‘I was wondering who inspired you to write?’ asks Josh, from one of the schools I visited last week.

Great question. Thanks, Josh! There are a few different possible sides to it – and more than few possible answers.

In my case (as I suspect it is with most writers) the drive to write comes from all sorts of different directions. If you’re talking about people who pushed me to chase my dream of being a published author, I’d have to include – for instance – my friend Mary. Her sudden and utterly unexpected death in a car accident when I was 18 (and she 16) was a timely reminder that life is short, it can stop at any time, and if you have an ambition then, well, you’d better get on with going after it. If, by contrast, you’re talking about writers whose work has inspired me – positively or negatively – then the list is very long indeed, and growing all the time (check my LibraryThing profile for some of the positive ones!)

But I guess there is one person I can point to who had a big effect on my choice to do what I do. He’s also a large part of the reason I’m always looking for opportunities to do my stuff at schools, by the way! I’ve mentioned him on this blog before (though THE IRON MAN is by no means his most representative piece of writing). His name was Ted Hughes – and I GOT TO SEE HIM IN PERSON.

He came to my school. If you haven’t heard his name before then it’s hard to explain what a big deal that was: his writing is still loved and admired today, but at that point he was arguably the most famous living poet in the world – and (to repeat) HE CAME TO MY SCHOOL!

He’d been asked to read some poems of his that we students were supposed to be studying for our exams. To my absolute glee he refused, reading instead from what is still one of my favourite books of his, namely CROW. And as if all of that wasn’t wonderful enough, it was a magical performance: his craggy face and deep, slow reading voice were utterly hypnotic, and are etched on my memory forever.

But something else is etched there, too. I was sitting in the front row of the school auditorium, and pardon me if this sounds a little weird, but as he read I realised I was close enough to him to smell that he’d just drunk a cup of coffee.

You see: he wasn’t a wizard, or an alien, or a myth. His writing may have been phenomenal and his life was dramatic – but he was a person. He was a human being, who got up in the morning, who drank coffee. This was a revelation to me, because until that point, while I’d written stories at school, becoming ‘a writer’ myself was something I’d never even considered. Writers were different (I thought). Writers were special – bizarre, mythical creatures separated from the rest of humankind. As far as I could see, becoming ‘a writer’ was as likely as getting superpowers – being able to shoot laser beams from my eyes, say. But there he was, Ted Hughes, this writer I admired. And I could smell his breath! 😉

Writers are people – just like (for instance) brain surgeons, or particle physicists, or polar explorers, or Olympic javelin-throwers are all people. Writing is a job: it’s done by people who sit in rooms and put words together – it’s as simple, and as difficult, as that. And passing along what Ted Hughes passed to me that day as I sat in the audience – namely that if you want to do it, and if you’re prepared to work hard enough, you can do, not ‘just’ writing, but whatever you want – is a big part of the reason why I love doing school visits so much. Seeing (or, heh, smelling-!) that he was a real person made the idea of being a writer suddenly seem real too. That was hugely inspiring to me. And if I and my stories even come close to having that effect on someone else, I’ll be very happy! 🙂

Saturday’s event at Waterstone’s Guildford with Mark Robson was tremendous. For those who don’t know, the traditional drill with bookshop appearances is for authors to sit at a table somewhere, waiting for people to come and ask them to sign their books. Well, let me tell you, that’s not Mark’s style at all. Hee hee hee!

When I arrived he’d set up a low table with some stacks of our books – but it was at the front of the shop, about three paces in from the door. And from there, from about 10 am until 4pm, he and I stood there and approached almost everyone who came in. We engaged them in conversation, we put our books in their hands and (as often as not…!) we convinced them to buy ’em!

