INTERVIEW Part 2 (go to Part 1) 

This is the second part of an audience (sounds a bit grand) with Diana Wynne Jones. She was interviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller, at a London British Science Fiction Association meeting (in a pub, of course) June 1997.

Maureen: Apart from your father and the headmistress, what other people have you written into your books?

DWJ:

I nearly always put someone who’s real in a book. It serves to keep the other people in line. If you know how this person is going to behave, all the other people around them are going to behave right. Apart from that, let’s see. Black Maria was a real person. Al in Drowned Ammet, Chairperson ...

I do have a set of books which were written for pure revenge, such as Chairperson and Who Got Rid of Angus Flint? Angus Flint was a real person. He really did do yoga and it really is impossible to be angry with somebody who’s upside down with their feet dangling in your face. He did all those things in the book: like picking my kids up by their hair. The only thing that didn’t happen was that the furniture didn’t turn him out — we just had to wait for him to go. He’s such an aggressive person that when somebody tried to burgle his house, he broke their jaw and got sued and had to leave his job. I don’t know what happened to him since, but Nemesis did catch up with him, and I’m glad, I must say.

Chairperson is certainly real. I fled Chairperson from various places in America. I was in Boston, put up in a dorm which was full of little librarian ladies, and they were in a flummox when I got back there, because this man had been ringing my room every minute. He was just ringing off and re-dialling. They implored me to do something. "Well, take the phone off the hook," I said. "Oh we can’t do that," they said. "Please yourselves," I said. "I’m going to have a bath." So I was having the bath, and every minute and a half they would call me, saying, "He’s ringing again, he’s ringing again, we’ve answered the phone and all he’ll say is he wants you." And I’d say, "Tell him ‘bad luck.’ You can just take the phone off the hook." They never did, and he only gave up about half past two in the morning. I then left for New York to do a signing in a place called Books of Wonder. Having moved from Boston I was feeling totally relaxed and I went into the signing, and there was the man in the middle of the crowd. I could not believe it. I said, "Why are you here?" and he said, "Oh I had to come ..." If you do meet this man, run the other way!

(Maureen: You said that most of your books have got a real person in them. Do the people you put in your books realise it, and how do they take it?)

No, it’s odd, people do not recognise themselves. There’s a Michael Innes story about this in which everyone spends the whole book worrying about so and so noticing that she was actually the demon wife in the great novel, and she doesn’t. They recognise all the other people, but they never recognise themselves. Thank goodness, I must say. You don’t put the same name to them. You absolutely give them another name and then you sit back in fear and trepidation, and think they’re surely going to recognise themselves.

(Maureen: Do the people you put in, especially the villains, ‘deign’ to read your books?)

If it’s my mother, yes. She’s in all of them, actually, and she’s always a villain. And so far, she’s not managed to recognise herself at all. She says sadly, "Oh, there’s always an evil older woman in these." I intend her to know. I hope she does.

(Maureen: Having written to entertain your sisters, how did you break into print? Your first novel was published as an adult novel — the one no-one can get hold of [Changeover].)

I broke into print with enormous difficulty! Yes, they printed remarkably few of Changeover and then stopped doing it rather quickly. I had fun doing that one because we were going through one of those bad patches where everything was going wrong and it was written to keep me sane. I never really thought of it as a book, it was the thing I was writing to keep me sane, bearing absolutely no relationship to what was going on at the time. Changeover is not a fantasy really, and what I really wanted to do was write fantasy. As I said, in those days the only channel for writing fantasy was for kids. I was very interested in writing for kids, but it took me ten years of trial and failure to get a book that publishers were willing to accept. I’d sent various publishers — including the one at Macmillan who finally did publish a book by me — various things and it turned out afterwards that she did remember them very vividly.

There’s one that has only recently been published called Everard’s Ride that she scratched her head about and said, "I don't know why we didn’t publish that." So I said, why not try again, and she said, "No, we never change our mind!" So that was that. And this seemed to be the way people worked — do work, probably. If you’re not known, it’s a Catch 22 situation. They don’t publish you unless they know who you are, and what you’re doing and if you’re nobody and doing something a bit weird (which I certainly was) you don’t get published.

Having had this experience with my husband falling asleep reading books to my children, I quite deliberately set out to break a lot of the rules and taboos which were around at that point, particularly the ones about adults. Because in children’s books in that era, adults were handled with enormous respect. Your father and mother were sacred. Villains who were also adults, even if all they’d done was steal the spoons, had to be killed. Besides these rules there were all sorts of other infinitely ridiculous ones. The first book I wrote that actually set out to break all the rules was Eight Days of Luke. It got published a bit later on, which confused things, but at first it was turned down by various publishers on the grounds that kids shouldn’t strike matches.

