One event, two reports. This is a longer report by Kyra Jucovy and there is also a shorter summary by Meredith

* * *

The talk started with the sound system not working - DWJ said that these sorts of things never worked for her. But she managed to successfully get it to work. She explained that she was going to talk about the way that writing a book worked for her. She had spent much of the day talking with another author who wrote books in a completely different way, so she wanted to emphasize that this was only her personal method of writing.

In general, before I begin, I should say that the talk was wonderful, interesting, and very funny. Even Olivia (who has never read any DWJ) quite enjoyed it.

She always needs an idea to start. These ideas can come from all different places. She still has no idea where Archer's Goon came from - it sort of came out of nowhere. In fact, the whole writing of the book was strange because she had no idea what was going to happen from page to page.

Many of her books come from pictures. Thus, Fire and Hemlock actually comes from a real photograph (which she and her husband bought in Edinburgh! I was excited!) called Fire and Hemlock, which is exactly the one in the book. Evidently the name of the artist was on it, on a tag, but it fell off, so she doesn't know who did it, and it really could be Tom Lynn (although she didn't say that herself). Everyone who looked at the picture always thought that it was not merely of fire and hemlock, but that there were also four people in it - hence the four heroes. However, once she wrote the book, the people all disappeared. It wasn't just her who thought so - people would come to her house and say, "Oh, the people in that picture are gone now!" Strangely enough, however, they seem to be coming back now. I was sort of tempted to ask if she thought this meant she would have to write a sequel, but I figured that it probably didn't, so I didn't ask. Hexwood also started out with a picture, of woods of course, woods which seemed to stretch on into infinity.

Others of her books come from actual places that she's been to. Cart and Cwidder came from two places - a long road she was on, I don't remember where, that seemed to stretch on forever, which put the travelling into the book, and a trip to Normandy where she saw some wonderfully speckled cows, whom she knew would for some reason have to go into the book. Many of her books come from Bristol, in one way or another. She mentioned The Homeward Bounders in this context, because there are many castles in Bristol, including a four-cornered one, and a police station that looks like a castle. Despite the niceness of Bristol, it is not paradise, because it rains too much ;-). And she also pointed out that Deep Secret, which she described as having been meant to be an adult book but then turning out to be for everyone, had a lot of Bristol in it by name ;-). Most of the time, however, she doesn't call places by their real names.

At this point, she started talking about people by saying that you don't call people by their real names, either ;-). She explained about how she needs to put in a real person in order to keep the other people in the book real. At this point, she basically explained that she soulbonds (although naturally she didn't use the word). I was rather surprised, even though soulbonders do keep on saying that most authors soulbond. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it comes from a certain section of Internet anime fandom - soulbonders talk about having various characters moving around and living in their head. These characters can be either someone else's or made up by the people whose heads they live in. Most soulbonders are willing to admit that this is actually an intellectual exercise and not something real (although some of them don't admit this), but they still take it very seriously. Actually, it is a rather interesting intellectual exercise - I don't think I did it before I read about it, but I did start trying after reading about it (it's supposed to be a thing for writers), and I do like it, although I don't take it nearly as seriously as most of the people who talk about it do. Anyway, the way that DWJ described it was by saying that she tends to think that her characters who aren't based on real people seem very real to her. They also don't come with the book - they tend to wander around in her head waiting for the right book to come along. She said that if you cut her head open, multitudinous people would pour out. Sometimes she ends up putting them in the wrong book, they're so eager to come out, but she generally realizes her mistake when this happens and takes them out again. Unfortunately, she didn't give any examples. Nonetheless, despite their apparent reality, she does need to put the real people in so as to make sure that the made-up people behave like real people as well. She said that she was disturbed by the fact that the times when a real person seemed to pull the whole story around them were times when she was putting the person in for revenge, like in Angus Flint. However, she did point out that it made sense that it was a good idea to keep your villain real. Many of the things that start off books can be very little things that end up only playing a small role in the book itself. This was the case with Power of Three. For some reason, as soon as she said this, I thought that she meant the radio bit, and I was quite right ;-). Evidently, her children were having some sort of fight, and the radio got involved. One of them tossed it on the ground. Her husband ended up interjecting himself and pulling them apart. He was quite mad. He picked up the radio and said, "See, now you've broken the radio," and turned it on. And the radio said, in a squeaky little voice, "Stop, please. I can't take any more." This story cracked everyone up.

