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Tia Fisher’s debut novel won the Carnegie Shadower’s Choice award.  Her second, Not Going to Plan is a novel in verse that tells the story of a girl called Marnie and a boy called Zed and how they face something big!

Tia has very kindly written for us about why she wrote the powerful novel she has…

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Maybe they messed up the contraception? Maybe they were unlucky? Perhaps they didn’t even have a choice? However they became pregnant, every year around 8,000 teenage girls in the UK make the decision to have an abortion. But they won’t often see their choice reflected in fiction.

With the notable exception of the brilliant Little Bang, pregnant teens in kidlit almost always have their babies. This is despite the fact that more than half UK teenage pregnancies are terminated, and that teenage parents – and their children – are more likely to experience poorer health, education, and social outcomes than older parents.

There’s a lot of my own tempestuous teenage self in creative, rebellious Marnie. When she’s excluded from her all-girls school with only months to go before her GCSEs, my protagonist is moved to the local comprehensive, where of course there are boys. Boys. Boys! ‘Virginity’, Marnie says hungrily, ‘is an itch you can’t scratch by yourself.’  She’s flawed and impetuous; she gets drunk at a party and ends up in bed with a boy who has no respect for women. He only pretends use a condom, and Marnie – not much given to fact-checking – is left floundering in the AI-generated search results of her pregnancy symptoms.

Who can she turn to for help? Initially, not Mum, who chose to have Marnie when she herself accidentally got pregnant. Nor her new friend Rakel, whose religious beliefs prohibit abortion. Not even the liberal Luca, who can’t see why it’s even an issue. So who?

I wanted Marnie to share the narrative with someone who is completely her opposite: an entirely non-partisan onlooker who could dispense facts and information. So I created the boy she has to sit next to in her new class: the mistake-averse, utterly logical and completely delightful, physics-nerd Zed (named for the keyboard shortcut, duh).

But Zed isn’t only a vehicle for opinions and information. He’s an undiagnosed autistic with his own narrative arc, and his experience of homophobic bullying and search for a gender identity enlarge the themes of Not Going to Plan into a wider range of challenges faced by young people. I’m also hoping Zed’s detached observations of his peers will promote some self-questioning in the readers. But what’s certain is that the differences between my two narrators injects masses of humour into what might otherwise be a heavy read.

I never intended Not Going to Plan to be a romance, and it isn’t – at least not between Marnie and the father of her baby. But by the time it was finished, I realised it was a love story of sorts. All the types of love in Greek philosophy are represented: romantic, friendship, family, universal, playful, enduring, and obsessive and love of self.   But for me, the most important kind of love in Not Going to Plan is the last. Self-love. And it’s thanks to Zed’s friendship that Marnie is able to travel through her shame to finally forgive herself.

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Not Going to Plan is available now and you can read more about it and order it using the link below.  Many thanks to Tia for this blog and this book!