I found the business of hand-selling our stuff to be very satisfying. I guess it helped that I’d been a bookseller myself for ten years: I was used to the idea of recommending books to people. It helped, too (of course!) that Mark and I enjoy each other’s work: his IMPERIAL series, for instance, is TERRIFIC! But having to convince someone of the merits of my own stories, enough to part with their cash and give a book of mine a go, was a great experience – humbling, sure, but empowering, too. The day passed in a flash and we had a lot of fun, and I’m delighted to say that Mark has indicated that he might be up for us ‘double-heading it’ again sometime soon. Watch this space! 🙂

Now seems a good a minute to answer Amin from London, who asks:

Where did you get the idea of TIM, DEFENDER OF THE EARTH?

The single best piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard came from an interview I read once with the awesome thriller writer Lee Child: “Write the exact book that you yourself would be thrilled to read,” he said – and as soon as I saw those words it was like a door opening in my head. The only way as a writer that you can hope to get readers excited by your stories, is if you’re excited by them yourself. GIANT MONSTERS thrill me half to death, and have done for most of my life now.

My first giant monster encounter was when I was six, reading Ted Hughes’ THE IRON MAN – I think it’s called THE IRON GIANT in the US (and I’m talking about the book, not the movie, which is quite different). For those who don’t know, in the book the Iron Man is something of an enigma: ‘Where did he come from? Nobody knows’. But as soon as he stepped off that cliff on page one I was hooked — and by the time he squared off to defend the human race against the annihilating space-angel-bat-dragon (a creature so colossal that it sat on the whole of Australia!) Mr Hughes’ book had started an obsession that would last the rest of my life. I love monsters – all kinds. But from that book I can trace a love of /giant/ ones, specifically, that has sustained and fed me through (to name a few) all three versions of King Kong, the wonderful work of Ray Harryhausen, innumerable Japanese ‘kaiju eiga’ such as Gamera and (naturally!) Godzilla – right up to this year’s CLOVERFIELD.

Sometimes, I’ll admit, I’ve felt a bit silly about it. Sometimes – especially when I was trying to convey my excitement to other people! – I would wonder what it was I loved about giant monsters so much. ‘But it’s blatantly just a guy in a suit,’ they would say (for example). ‘I know,’ I would answer, ‘but…’ ‘That building he’s just stepped on is about six inches tall. It’s totally unrealistic!’ ‘I know,’ I would flail, ‘but-!’ But the thing was, I didn’t know where that ‘but’ came from – why I loved these stories so much. Not until just a few years ago, when I was asking myself that question again. Then, at last, it hit me.

A lot of the satisfaction to be had from these stories… comes from imagining you’re the monster.

Take me, for instance. I’m six foot two, I’m a little clumsy, and when I get excited I tend to wave my arms around like a big blond baboon. I had to give up learning Wing Chun Kung Fu recently when I realised that all it was doing for me at this stage (even Wing Chun, one of the tidiest and most short-range of all martial arts!) was to make me knock things over even more than I did already. Well: imagine the destruction if, like Tim, I was a HUNDRED METRES TALL!

What would it be like, say, to wade through a multi-story car park? What would it be like to be stuck trying to walk around in a city that’s built on a vastly smaller scale to you, even if you didn’t want to destroy it? What if every time you opened your mouth, people ran screaming in terror? And what if, like the Iron Man, you found you then had to face a threat that was even more powerful, and frightening, and seemingly indomitable, than you?

In his brilliant book of the craft, ON WRITING, Stephen King describes the germination of the seed of a book as the ‘What if?’ stage. That’s where writers get their ideas from: by asking themselves ‘What if…?’ The combination of that, giant monsters, and Lee Child’s advice, and there you have it: TIM, DEFENDER OF THE EARTH. And as with THE BLACK TATTOO, if you have even a quarter as much fun reading it as I had writing it, then you should be in for a pretty good time. HEE HEE HEE HEE! 🙂

Have you seen the Q&A pages on my Black Tat and Tim sites? For about eighteen months now I’ve been doing my best to answer every question that comes in on my websites’ Guestbooks. If you have a question about me or my writing (and I haven’t answered it already!) then drop me a line on the Guestbook of your choice, and I’ll see what I can do – here on the blog first, then it’ll wind up on those Q&A pages.