She said that very few of her books came from dreams - however, many times, when she's stuck in the middle of a book, a dream helps her see where to go next. However, her newest unpublished book (The Merlin Conspiracy) did in fact come from a dream, although she says that the dream is only a small part of it. The dream sounded sort of like a weird platform video game to me. It was of a lot of bubbles, which were actually universes, floating in the midst of nothingness. DWJ knew that she had to go to one of these universes, and so she started hopping from universe to universe, and just like in a platform game, they sort of moved away under her. However, what eventually happened was that she found herself totally lost, and unable to find her way back to the universe that she came from. She described the dream as completely beautiful, but rather frightening.

And she also pointed out that many of her books came from getting ideas from other people. As soon as she said this, someone in the audience interrupted and mentioned Howl's Moving Castle. This is true - as it explains in the book's dedication, she was giving a talk at a school, and a boy asked her to write a book about a moving castle. She took down his name so that she could thank him for the idea in the book, but then she lost it. She says that she has never found the boy's name. She also mentioned at this point that she had gotten a letter from someone, which she found very strange, which merely said, "Have you ever written or do you intend to write a book called The Castle That Wasn't?" Or something like that - I don't remember the title, but it was a book about a castle that doesn't exist. She said that she found the idea fascinating, and if she could ever think of why the castle that didn't exist was important enough to name a book after, she probably would write such a book. She also talked about The Crown of Dalemark. She had a deal of trouble writing it, and it took her 10 years. Evidently, the key idea came from the guy who was the model for Chair Person! He said, in a typically Chair Person-ish bossy way, "The thing you need to do with these books is to put the modern world in." And naturally, given the way he had said it, she discounted the idea totally. It took her another five years to realize that he actually had said something useful, once in his life.

She then went into a long description of her childhood, familiar to me because of my reading of her autobiography (which is available on the web). It was lovely to hear her tell it, though, and she added a lot of details and stories. She described how the reason why she writes such strange books is because of her strange childhood (and mentioned another children's book author, who got evacuated to the same house in the Lake District as she did). When World War II broke out, she got evacuated to the Lake District, which was strange. There, she met her first real authors - up to that point, she had thought that books were just sort of mechanically produced in the back room at Woolworth's. First she met Arthur Ransome, who had been deeply upset by her sister and the other author's sister playing out in the water where he had his boat. She met him because she was being punished. Since there was no way the children in the house could go to a school, they were being home educated there. Someone had told her to make a buttonhole, and she protested that she was five and too young to make a buttonhole. The person asked her if she wanted to be a lady when she grew up, and she said, "No!" emphatically. For this she was punished by being made to stand in the hallway, so she saw Ransome coming in to complain. Then there was Beatrix Potter. The children and mothers were going on a walk, and her sister and the other sister went to swing on a gate, which happened to be Beatrix Potter's gate, and Beatrix Potter chased them away and made them cry. These incidents made authors seem very real to DWJ, and let her think that "anyone could write a book."

The war made all of the adults seem to behave like rather crazy children. For example, a German pilot got shot down in the region, and was trying to make it to the coast. He happened to steal some food from the house. All of the mothers began to panic that they would be raped and murdered, by this single, hungry, pathetic 19-year-old pilot. DWJ thought that this was rather absurd.

After the war, things were equally crazy, because her parents moved to the small village where they ran a conference center and ignored her and her sisters. She explained that she rarely puts things directly from her childhood into her books, since no one would believe her, and gave the stories that she did put into Time of the Ghost (about her youngest sister Ursula wearing her hair in knots for six months and about how she and Ursula nearly hung her middle sister when the latter was trying to be a pantomime fairy) as examples.

