No. I didn’t enjoy writing as a
child. I wasn’t a good student for
all sorts of reasons. I was taught
in a flat, uninspiring way, and I
failed consistently and was made
to feel a failure. It was all
rather sad as I had all sorts of
advantages (a mother who read to
me) but the teachers were all
rather frightening and austere.
Later, there was a
teacher at secondary
school and one at
university who were
inspiring and I left
education converted
again - but I hated
reading and writing at
the time. I know exactly
what it’s like to be a
reluctant reader. The
only way to tell stories
to children is to tell
stories that you love
yourself.
When I became an
English teacher after
university I discovered
that one of the best
ways of getting through
to children was to read
them a story at the end
of the day. One day I
realized that a story I
was reading wasn’t very
good and decided to
write my own story to
tell the class.
 Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island),
 Rudyard Kipling (The Just So Stories) and
 Ted Hughes (The Iron Man).
Hergé’s Tintin: the three double-instalment episodes
from Hergé’s middle period:
 the pirate/submarine yarn The Secret of the Unicorn
and its sequel, Red Rackham’s Treasure (1943-44);
 the Inca diptych The Seven Crystal Balls and
Prisoners of the Sun (1948-49);
 and the post-war Destination Moon/Explorers on the
Moon (1953-54), in which the pesky Walloon hack
reaches the lunar surface two decades ahead of Neil
Armstrong, albeit in what looks alarmingly like a V-2
rocket.
Aged about 12, I discovered
Tintin and was hooked. Snowy
barked like no other dog:
‘Whooah! Whooah!’ But he could
‘talk’ too. And there were two
bungling detectives in bowler
hats, and the irascible Captain
Haddock – what a cast of
crazies. Heroic Tintin looked
like a boy (like me, sort of),
but did all his derring-do in a
man’s world. And he always
triumphed. He travelled the
world, implausibly, impossibly
(but who cares?) – to Tibet (my
favourite Yeti story, and the
reason I wrote my own 40 years
later, King of the Cloud
Forest);
to Egypt , in Cigars of the
Pharaoh; to the moon, to
America, Africa, Soviet
Russia; to islands.
There was almost always
treasure , bodies, mad
professors, pirates. Whenever
I discovered a new Tintin
book, nobody ever had to tell
me to read it. I read it from
cover to cover, utterly
fascinated, totally involved
, loving every moment of it,
lost as much in the pictures
as in the dialogue.
[My book], Alone on the Wide,
Wide Sea was inspired by the
stories of the young children
sent to Australia who found
themselves working in the back of
beyond, enduring terrible
conditions. This was the last
forced migration of unwanted
children from the UK, and often
it seems it was organizations
like Barnardos behind it.
I don’t get up very early. I write in bed,
piling the pillows up behind me, by hand in an
exercise book. I write by hand and usually
write quite quickly having had months of
‘dream time’, thinking about the story.
When the voice is going well I write between
9.30 and 1.00. In the afternoons I revise what
I have done. Sometimes I scratch everything
that I have written that morning. Every
afternoon I take a long walk in the Devon
countryside.
I don’t work out a plot line as I go. I have a
strong sense of where a story is going because I
have dreamed about it and pictured it in my
mind. If you have planned a story too tightly it
can become predictable, so if possible, I try to
let my characters find their way to the
denouement. I never want to impose a glowing
finale to make it all ‘fine’ - if I can I prefer
to leave the reader with a sense of wonder and
doubt, which reflects real life. I dislike
‘solutions’. Children are often taught that
adults have the solutions to life, whereas they
ought to know that adults are still searching
for them themselves.
When War Horse was being performed as a play at the
National Theatre, I discovered that the actors had
‘work-shopped’ the characters- they had invented a
background for each of the characters from the
script to male them more real and believable. I do
a very similar thing when writing. I have a back
story for each character (where they come from,
etc). This is information that may not be in the
final novel but helps me to understand why
characters behave as they do.
You don’t have to like characters, you
just need to understand them. I’m not
judgmental of my characters and I try
not to be judgmental of people either.
How do you know when
a story is going to work?
You don’t. A moment
just comes when you
think you can write
it, and I always go
through a period of
despair first. I
have always been
wrong about which of
my books will
resonate with
people. They are two
completely different
things- the books
you like, and books
you think will work.
How long does it take you
to write a book?
It depends on how well I’m
writing, how well it’s flowing.
But I usually I spend several
months dreaming it up in my head
- I call it my ‘dream time’, the
most important part of my story
inventing when I try to weave
the story together, do my
research and find the right
voice for the story. Once I
begin writing, I write very fast
and will finish a book in two or
three months. Then revising it
might take another month. So, on
average, a novel takes upwards
of 6 months to write- though
sometimes it’s shorter and
sometimes much longer.
How many re-drafts do you do?
I write on paper, very, very fast and
then write it up again neatly. The
first version is to ‘tell it’, just
write it down. On average I’ll do
about three drafts, and then lots of
tweaks.
I then send it off to a friend of
mine in the Isles of Scilly who puts
it on the machine. Then when it comes
back to me it looks like a proper
publishable story and then I work on
it, send it back again, she sends it
back and then I work on it again, and
I keep doing this until I’m satisfied
with it.
How does your editor help you?
Good editors are very helpful. Bad editors are
a pain as they divert you! My first editor is
my wife. You have to trust what people say as
they are trying to make the book as good as it
can be, though sometimes this is difficult.
What other writers do you admire/read now?
I’m not a great reader of fiction, though I
have just read and enjoyed Ian McEwan’s On
Chesil Beach. I read a good deal of poetry
(Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, W.B. Yeats, Alice
Oswald and Moora Dooley are some of my
favourites) and I also enjoy biographiesespecially of other writers as I’m often
fascinated to find how they found their voice.