If it takes me a while though, like this one has (sorry, Amin!) you’ll have to forgive me. After all, I’ve got more cool stories to write! ;p

Well, here I am, fully recovered from last week’s excitements (check out the full story of the opening of The Big Green Bookshop here) And I’m now gearing up for TIM’s impending launch in the USA! It’s officially out in America at the end of this month, but I’ve already received my author copies, and that means it could be in shops any day now.

Pauses to wave tentacles in the air in what’s probably a thoroughly uncool way: YAAAAAAAAAAAAH! HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE!

Ahem. ‘Scuse me! 😉

All sorts of cunning plans are afoot. Allow me to share a couple with you…

First up, here’s an article I wrote for the SF wiki site SCIFIPEDIA. My US publishers, Razorbill, asked me to write my own entry there, to explain what I do – and let me tell you, for a while I was completely stumped! I had to tear up what I wrote and start again, something like three times, before I realised that a certain correspondence I’d had with one of Black Tat‘s young readers a couple of months back seemed to sum up for me what this sinister masterplan of mine is really all about. Hope it does the same for you. [And thanks again, Jasmine!]

Speaking of Black Tat, it’s with great glee and delight that I can announce we have another winner for the No Monsters Were Harmed In The Making Of This Website Competition! Not content with clinching Round Two with his fabulous frog photo, the awesome SKULLIAN has stormed back into the fray to take the NMWHITMOTWC crown once again in Round Five with his gorgeous Snakeskin. Check it out, it’s a stunningly beautiful image – and while you’re there, be sure to take a look at our other winners, which are every bit as sinister and striking! Time to ask yourself: do you fancy a chance at monster glory? Closing date for Round Six is May 26th, so send us what you got. 🙂

Lots more good stuff in the pipeline, I’ll be back soon to keep you posted. But before I slither off into the night again I have one more item of news to show you. Awesome up-and-coming scary-story-author Barry Hutchison has been reading TIM and saying all sorts of kind and flattering things to me about it (ahh, cheers Barry! [blushes a meaty pink] ;p) But even better, he sent me this link to a BBC News story that seems eerily close to a certain set of inventions by TIM’s nemesis Professor Mallahide. As Barry said in his email – “Just found this and thought you might appreciate it. Or cower in terror.” HEE HEE HEE HEE!

Q&A time again, and this Guestbook question comes from Louise at Ashington High School, who asks:

“Do you base your evil characters on things you don’t stand for or dislike?”

This is an excellent question, and the subject of baddies is one I find especially fascinating: HUR HUR HUR! 😉

When planning a story with a baddie in it, it’s certainly tempting to make the baddie as unsympathetic as possible, as this (of course) will supposedly make your ‘good’ characters seem all the more good. But in fact I reckon this is a mistake. The problem is, it tends to lead to very simplistic storytelling, with a very skewed ‘black and white’ sort of view of the world. OK: I write fantasy stories – they’re escapism, they’re fun. But I try to keep at the heart of my stories a truthful reflection of some kind of daily reality, as I think that makes them more believable, and therefore more enjoyable. And this business of baddies is a prime example.

In real life, acts of cruelty, horror, callousness, brutality, greed, sadism and so forth are not generally carried out by your classic moustache-twirling ‘BWAH-HA-HA I WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD!’ type of baddie. In real life, acts of unspeakable evil are actually carried out by… us.

We all of us, every one of us, have the potential inside us to do terrible things. We all get tempted. We’ve all experienced the moment of madness, the beckoning abyss, the curiosity. And I’m not putting across a pessimistic view of the world by saying this: on the contrary, considering the potential for darkness and insanity inside every single human being, it’s amazing and incredible and brilliant that the majority of us are as positive as we are. But people do bad things. And as humans – let alone writers – we have to try to understand why.

My favourite baddies, therefore, tend to be ones who have a bit of depth to them. I don’t believe that people can be classified forever as ‘evil’, so I don’t think characters in stories – even fantasy stories – should be, either. So, when I’m thinking about a baddie for a story – someone who is going to get a story started and bring it to its climax; somebody who has to be fought or stopped – the big question I ask myself is, WHY?