(Maureen: Did they actually spot the mythological symbolism?)

Oh, that didn’t worry them at all. Kids shouldn’t strike matches! (Maureen: Not even if they’re gods disguised as small people?) Not even then. So it did take an awful time and an awful lot of labour. I ended up working on this person who’d almost taken Everard’s Ride. Eventually, but not until she’d had me up into her office and given me a long, long lecture on what was the ideal children’s book, of which I remember not one word now, because none of it was in any way relevant, did she condescend to take a book of mine.

(Maureen: If they turned down a book because children shouldn’t strike matches, what did they think of The Ogre Downstairs?)

My agent called it a black comedy for children, which indeed it is. It seems to me to be totally like kids, like I was myself and like my kids were, and like any children I’ve ever known are, but she wasn’t sure. She thought it was a bit extreme, because they’d been worried about Eight Days of Luke, which they’d published the year before, and it had got mixed up with all the stuff about The Exorcist! They were a bit worried about The Ogre Downstairs causing a bit of a furore, but actually nobody noticed. So, it got sent to somebody else, at least a bit of it got sent, and I had to send a synopsis. A synopsis of The Ogre Downstairs, as you can imagine, reads totally bizarrely: "And then Gwenny poisons a cake and renders it invisible and so forth." They sent it wondering back to me and said we don’t know what this is (we can’t cope, more or less). So there was a little bit of trouble with that one. But after that, none.

(Maureen: Did you have the impression that children’s publishers in those days didn’t really understand what kids themselves were actually like?)

It was very odd because in fact the one at Macmillan who did eventually publish my books had four kids, but I got a feeling she was living remote from them and didn’t really know what they were like. It was very strange. None of the others had kids and no reviewers of children’s books had anything to do with children. I remember I was giving a long talk on the rooftop of Biba (which dates it a bit, doesn’t it?) and this lady who’d been given some kind of award for services to kids books went on and on and on until my feet ached as there was nowhere to sit down, saying she did know about kids, she had met one once. She was therefore totally qualified to review kids books.

(Maureen: Do you have a very optimistic world view, because your books do have a happy ending one way or another?)

Well, not altogether, but I don’t think that books actually reflect life. I think books are a blueprint for what life should be and what your mind should do when you’re working towards living, and it seems to me that a happy ending is essential to aim for. If you’re going to set out into life or any venture or start from now to go on and not think you can succeed, you might as well stop. It is very, very important, particularly, I think, with younger people, but not only them, that you should never really think that life is a bitch. I mean everybody knows that life can be a bitch, but books, it seems to me, particularly fantasy books, are not about what life is, but what it should be, could be, can be and the way you look towards what you might be doing next. It seems to me that the function of books like that is to lift you from the despair that your actual experience might well cause you.

(Maureen: It seems to me that your early books there is a strong theme of redemption. Sirius gets his second go on earth and redeems himself, so he gets to go back and be a star. Luke gets a second chance.)

Yes. I don’t see why you shouldn’t have a second chance, provided you earn it. I think that is quite important. As soon as you think you have lost in every way, there’s no reason for carrying on, really, or if you do carry on you carry on destructively, which is a terribly bad thing.

(Maureen: Minor Arcana has been described as a kids' book for adults. I can’t tell the difference.)

No, neither can I. I never could tell what meant an adult book and what meant a kids book. To some extent it’s the protagonist. They might be 14 or they might be 44, but otherwise, what’s the difference? I do not know. I don’t myself think that the difference resides in torrid sex scenes, which I find a total bore and hold up the action rather, like in old Hollywood films, where someone had to tap dance and sing, and I’d go, "Oh, come on, stop it. We want to know what happens next." Otherwise, I don’t know the difference.

(Maureen: Some of the stories in Minor Arcana were published originally as children’s stories. They seem more complex and more explicit in some ways than the ones first published elsewhere.)

That’s because most adult editors believe that adults have given up using their minds when they read, so they like the simpler stories. It seems to work that way. It is true that with kids things you can do much more complex things because people are prepared to allow you to.

There was one story in Minor Arcana that never got published anywhere else at all. This was the very early years, and this is one of the reasons why I have this don’t give up, don’t despair blueprint for life, because I did send it to a very large literary agent who didn’t even bother to read it, and just passed it back to me saying, "I don’t think we’re interested in this fantasy sort of stuff." I asked if she had read it. "Oh, no!" It was very depressing. That was the long story at the end called The True State of Affairs, and that was a very early one. That is not actually a very complex story, its just a situation explored and that I thought it was quite surprising in that no-one bothered with it.

