INTERVIEW: Eva Amores & Matt Cosgrove Tell Press Gang About The Worst Week Ever Series

Eva Amores & Matt Cosgrove are the co-authors of the best-selling Worst Week Ever series. They Zoomed with Press Gang reporters from Guildford West, Hilltop Road and Putney public schools.

Press Gang: Where do you get the inspiration for your books?

Eva: A lot of our inspiration for our worst week ever actually comes from real life and our own experiences. The main character Justin Chase is a combination of Matt and I. So a lot of the stuff that happens to him is based on something that’s happened to us, but we’ve just made it 10 times worse and didn’t all happen in one day. 

For example, Worst Week Ever, Tuesday, is all about having terrible school photos. And that’s based on my experience. When I was in Year 7 or 8, I had my eyes closed in my school photo – it went to every kid in my class! So we use it as inspiration, and then we build on top of that.

So that’s always our advice for people when they’re writing. You can use your own life for inspiration for your stories. You can write about things that have happened to you, but then you can use your imagination just to exaggerate things and make it more extreme so it’s more exciting and more interesting for the reader to read about.

What made you decide to become a writer and when did you become one?

Matt: I knew from when I was a little boy that I wanted to be an author and an illustrator. I used to love going to the library and borrowing books and I loved book week. It was my favourite time at school. 

So I was always practising writing and I was always reading and I was always drawing and I was always making my own books at home and at school I just kept on practising and practising and getting better and better until eventually I was able to do it professionally. 

I started working as an author and an illustrator when I was 18. I’ve been an author and an illustrator for 30 years now. 

Eva: I only was published during the Pandemic, that’s when I signed with Scholastic to do the Worst Week Ever series.

I didn’t grow up wanting to be an author, but I kind of just fell into it during the pandemic when I was retrenched and lost my job at the A.B.C. 

We’ve been talking about the idea of this Worst Week Ever for a very long time. Our son thinks he came up with the idea – the whole family’s been talking about it. And so we thought what a great opportunity to actually work on it.

We were trapped at home and couldn’t go out or do anything, so we decided maybe it was time to finally work on this project, this idea that we’d been talking about for years and years. We had the time to actually do it and it’s turned out pretty well so far. We’re having lots of fun working together.

Press Gang: Do you have any advice for us young amateur authors?

Matt: Well, my advice for young authors is just to read a lot. So I think that’s a great way to learn about what good writing is. If you are reading lots of books, you start to recognize what’s interesting and what works well and you can start taking on board some of those techniques and some of those ideas and skills. 

Another way is just to practice writing. If you write and you practice all the time, you’ll get better and better as well. And I also suggest to enter every competition that you can. I know there are always lots of writing competitions floating around and I’d really encourage you to enter any of those writing competitions because that allows you to practice your skills, but it also lets other people see your writing and you never know where that’s going to lead.

Press Gang: How did you get the idea for the toilet car in Worst Week Ever?

Matt: Well, we were trying to think, you know how it can be pretty embarrassing with your parents sometimes if they’re dropping you off at school or they make a big scene. We tried to think what would make it the most embarrassing school drop-off ever. And we thought, how about if we turn the car into a giant toilet, that would be pretty embarrassing to be dropped off at school in a giant toilet.

Eva: Can I add that we have two boys who are teenagers now, but Matt’s motivation in life is to embarrass them as much as possible.

Matt: Yeah, I love embarrassing my sons, so it’s easy for me to come up with ideas.

Press Gang: Is it fun to write books together?

Eva: Yeah, it’s lots of fun. We were actually surprised how much fun it was. So Matt and I met at university when we were randomly placed in a group project together and we did the same course. I specialized in multimedia and Matt specialized in illustration and we’ve worked together as designers, but we’ve never actually worked on a book together until the Worst Week Ever series. So we were quite surprised at how much fun it is to work together.

Matt: I’m used to making my books by myself, so I’m usually just writing and illustrating all by myself. So it’s very solitary, I just work by myself all day long. It’s a very big change for me working with somebody else where we are bouncing ideas around and talking constantly and discussing the ideas. It’s much, much more fun to be working on a project together. 

But it can be difficult as well because there’s a lot more compromise and we have to balance everybody’s ideas. So, it’s very different working with someone else, but it’s lots of fun because we get to laugh and make each other laugh and tell jokes and it’s really cool.