A reader asks why it is always summer

A reader, fifteen, wrote to me with a complaint dressed up as a question, which is the best kind of letter to get. She had read three of my books, she said, more or less back to back, and she had noticed something and was not sure whether it was clever or lazy. Why is it always summer. Why does the big thing, the friendship or the falling out or the first person who ever really saw them, why does it always happen in the holidays. Was I doing it on purpose, or had I just not noticed.

Both, is the honest answer, and I am glad she caught me, so let me try to say why, because I think the summer is doing more work in those books than I gave it credit for while I was writing them.

Term time has a shape that is not the shape of a story. It is rung into forty minute pieces by a bell, it is watched, it is full of corridors where you are exactly who everyone has already decided you are. There is very little room, between the register and the last bus, for a person to become someone slightly different, and becoming someone slightly different is more or less the only thing my books are about. The summer takes the bell away. It takes away the timetable and the watching, and for a stretch that feels endless while you are in it and takes about nine pages while you are writing it, it hands a teenager the one thing school never will, which is unstructured time and nobody in charge of it.

And unstructured time is dangerous, in the good way. It is where the friendships get made that would never have survived being introduced in a classroom, the ones that cross the lines the school day keeps everyone politely on their own side of. It is where you find the people who become the family you assemble for yourself, the one that is not an accident of who your parents are, because you finally have the hours to go looking for them. Nothing forces two people together like a long empty afternoon with nothing to do in it. Term time keeps everyone apart on purpose. The summer, gloriously, does not.

There is also this, which is harder to write down. The summer everything changed is a phrase you can only say afterwards. Nobody knows they are in it while it is happening. You think it is just July. You think you are bored, you think nothing is going on, you think the interesting part of your life is happening to other people somewhere else, and then one specific evening you look back and cannot find the door you came in by, because you are not the same person who walked through it in June. That gap, between how ordinary it feels while you are living it and how enormous it turns out to have been, is the exact space a story lives in. I keep setting books in the summer because the summer is where people change without permission and without noticing, and then spend the autumn working out what happened.

So yes, I plead guilty, and no, it is not lazy, or at least it is not only lazy. Tell you what, though. Next time I will set one in the miserable damp of a February half term, just to prove I can, and we will both find out whether a person can be quietly rebuilt over a single grey week with the heating on. I suspect they can. I suspect it is only harder to put on a cover.

For one answer told as a whole novel, The Comet Year follows a new girl who picks a locked door on the science wing roof and finds a dome behind it.