I always feel guilty when people ask me this question and I can’t do any better than “Um, I dunno…my head?” Sometimes they look at me suspiciously, as if there’s a sacred place where authors go to draw up ideas from a well and I won’t tell them the secret location, but the truth in the case of my teen novel is no more glamorous or secret than this: I watched a lot of telly.

Girl, Aloud was inspired by hundreds of hours of X-Factor-viewing. My feelings about the show swing wildly between love and hate, but my main state of viewing is pure fascination. Who are all those people? What are some of them thinking? And why is Simon Cowell always right?

I knew I didn’t want to write about the show itself – though I did want Mr Cowell to have a cameo – and that I wanted to invent the home-life of a made-up contestant: someone who didn’t have a hope in hell. I remember one real contestant who got me thinking that this was the kind of story I wanted to tell. If you’re an X-Factor fan, you’ll certainly remember Emma…

The way that X-Factor presented this family is not something I enjoyed at all (though I should point out that Emma came back for more, this time with her sister). Reality TV can be a bully, and this is bullying at its worst. But, assuming we all accept that Emma was exploited by the programme, my real interest was in the parents, who can be heard in this clip to say that they “pushed and pushed” their daughter. I wanted to know how that happens: parents always see the best in their children, but how could they have got it so horribly wrong? So that’s how the story began, though I must explain that Kass Kennedy, my character in Girl, Aloud, is nothing like Emma. Kass isn’t deluded in the least as to her talents – that was my extra twist: how does a deluded parent get a realistic child along to an X-Factor audition? How would that story go?

That story is Girl, Aloud.