May
30
Kate Hunter talks about ‘Mosquito Advertising’
Mrs O: How did you come up with the idea for your series ‘Mosquito Advertising’? Kate: The idea behind Mosquito Advertising had been swimming around in my mind for many years, but it only took form as a book in 2008.
Six years before that, though, when I was home with my first baby, I thought a show about ads being made by non-advertising people would be fun, so I wrote up the idea and took it to the Seven Network. They agreed it had potential and made a pilot (a test episode). But the concept was not appealing to advertising agencies, because the show revealed all their secrets!
So my idea morphed into a story – which was great because I realised that a story doesn’t need a network, or a production company or anything but an idea and some time. And no matter what anyone says, there is always time for something you really, really want to do.
At first, writing Mosquito Advertising was difficult because I was unaccustomed to writing anything that takes longer than 30 seconds to read aloud, but I had a keen publisher and a serious deadline, so I kept going.
It’s been a long time since I was thirteen, but I remember that time clearly and mostly with happiness. I also remember the books I loved – Enid Blyton made a huge impression on me – particularly The Naughtiest Girl In The School series. I read the first one when I was eight but was probably secretly re-reading them for years. In the end, I just wrote the kind of book I would have liked to read. The characters are mostly hybrids of people I met and worked with. Some I just made up. No one is based purely on a real person.
My main motivation to write a sequel to Mosquito Advertising, The Parfizz Pitch was that I’d said I would. There was no getting out of it. Like Katie Crisp, I’m a big one for imagining things are easier than they appear.
But once I was into it, it seemed that the characters I had created became real, and I was curious about what they would do next. Advertising agencies grow, change and even shrink over time and Mosquito Advertising is like any other agency. Only with its office in a backyard.
Overnight success does funny things to people – I wanted to explore how Katie would handle it. How it would affect her relationships – both with her family and her mates and how she would juggle her passion for advertising with the pressures of school.
It’s also fun for me to write ads as Katie and the rest of the gang; to imagine what I would do if I had the opportunity to work on a dog food account and an airline. What would the people who ran those businesses be like? Why would they do what they do?
As a writer, I wanted to create a bigger book – not in terms of word count but in terms of action and relationships. There’s a death. A romance. A fight. In many ways, it was a challenging book to write, but I think because of that it’ll be a fun one to read.
Visit my website: http://www.katehunter.com.au/
