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Quite a lot of readers of my books email me to ask about this,
that or the other. In an attempt to cut down on
oft-repeated answers - as well as make them available to others
who don't like to ask - I have put this page together
in the hope that it will cover most enquiries. The most
frequently-asked question is the first, to which I have two
answers. Take your pick!
Where
do your ideas
come from?
Answer
1: The
Ideas Cart, which rolls up to my door every six weeks. The man
who runs the Cart sells a range of ideas at various
prices. When I first started getting my ideas from him he had a
ten-a-penny range. They weren’t very good ideas, but they were
better than no ideas at all. Nowadays, the cheapest range is
five-for-a-quid. A great many writers buy these, as do I when
I’m hard up. The two-for-a-pound range is slightly more
ambitious, as you might expect, and I've bought more than a few
of these.
The best ideas can cost anything from £10 to £50 each. I buy
one or two of these a year. In
recent times, the Ideas Cart has had an occasional
three-for-the-price-of-two offer, which is quite hard to resist.
Where do your ideas come from?
Answer
2:
I carry a notebook at all times and often stop in the street or the aisle of a supermarket to jot down a thought for possible
later use. I have a drawer packed with such notebooks. I get
ideas from newspapers, TV and radio, from things overheard or
witnessed in the street, from posters pinned to trees, from
anywhere and everywhere. And a fair few pop into my head without my having
the faintest idea where they came from. With all this input,
I’m rarely stuck for something to write about. But
ideas are only the starting point of a work of fiction. A Jiggy
McCue book, for instance, is humour-driven. Without the humour
(which doesn't come out of thin air) they would be
straight-forward adventures - the kind of book that doesn't
interest me at all.
What was the inspiration behind the Jiggy books?
The
series started with The
Poltergoose,
which, when I wrote it, was not intended to be the first of a
series. At the time the idea came to me, my partner and daughter and I
were living in a three-storey house that creaked quite a bit,
especially at night, and occasionally there would be odd thumps
and doors slamming, apparently of their own accord. One morning,
shortly before I was due to walk my daughter to her primary school,
she came downstairs
and said: 'A picture just fell off the wall, and I was nowhere
near it.' 'Oh,' I said, quick as a whippet, 'it must be the
poltergeist.' Well, that's what I meant to say, but instead of 'poltergeist' I said
'poltergoose', for no other reason than that I sometimes get my words mixed up. But then I thought,
'Hang on. The Poltergoose.
Good title!' I reached for a notepad and wrote these
words: 'Three kids haunted by dead goose.' That very day I
started writing the story, and four months later I found that the
story had become a novel. It took well over a year to sell the book (about
a dozen publishers turned it down, even though
I'd already had two or three books published by then), but it
finally found a home and became the first of the Jiggy McCue series. Because of that little slip of the tongue, the Jiggy books are now to be found in several translations,
including French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Serbo-Croat.
Yes, Serbo-Croat.
How
many Jiggy books will there be?
I keep
making the mistake of answering this question, then having to
update it because things change. Originally I planned ten books
because ten is a nice round figure. Then I
said that the eleventh, One For All and All For Lunch (which I'm
working on now), would end the series. Since I said that,
however, I've signed up for one more, a sequel to Nudie Dudie to
be called... Rudie Dudie. I'd better keep quiet from now on.
Are you like Jiggy McCue?
My editor says I am
him. I deny this vigorously.
How
long have you been an author?
I’ve
been a published
author since 1995, but I was writing for a great many years
before my first book came out.
How old were you when you started writing?
I
wrote stories at school, of course, but back then I had a fancy
to be either
an astronomer, an archaeologist or a painter. I was seventeen or
eighteen before I began to think that I would like to write
fiction. I wrote all kinds of things over the years, mostly for
adults, but the first book that was accepted for publication was
a novel for children, which
seemed to be a pointer to a direction to follow, which I did.
Do you prefer writing comic novels or serious ones?
I
couldn’t write comic novels all the time, and would probably
not like to write serious novels one after the other either.
Between humorous books I always spend months on something very
different. The break gives the humour a chance to replenish
itself, and amusing ideas time to find seating room in the dusty
waiting room at the back of my head. Besides, I like variety.
What is your favourite Jiggy McCue book?
I
don’t really have one, but I do seem to recall having more fun than usual with the character and antics of
Neville in Neville the Devil, a sort of sequel to
The
Killer Underpants.
And I'm quite pleased with The
Iron, the Switch and the Broom Cupboard...
Which
of all your books are you proudest of?
I wouldn't say that I'm actually proud of any of
them - too self-critical perhaps - but I’m very glad to have
written The
Aldous Lexicon,
which took three years to finish, and Juby's
Rook, which took twelve years to
reach publication. And I do have a bit
of a soft spot for The Griffin and Oliver Pie.
What inspired The Aldous Lexicon trilogy?