But you know, the nice thing about writing for children is that kids are prepared to use their minds. So you can throw all the ideas in and get it really complicated and tangled, and cats-cradled, and they don’t mind. They don’t worry about the plot getting complicated, because they can follow Doctor Who, and anyone who can follow Doctor Who can follow anything!

(Maureen: What made you think of writing The Tough Guide?)

I was working with Chris Bell on helping with the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, which meant at times chorusing the same things, like "Nunneries are for sacking!" It was really quite ridiculous, and by the time we had been through gladiators and galley slaves — galley slaves are what you do after you’re enslaved by pirates, and gladiators are the other thing males do after they’ve been enslaved — I said I should write the guidebook to these things, because they’re all the same. Chris said, "Shut up, you’ve got to get on with the Encyclopedia," but I was up and running. I must admit I shamelessly took things that seemed relevant from the Encyclopedia.

(Maureen: Can you name any of the writers who inspired you to write The Tough Guide to Fantasyland?)

The trouble is so many of them are so nameless ... The thing is I read so many because at one point, I was published by Pocket Books, and I got onto the wrong bit of their computer, and I got sent bundles of really bad fantasy every month, and I did not know why. I wasn’t about to send them back, because I couldn’t afford to at that stage, so I simply read the things, then gave them to Oxfam. I read hundreds of really awful things. Then every so often, Pocket Books used to send me their good one — good one! There was an epic one in five volumes which was written in priestly sort of language, in sort of pseudo-biblical language. This one had every sort of cliché that you care to name, and several leftover that I didn’t manage to cram into The Tough Guide. I don’t remember what that one was. It’s vanished without a trace. It sank like a stone, I’m glad to say. Anyway, I was required to give favourable comments and say good things so they could put in on the back, and this was extremely difficult and so I didn’t. And the next thing they sent me they said I had to comment on this. So I thought, here goes, and I said what I really thought.

It was terrible. It wasn’t as bad as the one which sank without a trace, but that was only because the author hadn’t used biblical language. She’d done everything else … I said all these things and then I went to a fantasy convention where unfortunately, [the author] was there. Obviously she’d been shown what I’d said. When we met she turned on her heel and spoke to someone else and thereafter we were continually having to appear on panels together and she behaved as if I wasn’t there, which said volumes really. It was very unfortunate. She embroidered at me. Because they embroider, these people. I went to a convention where they were all embroidering. It was run in honour of Marion Zimmer Bradley, and those who didn’t embroider strutted up to me and said: "Hi, I torture rats for a living." I wondered what I was supposed to say back.

(Maureen: Didn’t someone denounce you as a witch at one of these?)

Oh, that was the librarians in Northampton. That was very early on, I think. It was the second time I’d ever given a talk, just after Charmed Life had been published, and it was in this very normal surroundings, a library after hours, and they’d all gathered from Leicester and places. It was terribly nice and terribly sweet, and I was sitting there trying to tell them things, and suddenly this mad cross-eyed lady sprung up from the audience and said "Evil! Evil! Evil!" And I thought, "Oh god, this is NOT happening," the way you do, "I’m imagining this!" No, she was only too real, and I started to try to deal with her: "You ought to have a cup of tea. Sit down, it’ll be alright."

Like the madman I met on a train once. I fell into conversation with him and I said I was actually on my way to stay in a nunnery, and he said: "Oh god, this is like my fantasy!" and then he fell face forward in the train, turned purple and started to breath badly. I was about to do for her what I’d done with him: "Take a nice deep breath...in...out..." But everyone got terribly embarrassed about this and they rushed at her, and they rushed at me, and they wouldn’t allow us to communicate and they kept saying nice things, and eventually she was hurried out, and no doubt given a cup of tea. They were nice people, very nice people, and they didn’t want to talk about it afterwards: "Let us pretend it hasn’t happened." Whereas I wanted to talk about it, because you want to get something like that out of your system, but no, no, they wouldn’t let me.

(Maureen: Do you have a standard procedure for writing a book?)

No, I wish I did. It would make it so much simpler. What I have is five years troubled agony in which bits, the seed ideas, and other bits are fighting each other. I think, no, no, those bits don’t belong together, they belong in another book, which is usually what happens, and then usually you suddenly get seized with a bit at the most inconvenient time possible.

