For Authors or Anyone Interested: This Is How I Set About Writing ‘The Night Staffer’

Ever since I worked as a night staffer at the Christchurch Boys Home I wanted to write a book about the experience. Living at night felt like being part of a parallel universe that had its own rules. It was intriguing, challenging, and at times, confronting. I believed it was a story that needed to be told, about the staff, about the boys, and about the system under which they all lived.

Over the years I jotted down scraps of ideas and reflections in various diaries that I kept, with a view that one day they might eventually contribute to a book.  I had the basic concept that it should be a story covering the journey of a new night staffer, newly introduced to the welfare system as a domestic worker, who eventually decides he wants a career as a social worker. I started assembling the snippets I gathered into a rudimentary map. It didn’t have much in it, just the opening, the first day, a couple of riots, and the culmination of the career decision, all extending over a period of fifteen months.  

Once I started putting it together it became evident that the actual story was far more significant than just the adventures of a night staffer. From my first day on the job at the Boy’s Home, I was fascinated by the work. What kept me involved and motivated throughout my thirty-year career was a desire to address some of the more significant issues and challenges the welfare and justice systems face, especially where they interface strongly as they do for adolescents who are offending. My experience left me with strong views about the way things were, why they were that way, and the way they could be.  At some point, after I reviewed a few chapters, I came to the unfortunate conclusion it wasn’t really saying anything about these ‘bigger ticket items’. It was just a description, an illustration of the times, interesting but not challenging enough.

I had an initial theme in my head that problem young people are tucked away ‘out of sight out of mind’ behind high walls and locked doors, and society seemed more than comfortable with this methodology. And many people I knew at the time, and have met since, thought we should do a lot more of it! I wanted to shine a light on the environment and break down the walls a bit so people could see inside. However, it was apparent that to capture a broader range of themes, I needed another dimension to the novel. I have seen and talked to hundreds of young people over the years, including a significant number who ended up in the prison system. I found the boys pretty forthcoming about their experiences while incarcerated. A number knew me from their time in Christchurch Boys Home or Kingslea, but others introduced themselves when they found out my background and offered their reflections. I had been toying with the idea of adding a young person's story to provide balance and a different perspective. I felt it offered an opportunity for a more engaging and informative story. I pretty much sat down and produced a list of things I knew were risk factors that sat behind serious behavioural issues in adolescents and put a few together to create the main boy character, Jai. I also used the list to create the bones of three others. They are broad-brush portraits, almost cliches.

My 10 years of ‘hands on’ working on the residential floor introduced me to a wide variety of people. There was not a lot that was typical or consistent within the group, apart from some having similar occupational backgrounds, and most being well-motivated and committed people. I composed the team, including the night staff group, mainly with a view to contributing depth and colour to the book. I tried to create portraits of ordinary people who represented the diverse values and attitudes found in the local community.  

Now I had the cast of characters, I started to think about how I could use them. I knew I wanted to say more about the adolescent welfare and justice systems and expose some of the deeper issues. On an A3 sheet, I set out a timeline and a few events I thought were pillars around which a story could be built. I added the list of boys and bullet points of their core traits and issues. I also wrote a list of the high-level themes I wanted to engage with, including familiar themes that resonate through many novels about deviance and crime. Is serious and persistent offending learned or inherited? With adolescent behavioural problems, should the focus be on their ‘needs’ or their ‘deeds’? I wanted to pose the question of whether young people with behavioural problems were being isolated, excluded, or excommunicated. I also found the staff often felt a sense of isolation about their own work, whether it was real or not. This was particularly so for the night staff who felt excluded. I wanted to present and contrast the highly complex nature of residential life with the simplicity of society’s response. Another theme tossed about is the dichotomy between how we manage individual rights and needs, while still giving due regard to community and victims' rights. The story also considers whether the easy response of ‘warehousing the problem’ will achieve the overall social objective of making the community safer, temporarily maybe, but longer term? Finally, I also wanted to show that the residential model was flawed and I think readers can see that. I note that many of the current residential and custodial models, not just in New Zealand but also in other Western countries, continue to use a similar methodology.  

