Q & A's

Latest Q & A's

I am privileged to have so many of you send through your questions about my work – thank you. I am afraid that I will not be able to answer all of them, but please still send your questions and I will do my very best to answer as many as I can.

Question:

Are there any authors, either working now or in the past, whom you would recommend aspiring writers to read? You have talked in the past of the importance of reading other people so who has particularly influenced you? Should new writers be looking at the work of established authors to establish a set of rules or guidelines?

Asked on 05/03/2009 16:26:15

Answer:

Not for rules and guidelines, but for helping to maintain a vision. It was a great help to me in writing HDM to return to Milton and Blake periodically.

Question:

Can aspiring writers learn much from creative writing courses or 'how-to' books?

Asked on 05/03/2009 16:25:42

Answer:

Goodness knows. I don't think they would have helped me much. The most useful quality you can have as a writer (given a basic amount of talent) is stubbornness, pig-headedness, call it what you will - the insistence against all the evidence that you will produce something worth reading. I'm not sure you can teach that.

Question:

With publishers aware of the astronomical sales now possible, is this good news for emerging writers or does it generate pressures from publishers to clone a new 'Lyra and Will' or 'Harry Potter'?

Asked on 05/03/2009 16:24:59

Answer:

Yes, publishers always want to publish what was a hit last year. Great publishers (like David Fickling) have the courage and vision to back things that might be successful in the future, but about which no-one can be sure.

Question:

Have you consciously set out to create female heroines like Lyra and Sally Lockhart? Have you found any difficulties as a male writer in creating young female characters?

Asked on 05/03/2009 16:22:25

Answer:

No. I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites. So there are no limits, no areas, or characters, or sexes, or times, where these sprites can't go. And they fix on what interests them. I wouldn't dream of deliberately choosing this or that sort of person, for political or social or commercial reasons, to write a book about. If the narrator isn't interested, the book won't come alive.

Question:

Have you created any minor characters that you would like to explore in more depth in other stories?

Asked on 05/03/2009 16:21:44

Answer:

Yes, many times, and it's only lack of time that prevents me.