Do you have any special quirks when you write? (A certain mug you must use, a candle you have to light etc.)

MS: I prefer my phone to be nowhere near me. When I worked at the National Library, I’d leave it in one of the free lockers downstairs.

A&U: If you could give some words of wisdom to yourself from when you first started writing this book, what would it be?

MS: I wouldn’t say anything to the 21-year-old who started this manuscript, because she didn’t need advice – she just needed to put her head down and write. We learn by doing, and I needed to ‘do’ my first book haphazardly and imperfectly over several years and multiple drafts to really develop the understanding I have now of what goes into writing a novel.

I would say something to my 31-year-old self, who was hit with a second structural edit and the realisation that she still had a lot of writing to do only a few days after birthing her first child. That would be: small efforts repeated daily might be the gold standard, but miniscule efforts repeated on an ad-hoc basis will still get the job done eventually. Be kind to yourself, and if you’re tired, go to sleep. 

About the book

A&U: Where did the initial spark of inspiration for The Followers come from?

MS: The first quarter of The Followers takes place when the characters are ten years old, and that was the part I wrote first. It’s told in the collective first person, which was a narrative voice I felt inspired to experiment with after studying The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides at university. I tried to think of a time when I personally felt like my individual identity was subsumed by a group identity – and for me, that time was in primary school.

I recently found a notebook from 2011 where I’d jotted down a couple of sentences that reveal the initial spark for the work– ‘A story about a group of children pretending to see something frightening. The idea of shared delusion (consider the Crucible.) One child in the group is clearly ‘lesser’ than the others. There is always a weakest link among kids.’

About two pages later is an early draft of the scene where the characters summon Bloody Mary in the school bathrooms.

A&U: Share a little bit about your journey to publication. Were you querying for a while? Or did it all happen very fast?

MS: I was fortunate to be picked up by Allen & Unwin after an earlier version of my manuscript was shortlisted for the Vogel. Although the writing, for me, has been slow, the process of getting a contract was fast, and I feel very lucky for that.

A&U: Is there anything about the publishing process that has really surprised you?

MS: I think I have a new appreciation for what a gift it is to be professionally edited. For years you work on the manuscript on your own, and then suddenly, a professional editor with a wealth of insight is right there with you, followed shortly after by an incredible copyeditor, an eagle-eyed proofreader, and a frank and fearless sensitivity reader. It’s just so reassuring to have this whole team of other people so deeply invested in your work.

A&U: Is there a part of the book that made you cry, laugh, or scream while writing it?

MS: I don’t know what this reveals about me, but there’s a chapter called ‘haircut’ that made me laugh out loud every time I edited it – specifically, at the moment when Jason enters the ensuite bathroom with the magazines.

A&U: What is one thing you would like people to take away from reading your book?

MS: I’d like readers to reflect on the ideas about womanhood that were fed to girls through popular culture in the 2000s and to consider whether what they are sold now through social media is more enlightened and inclusive or if it is – to quote teenage Lacey – the same difference. 

The Followers is available now from your book retailer of choice.

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The Followers

by Maree Spratt

The Followers is a sharp debut that explores themes of peer pressure, girlhood, identity, social capital, and how schoolyard dynamics translate to social media.

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