Characters
When Jacqueline chats with children about the characters in her stories they often speak about them as though they are real people. Jacqueline thinks her characters are made more convincing for the reader because she uses a strong narrative created in the first person. Jacqueline says that to write her characters, she needs to get inside their heads, to experience what it’s like to be a child in a modern city, so she prefers to write in the first person, pretending that she is the character.

When asked why she doesn’t write about children in conventional family settings, Jacqueline replies that she is interested in non-standard families and in children who have a few problems and have to work things out for themselves. Jacqueline explains that she often gives her characters a hard time, like Rose and Dad in Double Act, in order to build up the tension between other characters in the story and for the reader. Jacqueline doesn’t believe in completely happy endings, so she doesn’t solve all her characters’ problems for them. She tries to leave her stories on a positive note however, at a point where her characters have come through the worst of a bad patch.

Themes
In setting out to depict what is going on in children’s lives today, Jacqueline’s stories reflect a range of social issues. Her books expose and confront serious issues, such as the death of a child in Vicky Angel or mental illness in The Illustrated Mum. Jacqueline feels that these are difficult and worrying subjects which exist in children’s real lives and that children therefore need the opportunity to explore them. She treats these themes truthfully but with sensitivity and care.

Research
Jacqueline Wilson admits that she doesn’t do any formal research for her stories. Details for her characters and plots may come from everyday incidents, things she has read, or just things that interest or fascinate her. For example, the programme shows Jacqueline watching a tattoo artist, a theme that comes up in the descriptions in The Illustrated Mum.

Children may be particularly interested in Jacqueline’s attitude to planning her stories. She says that she doesn’t plan them; she thinks planning is boring! Jacqueline has lots of ideas in her head and although she keeps an ‘ideas’ book just in case, she believes that her best ideas are never forgotten. Perhaps what children will learn from this is that all writers develop their own way of working and that they, too, must develop what works best for them. Jacqueline describes her writing process as: having an idea; thinking it through; getting started (the hardest bit); knowing what will happen in the next chapter; waiting for other ideas to ‘pop up’, as they invariably do.

Illustration
Many of the books Jacqueline enjoyed as a child contained small black and white drawings and she wanted to include this as a feature of her books, to make the text more accessible for less experienced readers. We meet Nick Sharratt, Jacqueline’s illustrator. His expressive style of drawing is exactly the style that Jacqueline would want to draw in herself. In her manuscript she writes notes for Nick describing what the character is wearing and what she wants them to be doing or saying because she thinks that the illustrations have an important role in telling the whole story.

Publishing
Jacqueline writes very secretively in the early stages of a book. We see her meeting her editors in order to revisit the text until all are satisfied with the final manuscript. She describes the lengthy process from idea to publication:

• Idea
• Write story in longhand
• Type story onto computer
• Make changes
• Send to publisher
• Meet the editor who makes suggestions to improve story
• Re-work manuscript
• Editor and writer decide when story is finished
• Manuscript sent to the printers