The time I started writing Dogsbody, my mother in law had just arrived for a visit. My mother in law was Black Maria, and that says it all. She was not pleased, because I had to go upstairs and try to write chapter 1. In fact it was one of those — which I’ve discovered is possible if the thing is powerful enough — where you can go off too early, and I had to wait until more ideas had come to the boil. To my great relief that took only about nine months, but it can take a lot longer. Usually what happens is they just signal that they have to be written NOW. Drop everything and do it NOW. This is usually extremely inconvenient, though it has never been as inconvenient as Dogsbody so far. It isn’t so much procedure as trying very hard to keep pace with it, as it happens very, very quickly. At that stage, what I’ve got is what is going to happen at the end and obviously at the beginning, and all the main people, which is very important, and something very clear and very vivid from the middle bit. It’s very small, it’s like a window you can’t see out of properly, and you can’t see out sideways, and you need to know with an enormous, almost a hurtful need, what it is that’s happening in that scene, and why it relates to how you started. As soon as it gets going, and when it gets going, you know its going to be a proper book because it has its own personality and its own way and it’s very firm about that. You have to be very careful to give it its own way, because you can wrench yourself off course by trying to be opinionated about it! It just sort of hurries through, basically, and when I’m doing the first draft of the book, I’m not easy to know, because I forget things.

When I was writing Fire and Hemlock, I was so involved in it and so afraid of missing some small thing, because it is a book of nuances, that I actually got up at six over and over again in the morning and started straight in to write without even eating or drinking. And that is unusual.I forget everything else too. When my children were at home they used to get terribly resentful which was reasonable, because I was sort of not with them. I was hung on another world and they used to test me on what they’d just said. I got very good at playing it back without having really noticed, which was unfair. This usually goes very fast and only takes six weeks, and then there’s a terribly painful bit when you have to read it through and think my god, this bit is such crap, and read it as though you were somebody else who had never seen it before, which is an awfully difficult thing to train yourself to do, and almost impossible. But I try, and realise what won’t do, and how things need adjusting and how you haven’t quite at the beginning said enough, so that something that happens in chapter 10 or chapter 20 which it pivots on, is credible. Then I have a long, long, slow difficult time doing the second draft. I always hope that the second draft is going to be the last, so I tell myself, "Right, this is not only the second draft, but the last draft. This is all I’m going to do, so this is IT."

This is an awfully good way to make yourself get it right where you can, and this can take an awful long time. It depends how much has gone wrong while you were writing it, basically. But this bit goes more like office hours, which is good because you can come out of it and be sane sometimes, as in the case of Fire and Hemlock, when I actually discovered that every time I came out of it pieces of it came true at me, in a minor way.

I went to a lecture because I thought I couldn’t stay with the book the whole time, and I discovered that ‘Mr Leroy’ was giving the lecture. It was quite creepy. There was my villain up on the platform exactly as I’d imagined him with enormous bags under his eyes and everything, giving a lecture about how tragedy is not tragic. I really did gulp at that. At that stage you can live life, and that is the stage I am at at the moment with my latest. I am actually quite sane, and sort of struggling on and hoping that it will end soon. And then, of course, you feel totally lost when its finished.

(Maureen: So you don’t concentrate on one thing at a time?)

Well, I do, but they’re not at the same stage. At the moment, for instance, I’ve got a book that I’ve just done the proofs of. That was a bit of a wrench while I’m on the second draft of another one, but at the same time there are at least two, probably three others which are germinating. They’re all at different levels, and they all have totally different flavours. There’s no way you can confuse them exactly, but you have to keep remembering them so that they keep working at themselves. I mean there’s one which I want to do next, and I think it’s for adults, but I’m not sure, and I’ve actually got — unusually — I don’t do this very often, I’ve got passages of it already written. Thankfully they’re too good to lose. Nobody’s thought of the things that are in them. They’re absolutely fantastic to my mind, but I don’t know where they’re going. Its maddening. I’ve got these vivid bits not only written down but also in my mind, and I do not know where the actual whole is taking me. It’s really frustrating. And that was at the same time as writing the second draft of another, which is equally vivid and up at the forefront, and behind that there’s another one, and that one is nebulous, so that I can’t even describe it to you yet, though I know enough about it to describe it to myself. It’s a terribly funny business, you’re living on about four levels even before you start writing.

(Maureen: Do you like your books? Do you have a favourite?)

It’s sort of how you love children. You love them for their obvious faults. You like them for different things. There’s a specific and different excitement which you get with each one. Some of them you’re on the edge of your seat with. I was like that with The Spellcoats: I just couldn’t get it down fast enough it was so exciting. And others, like say, Fire and Hemlock, I love because it somehow became nearer all the time to the conception I had of it.

(Maureen: All your books have a different flavour to them.)

Yes, each one is like a different flavoured food, and if you don’t have that at the start, you might as well give up. You wouldn’t believe the number of two pages I’ve got, all of one flavour. I have a whole drawer full of vanilla!