Everyone in the entire village was crazy. There was the man on the church porch who thought he was a werewolf and howled at the full moon. There was the Neanderthal woman with nine children. There were two women, from the same family, who were witches. One was a good witch, and the other a bad witch. You went to the one you needed.

There was one woman who opened up cafes like a tic. She couldn't stop herself. All of the cafes had beautiful cakes that tasted horrible. Then there was the guy who made "human-sized working elephants." At first, he put them on wheels, but eventually he got the legs to work. He took them around to various fetes throughout the area and made his living this way.

The people who came to the conference center were equally strange. Once an amateur opera society came in. All of the men were grotesquely thin and the women were equally grotesquely fat. DWJ was not supposed to come to the performance, but it ended up getting rained out and had to move to a covered area. She managed to sneak in and sit at the back, where she could feel the rain on her back. When the curtain rose, the village was so horrified that they all jerked back. She got pushed off her bench.

Then there was the performance of A Midsummer's Night Dream which featured an Oberon who refused to learn his lines. Instead, he carried a mirror throughout the performance with his lines written on it. One of the people working with this production always wanted everything to go his own way, but everyone else always wanted a say. When he started losing an argument, he faked a heart attack. It was very clear that he had faked it - as soon as they got him to a bed and left, he got up and went to the pub. However, as soon as he got into an argument again the next time, he faked a heart attack again. Clearly, he never learned.

The conference center house had various things around it. One was a large yard. This yard had an invisible clothesline stretched through it, at about neck level, which people would invariably walk into. It also had a chicken hut, which was strange, because no one ever kept chickens. The center also had a large, pleasant, but extremely boring garden.

But it also had the second, secret garden. This garden was kept mysteriously locked, and when DWJ wanted to go to it, she would have to beg her father for the key, for he kept it hidden. This garden was beautiful and perfect, full of fruits which never were eaten. It also had a gardener. The gardener loved to tell DWJ about how he had seen an angel. He had once gone to both church and chapel, one in the morning and one at knight. But one day, in the middle of the road, he saw an angel, who told him that he should always go to chapel and never join a trades union. He told DWJ this story over and over again.

The beautiful garden also had bees. These bees were famous for being truly evil and vicious. Many times, when DWJ had managed to get the key from her father and was going to the garden, she would enter it to find the mystic gardener running away in fear from the bees. However, oddly enough, the bees never stung anyone in the family, and DWJ could go right up to them without fear. Both Lizzie and I independently thought that the garden was the one from Charmed Life and the bees are the ones from Power of Three.

DWJ's goal in writing books is always to get all of this into one book. She wants to put in the craziness of the outside world in wartime, the bizarre nature of her village, the yard (which represents the weird things that happen in the everyday), the first garden (the funny things that happen in the everyday), and the secret garden (the mystical). However, she feels that she has never yet managed to quite do this in one book. However, those ideas which work for her are the ones that seem to touch on all of it.

Once she has the idea, which is frequently something from the middle of the book, she sits and writes it - in a comfortable chair - never at a computer. This can take varying amounts of time. Charmed Life was absolutely the quickest. The idea that sparked it was the scene where Cat goes to see Gwendolyn, she turns out to be Janet, and she asks who he is, and he says, "I'm Cat," and she says, "No, you're not, you're a boy." The book seemed to spread out very quickly in both directions from this scene. However, she gets totally in a daze when she writes a book. Her sons used to come home from school and tell her about their day and challenge her, because they could see she wasn't paying any attention. She got very skilled at repeating back things without actually listening. Her sons knew she was doing it, of course, but there was nothing they could do about it. However, her absent-mindedness could be a real problem. As she was writing Charmed Life, she had to make dinner, and she calmly put the manuscript on top of the refrigerator and started to make dinner. Then, after she had turned on the oven, suddenly she realized she had done something wrong. She opened up the oven and saw her husband's boots in there, where she had calmly put them to be cooked.