The
trilogy’s first volume, A Crack in the Line, is an
expanded rewrite for older readers of my first published
children's novel, When
the Snow Falls.
I can’t pinpoint the original thought behind that book, though
the trilogy it led to contains a number of ideas and conclusions
that had been building in my mind for decades. For a rather nice
review of the trilogy,
click here.
Where do you get the names for your characters?
Often,
characters present themselves fully-formed, with names attached,
but when I need a name I frequently look around the spines of
the books in my study and use or adapt an author’s name. The
name McCue, for instance, came from the novelist Ian McEwan.
Sometimes, stuck for a name and keen to get started on a story,
I temporarily assign an initial to a character – J, S or B,
say – and find a name for him or her some other day.
Occasionally, a name that I’ve chosen doesn’t feel right
after a while, and I have to search for a better fit.
Are your characters based on anyone you know?
Several
of the teachers in the Jiggy McCue novels were my own teachers.
I use their real names too – Mr Rice, Mr Hurley and Mrs
Gamble, for instance. I put other people I know or have known in
my books too. Fortunately, most of the people I know don’t
read them.
Are some of the things that happen in your books based on your
own experiences?
More
than I let on about. I mention a few in the ‘About this
Book’ or ‘About the Author’ sections in the front of the
Jiggy books.
As an adult, is it difficult to write a children’s story in
the first-person?
I
don’t find it difficult at all. Jiggy McCue’s voice, in
particular, felt absolutely right from the first sentence of the
first book about him and his pals - perhaps because a large part of my consciousness is still twelve or
thirteen years
old.
Can you give me some tips on how to become a writer?
Tricky, this, but I think I would recommend that the would-be
writer first learns as much as he can about the way language
works (by reading mainly, and taking note of what
he’s reading rather than just the story) and writes as much as
he can until he can put together a story and bring it to
completion with comparative ease. Some established authors admit
with a light laugh that they can’t spell or punctuate. I think
this is very lazy. Spelling and punctuation – along with some
facility with words – are the backbone of the writer’s
trade. He or she should at least be fairly
good at these things.
Lecture over.
How do you construct a story?
Many
writers like to take an idea and see where it leads them. I used
to work that way myself, but more often than not found that I
ran out of steam after a while, or reached an unsatisfactory
conclusion. These days, if preparing to write a novel, I plot it
chapter by chapter, event by event, all the way to the
end, before writing a word. I often have several possible
endings and leave it to the story to choose the one that seems
the most logical (or illogical) when it reaches it. Well,
that’s the plan.
I’m fond of saying that in order to surprise the reader I must
first surprise myself, so once I’ve plotted a story I rarely
look at the outline again, and sometimes the thing goes off at a
wild tangent or two and ends up bearing little resemblance to
the one I set out to write. The purpose of the plan is to
create a skeleton to hang the flesh of a narrative on. If the
skeleton makes a run for it, does a back-flip, dives over a
cliff, the story goes with it, sometimes to its advantage. This works for me. It
might not for everyone.
How can I learn to write stories like yours?
If
you feel a desire to write something similar to one or more of
mine, just map out an idea and get stuck into it. Eventually you
will either move on to more personal material or give up the
idea of writing altogether. I recommend the latter course.
Writing isn’t the bag of magic beans it’s often thought to
be. It’s hard slog, year after year, often for very little
reward and with a great deal of frustration along the way, not
least when publishers or editors don’t like what you show
them. This happens to me even today.
Do
you have any pets?
When I was little and living in my grandparents' house we had a snow-white goat called Flo. When
Flo butted me, my grandfather sent her to the abattoir. A couple
of years later we had a dog, which ran into the road and was
flattened by a passing car. When I was a bit older we had two
tortoises, Tish and Tosh, who chewed through the fence and
escaped. In
my twenties I was given a cat called Bert (the model for
Stallone) who hated to be cooped up and disappeared. Some years later
my partner and I had two budgies (Benson and Hedges) that flew away. Lesson
learnt, we had no intention of taking on any more pets, but two
kittens have just strolled into our lives, and they look like
being fixtures. They are brother and sister and called Bella and
Archie. To commemorate their arrival, I've lent their names to
Jiggy's grandparents in a story called Shelling Pees, which
you'll be able to read next summer in the eleventh Jiggy book,
One For All and All For Lunch.
What football team do you support?
I
don’t support any football team. My father loved football, and
so do my brother and my son, but I detest it and always have
(something I'm
pleased to have in common with Jiggy McCue).
To read about something really terrible that happens in one of
Jiggy's school football session, get hold of a copy of
Ryan's
Brain!
Last
Word. The
Jiggy McCue books are often said to be books for boys. Let me
correct this for good and all. They are books for boys and
girls. Most of my correspondence comes from girls and their mothers, who often read
the Jiggy books together. And one of the main characters - Angie Mint - is
a girl. Angie is the real leader of the gang (The Three
Musketeers). Jiggy and Pete would never admit this, of course.
For further information, see my Biography.
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