If they’re obsessed with power, /why/ are they obsessed with power? [Perhaps it’s a sign of weakness and powerlessness in some important other part of their life?] If, as in the Scourge’s case in Black Tat, they want to destroy the universe, /why/ do they want to destroy the universe? [The Scourge makes a lot of noise about ‘the purity of the Void’, but in fact it behaves as it does because it was /created/ that way: it’s like a machine, a ‘self-destruct button’ for the universe, set up that way for experimental purposes by a higher power. But over the course of the story, it discovers that it has feelings…]

In TIM, DEFENDER OF THE EARTH, the ‘baddie’ is Professor Mallahide. He’s discovered something, something tremendous and incredible, with enormous potential for good. But where he crosses the line into being a threat to the world, is the fact that he can’t understand why everyone else can’t see his invention the same way he does. He inflicts his will on other people, thinking he knows best. And that’s a mistake that any one of us can make.

The best and most exciting baddies in stories, it seems to me, are the ones who are closest to ourselves. Rather than starting out trying to make a baddie as unsympathetic as possible, therefore, the best way to get thinking about them (I reckon) is to take something from ourselves – something we’ve seen ourselves do, something we’re not proud of – and just… push it a little. And you know what? It doesn’t even have to take much. After all, as The Joker tells Batman in Alan Moore‘s /awesome/ THE KILLING JOKE: “There’s no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.”

OK, enough talking about baddies: instead, here’s a SONG! It’s by the fabulous JONATHAN COULTON. It’s about one of my favourite types of baddie, ZOMBIES. And it’s sung – here’s the crucial bit – from the zombie’s point of view. [“I’m not a monster, Tom. Well, technically I am…”] To hear it, click on this link, click on ‘Re: Your Brains’ – and enjoy!

That was an excellent question, Louise. Thank you! More next week.

I’ve just returned from an excellent session with the Chatterbooks reading group of CLR James Library, in Hackney’s Dalston Lane. What a great group – and so full of fantastic questions! I spoke for about forty-five minutes but the time flew past so quickly that I only had time for one reading! My thanks to Kerryn and everyone else I met at CLR James for what was a lovely warm welcome. I hope you got something out of listening to me – I certainly enjoyed speaking to you. 🙂

Speaking of questions, it’s high time I tackled at least a couple of last week’s ones from the Guestbooks. Here we go…

From the Black Tat site, Robert and Adam from Newcastle ask ‘How many books do u plan to write?‘ That’s an easy one so let’s begin with that. I’m just starting out on this ‘being published’ caper, and I have a whole slew of story ideas bubbling and fermenting in the depths of my slurry-like brain. I can’t tell you them here, as I haven’t written them yet! But they’re all for young people, they’re all (if I can pull them off) pretty flippin’ exciting (if I may say so!), and I’m looking forward to having the chance to write each and every one of them. -So, the short answer about how many books I plan to write is… ‘As many as I can get away with!‘

Again on a Black Tat tip, Sean from Cramlington asked a question that the WebSphinx and I had to xxx out, as it contained a potential SPOILER, revealing one of the secrets of the book (sorry, Sean! Hope you understand!) It’s a straight question, however, and deserves a straight answer, so if you, reading this, haven’t read Black Tat yet and don’t want to know one of the story’s key secrets, SCROLL DOWN NOW!

SPOILER WARNING! — SPOILER WARNING! — SPOILER WARNING! — SPOILER WARNING!

Sean asks, ‘Why did you make Esme the Scourge’s daughter?’ -The main reason, Sean, was to do with SUSPENSE. Esme is a very powerful character: she’s strong, she’s tough, she’s independent, she’s quick-witted and (oh yeah!) she’s got superpowers. In most situations she’s nigh-on unstoppable. So in order to bring the story to a climax that would put her in real danger, I (or, heh! /the Enthoven/-!) had to come up with something a bit more sophisticated and involved than just another face-off with a demon. Having Esme’s strength, her speed and her flying all come from the Scourge seemed to me to be the best possible answer. The source of her power is the very thing she’s trained her whole life to fight! However strong or fast she is, the Scourge will always be faster! If she is to beat her nemesis Esme will have to find another way, one she can only find in herself. And that, to me, seemed like a proper test for her – one that most people can relate to, I hope.