The end is frequently the most difficult and most enjoyable part. She says that frequently, at night, she'll get up to the climax of the book, the point about 2/3rds in where everything from then on is totally inevitable, but is still really fun and interesting. Then she won't go to sleep and will just stay up all night finishing up the draft. Of course, even after she finishes the draft, she has to then make a second draft. This she does at her computer. Her computer is called the Bannus, which I find deeply satisfying. Frequently it's the end that needs to be cleaned up the most. The end of The Merlin Conspiracy was particularly hard to do and complex.

The next stage is sending to the publisher. It is at this time that the books start coming true on her (she used the same phrase of "you wouldn't know to ask" that she used in Deborah's letter on the Internet!). Sometimes this can be extremely painful. Directly after turning in Howl's Moving Castle, she got into a car accident and had to use a walking stick like Sophie's. And after writing The Lives of Christopher Chant, she twice found that she was walking around with a broken neck and hadnāt even noticed. However, sometimes it's less bad.

She told a story about a woman who writes her every once in a while. This woman has nine children, to whom she and her husband read DWJ novels to at bedtime, so she always writes to explain how each new batch is getting on with them. The husband is a businessman who has to do a lot of travelling. At one point, the woman wrote in one of her letters, he was in a lounge in an airport, where they have all sorts of nice things for the business passengers, but they aren't allowed to take any of the things out. There was a bottle of some sort of alcohol - I forget what - on a table, and the husband noticed a large man in a neat business-suit sort of sneaking out of the lounge with the bottle. Under his breath, the husband muttered to himself, "I belong to Chrestomanci Castle." To his shock, the large man turned around, said, "Yes, but under this suit I'm wearing an elaborately brocaded dressing-gown," and walked out with the bottle. This story made everyone laugh hysterically. I fear it may have almost killed me, but fortunately I survived.

This was basically the end of the talk, and at this point there were questions. God knows I can't remember all of the questions, and some of them were things that she's already answered on the website and so on, so I'll merely say what I remember.

Naturally, I remember my own question. I asked about her use of 1st-person narrative, and how she had gotten the idea of using it the way she did. She said that it came from 18th-century epistolary fiction, where the heroine was always writing secret letters that then were discovered by the villains and actually became part of the plot (just like "The True State of Affairs" and Aunt Maria!). I shall have to read these at some point. She also repeated the old saw about the problem with 1st-person narrative being the lack of suspense, because you know the main character will survive (although personally I've never seen the question of the protagonist's survival as being the main point of suspense in fiction anyway. . . .). And she also said that the other problem was that it could get sickeningly introspective, which I thought was an interesting perspective ;-).

Let's see. She doesn't know where Chrestomanci's title or Throgmorten's name come from. Rather like me, actually, she tends to make up stories without knowing the characters' names, but having a sort of idea, and then having to pull that idea through. She does know the cat who became Throgmorten, though - he lived in Bristol, outside a pub. He would scratch everyone who came by and run through the street back and forth in order to stop traffic. She also said that she wasn't sure where the idea of getting to the Place Beyond in dreams came from - she knew Christopher had to do it somehow, but she wasn't sure how and then eventually decided it would happen in dreams. The Place Beyond is a real place however, which strikes me as worrisome ;-).

She described The Merlin Conspiracy a little more. There are two protagonists with 1st-person narratives, one of whom is a boy. The boy goes to a city in a canyon, with shopping centers built on top of each other throughout the canyon. She also was going to complain about publishers, when someone asked her to talk about the book, but then her publisher (or someone) interrupted her saying that the book wasn't going to be published until 2004. We all, including DWJ, were shocked and groaned and thought this was ridiculous.