At this point, my whole approach to the novel changed. Out went a lot of the details about practice and procedures and deep descriptions of the systems. In came more storylines, events and character development. While each of the main characters had their own story, I wanted to connect them to illustrate the importance of engagement and relationship building as part of the way residential workers did their role. I’m a musician and music was a big thing in the residences, so it provided a natural option to link Wyatt and Jai. I also decided that it might be interesting to provide opportunities where the reader could get a perspective from both the staff and the young person on the same event.  

The incidents and events around which the stories are built are composites. There were a range of things that were challenging about working in residences but some things were more common than others. Much of those used in the book are the common types. For example, things like bullying and threats were part of everyday life, not traumatic but never the less, demanding in their persistence. Other events happened less frequently but more regularly than anyone would have desired. I personally experienced four riots in my first year as a night staffer and there were many more ‘collective disruptions’ of various magnitudes over subsequent years throughout my career. Events like the fire and the incident where the young person attempted suicide, were far less common. Serious incidents were hugely traumatic for all involved when they did occur, and cast a shadow over the residences, sometimes for months after the event. I tried also to capture some of the positives in the environment, the relationships, the joint activities, occasional humour and the sad reality that some boys felt, and probably were in many ways, safer in residential care than in their normal lives. I tried to capture the good and the bad, and every now and again the ugly aspects of residential life.  

My rudimentary map and timeline sheet was now almost completely covered. I started to write more of the stories. This next phase was an iterative process. Things would occur to me when I was walking and I got into the habit of carrying a notebook and jotting down ideas. Once I wrote something new I would have to go back and revisit the text to make sure it was consistent with the character's personality traits. Many parts of the more theory-based components were replaced by actions, events or conversations that illustrated rather than just described, integrating them into the storylines. It was a process of writing, reading, and revising.

The overall writing project extended for a little more than two years. I tried (and failed) to write every day and ended up having significant periods where the writing was interrupted because of other commitments. However, I also had prolonged periods where I wrote every day for three or four hours. I kept editing as I went, taking out stuff that I felt didn’t contribute or was too wordy and filling gaps in the story created by the new or extended storylines. I probably spent at least equal time revising and refining as I did writing the original text. In the end, I had a draft document that I was reasonably satisfied with but which desperately required a fresh set of eyes.

I had two people close to me read the book and give me feedback from a first reader's perspective. The advice was beneficial and I heard and took it into consideration. One criticism was that it was still overly technical. Some of the explanations about the way the law worked or about practice and procedures remained far too detailed. These are complex areas, however I simplified them by removing bits or summarising or presenting them in a more user-friendly way.  This may have resulted in a little less precision but I was more interested in creating the right atmosphere. A second criticism related to long bits of dialogue between characters as a way of introducing ideas that it might be better fleshed out as storylines of their own. I tried to find a balance between discussion, reflection and adding new events.

Once I made those modifications, I re-read the book very carefully to ensure that there were consistencies around the way the characters behaved and also that events didn't just happen out of the blue, but had a precursor or some form of suggestion to plant a seed in the reader's mind. For example, very early on one of the night staffers who is training Wyatt, the central character, references the great concern night staff have about the young person having illicit items like matches or cigarettes which could result in a fire in the dangerously old and dry building.

Finally, after all of those rereads I gave the book back to the original reviewers and they looked again. Once I had their positive feedback, I decided to look around for a publisher. My first mission had been to write the book, not necessarily to publish a work. I was sufficiently satisfied with the product, and the feedback was encouraging, especially that the book was very readable and a subject matter many people would be curious about. I thought it was worth putting it out there to see if there was any interest. I went to the internet looking for top New Zealand publishers and found a list of twenty that came on my first search. I followed their guidelines and sent a copy of the book to the first four on the list. I fully expected it to be rejected as only a small percentage of first-time novelists have their books published. I initially only chose four, partly because I wanted to test the water, but also to limit the emotional impact of being rejected. I had a backup plan of circulating it to another group of four if I was rejected at my first attempt. Within a month Austin McCauley got back to me and expressed an interest. It was a straightforward process to engage with them and from there I signed a contract. The rest is history.

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