In practice, hints are dropped about Esme’s parentage throughout the book – almost from the first page in fact! And having one’s father be the villain has always been a classic story element (even before Star Wars!) The revelation, when it comes, is supposed to be one you’ve pretty much guessed already, so I don’t think anyone who reads this post accidentally is going to have the story ruined for them or anything. But I thought in answering this question that I’d better be a bit careful. Hope you’re ok with that, Sean!

SPOILER WARNING! — SPOILER WARNING! — SPOILER WARNING! — SPOILER WARNING!

…Okay, all clear! 😉

There’s quite a stack of questions in the TIM Guestbook right now. My apologies for not getting to those today, time’s a bit short, but I’ll try to tackle ’em later in the week – I promise! 😉

In other news, yesterday (4th Feb) was the birthday of one of my very favourite authors, namely the awesome RUSSELL HOBAN. Here’s a link to The Head of Orpheus, a tremendous fan-site dedicated to the man and his works. Such is the devotion he inspires in his readers that some of them celebrate his birthday by picking out quotations from his books and leaving them in special places for people to find and (hopefully) discover about him. This now happens not just in London, where many of his books are set, but all over the world! [You can read all about that here.] And if you haven’t read anything by Russell Hoban yet, then I can hardly recommend him highly enough. His books are full of wit, warmth, wisdom and weirdness – the kind of stories you keep by you and treasure always. -Mr H., in case you’re reading this, I raise a tentacle in your general direction. You’re an inspiration! A very Happy Birthday to you!

Yesterday I found myself in John Hampden Grammar School. And folks: either everybody there was very friendly, or I’m starting to get used to being suddenly confronted with, say, sixty-plus keen fresh-faced young humans expecting me to tell them what it’s like being an author. 😉

Actually I’m thinking it was BOTH. Two excellent sessions of about forty-five mins apiece passed without incident (or casualties!) And in each case I only had to get my new-grown human tongue around the Enthoven’s prose for just TWO readings from TIM, due to a constant flurry of pertinent and penetrating questions from the audience. There /was/, I admit, just one sticky moment, when a young gentleman in the front row of session 2 mentioned that he’d read something on the internet about the Enthoven having “a stalker.” I naturally told him I didn’t know what he was talking about – and I definitely didn’t threaten him with swift, moist, tentacular violence /at all/, no matter what anybody says. ;p

A MONSTROUS thank-you to Barbara; Mimi; ninja bookseller Becky (visible left, above) and, indeed, everyone else I met at JHGS, for a truly terrific visit.

To answer two follow-up questions from the Guestbook:

James: The straight answer is probably ‘no’. It’s one of the less pleasant facts about novel-writing that one can only really learn it by doing it – writing stories as best you can at the time, and if you fail, well, you hope next time you’re going to get better. Each one of the three books I wrote before Black Tat took up a minimum of a year of my life, and I put my heart into them. But I was learning my stuff (still am!), the books were ropey, and the agents and publishers I sent them to were right to reject them. Some of the concepts in the stories /might/ be worth taking on, I suppose – if only in the fond hope that one day I learn to be able to express them properly! But characters? Nah. Better to start from scratch.

Jack: I try to plan a story as much as I can before I start writing it. There are lots of reasons for this, not the least of which is the fact that if I know where the story’s ending is going to be, then I know it’s possible that I can finish it! That said, I find there’s always a point in the planning process at which one has to accept that certain answers are just not going to come, not until the writing’s underway and you’re in there working with what you’ve got. As with anything important, there’s always a time when you have to leap into the dark and hope for the best.

I seem to be typing this in a hotel in Newcastle. It’s great here. Hope I don’t have to eat anybody, but I’ll let you know. 😉