One of DWJ's sons swears that the Goon was based on another one of her sons, but DWJ herself thinks that he was an entirely made-up character ;-). Although she was coy when a little kid asked her about her favorite of her own characters, she did mention the Goon as a possibility. This confirms my long-standing suspicion that DWJ likes Erskine more than I do. Hmmph. She also said that she was quite happy with the TV adaptation, except she sees Robert Westall's point when he refused to watch it because it was too childish. The BBC gave her family the tapes, which is how come it's one of her granddaughter's favorite tapes. Her granddaughter was very surprised that she had written it and that her grandmother "knows things like that." If we want the tapes, _we_ should petition the BBC about releasing them, because they won't listen to her. However, she's always felt that if one of her books should be filmed, it should be Charmed Life. She has no idea why no one's ever tried.

She doesn't know what's going on with the Howl's Moving Castle film and hasn't heard anything about it in months. She thinks that something may have gone wrong, just as it always does when someone tries to film her books. She thinks that the Black Maria adaptation would be good, if someone does it, but it won't necessarily come through. . . .

Someone did in fact give her an idea (a fairly young girl). She suggested a story featuring a set of houses, covered in mist. DWJ actually liked the idea - she said that she had a concept of a large, angry, somewhat smelly woman who was also a bard running somewhere looking for someone, and that maybe this was where she was running. The use of the word bard made me think that maybe this would be a Derkholm idea.

She talked a bit about Sirius. She had a dog who was the model for Sirius, since he was so intelligent, but the model for Sirius' looks was a clearly well-taken-care-of dog who seemed to want to come to live with her. It took her all day to convince him that he already had a home ;-).

She has many ideas for books that don't work out. She keeps all the half-finished manuscripts in her drawers in case she can ever take them up again, but most of the time, she finds that she has no idea what she was thinking of when she looks at them. The one with Cat as an adult is one of those. Cat is very hard to do as an adult, since he's such a childish boy with a lot of growing up to do, thanks to his dependence on Gwendolyn.

Cambridge questions: Dr. Pawson did not have a real model, but according to the questioner, many Cambridge dons do in fact resemble him. Also, DWJ was not thinking of the Cambridge finals when she named a demon in Dark Lord of Derkholm Tripos, but evidently this is the name of the Cambridge finals, which had disturbed the girl who asked the question when she was procrastinating for studying by reading the book ;-).

When someone asked her if she read children's books and which ones she recommended, she said that she tended to do so on and off, and now was a more off time. The only name she mentioned was Robin McKinley, which only makes me _more_ certain that there's something deeply wrong with me for not particularly liking her. . . . That seems to be what I remember offhand, I'm afraid. Anyway, after that was the signing - I chatted on the line with a little girl named Clare who had evidently only just discovered DWJ. I told her which books were in the Chrestomanci series, and she told me about a talk by Philip Pullman that she had gone to, which was evidently nice, only he got rather mad and peremptory when people asked him questions about what he was thinking of when putting certain things in his books ;-). I can understand that, but according to Clare, he said, "That's none of your business!", which seems like an odd thing to say. DWJ was very nice to me and signed all my books in the right way. I had to explain how to spell Kyla's name and my name, and she was unsurprisingly bemused at the similarity of our names, so I mentioned that we knew a Kira, too. She managed to spell our names correctly even so. When I said that my brother's name was Ethan, she said, "Oh, I know how to spell that, at least!" She also commented on the well-worn nature of my books. I told her she was lucky I hadn't brought my Chrestomanci ones (which are totally falling apart), and she said she understood how a copy of a book could become a sentimental object, which was kind of her ;-). She also signed Lizzie's books - Lizzie gave her a present, too (a little box of goodies), which she seemed to appreciate. She said she had just given a bonsai kit (one of the goodies) away as a present herself and had wanted one. She also liked the glowing pen that was there and called it a wand. At this point she found that Lizzie and I had come down all the way from Scotland and was impressed - she was also impressed that I was going back during the night. And that's it - but I really enjoyed it, it was great, and I'm very glad I went!

* * *