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Interview

Diana Wynne Jones

talks to Melanie Ashby

From Issue 26 ◊ Jul/Aug/Sep 2005

'And do you know who the city’s most famous author is?’ the taxi driver asks, bursting with local pride. ‘I’ll give you a clue. She’s the richest in Britain.’ He reminds me that the nearby Avon village of Chipping Sodbury brought forth the stellar J K Rowling. And I tell him I’m due to interview her rival.

Diana Wynne Jones, stubbing out her Superking, cheerfully answers the ‘J K’ question her publicist advised was best avoided with a tiny puff of a sigh. She is peeved that the Harry Potter novels revisit, sometimes quite closely, the boarding-school format she’d done some years back (Witch Week). But, on the bright side, the popularity of the Potter books has swung the field around from the ‘didactic and serious’. ‘It’s made a whole lot of people aware that this stuff is fun, interesting to read and that you can get a lot out of it.’

Wynne Jones may not have inspired such rapid popularity and hit the jackpot like Rowling, but her intelligent fantasy novels, first published in the early Seventies – have been steadily successful, even when the genre went through the doldrums in the Eighties. They are critically acclaimed (A S Byatt favoured Wynne Jones while taking a swipe at Rowling on publication of the fifth Harry Potter), and will shortly become the subject of a new academic tome by fantasy expert Farah Mendlesohn. Her books are also hugely loved by fans across the world, including anime director Hayao Miyazaki, whose Spirited Away became the international hit of 2003. His film of her novel Howl’s Moving Castle was released in Japan earlier this year, where it is making box office records, and will be out on general release here in the autumn. Watch out JK.

This is all by the by, as Wynne Jones doesn’t see herself as a rival to Rowling, who for her is more ‘easy read’. And here, at her house in Bristol’s – dare I say ‘magical’ – Clifton quarter, the politics of the publishing world become distant and inconsequential. Looking out onto a communal garden musky with spring flowers, her cat Dorabella tearing at the rug, her husband John hanging around agreeably waiting for lunch, it’s all pretty idyllic. A perfect setting in which to let her most fertile of imaginations loose on another novel.

Half-way through writing the current one, another novel (possibly an adult one this time, she thinks) has been nudging into consciousness, ‘like when you’re growing your adult teeth behind milk teeth, there’s not enough of it yet, just the prickly tip, but it’s pushing up from behind.'

Right now, she’s nearing the end, the hardest part, of the first draft of a book that has been on the back burner for two decades. It’s another in her Chrestomanci series of novels which inhabit a ‘multiverse’ of related worlds, all re-jiggings of the one we know; the main character, a boy called Cat, has been seeking a story since she left him in Charmed Life (1978). ‘He’s one of those funny children who damp themselves down because of a dominant elder sibling. I thought, well, when his sister is removed he’s going to blossom in some way – but I didn’t know how until about 18 months ago.’ Half-way through writing the current one, another novel (possibly an adult one this time, she thinks) has been nudging into consciousness, ‘like when you’re growing your adult teeth behind milk teeth, there’s not enough of it yet, just the prickly tip, but it’s pushing up from behind.’

With over 40 novels to her name, writer’s block is an alien concept for Wynne Jones – she thinks authors only get stuck when they tire of their material. Retirement is off the agenda and her main worry is that there won’t be the time to write the galaxy of novels swirling in her unconscious. However, there’s often a caesura in the incessant writing routine when she has finished a novel, and this ‘low period’ distresses her. In the ‘awful intervals between books’, she turns to her husband to reassure her that this is but a fallow time when she is accumulating the fierce mental energy required for the next. And he is always right.

This pattern holds fast except for an anomalous break when writing Conrad’s Fate, her most recent novel, which she clean forgot about half-way through. She picked up the thread of the story again later when she chanced upon the longhand manuscript under a pile of her husband’s books, remembering suddenly how the abandoned novel had been triggered, a year back, by a dream. The extraordinary stoppage had been caused by the discovery of an ‘enormous’ tumour which saw her whipped into hospital, the ‘physical chasm’ causing her, quite understandably, to forget the book.

Like her Chrestomanci enchanter hero Christopher Chant, who has nine lives, Diana Wynne Jones has the appearance of one who has shaved off a number of hers. In and out of hospital throughout the Nineties, she’s survived the latest threat to her health, and is here with her rich smoker’s laugh to ‘touch wood’ again. Magic is Christopher’s saviour. Her family (three sons, her husband and two sisters), and her writing are hers.

While writing may not help to exorcise the unhappiness of her formative years (‘that you have to live with’), caused by the neglect and often calculated callousness of her eccentric parents, it has helped her not to feel so ‘terribly, terribly isolated’. The notion that she would be a writer came tapping like a guardian angel on her shoulder at the age of eight – an anchor of certainty in her life, despite severe dyslexia. The idea made her parents roar with laughter. And the girl her mother labelled ‘ugly, semi-delinquent, but bright’, became all the more determined.

But self-belief and enormous drive were not sufficient to get her books published in the first instance, and it took ten years of experimentation and writing what she calls ‘five finger exercises’ before getting her first contract with Wilkins’ Tooth (1973). ‘It was painful,’ she recalls. ‘I sent various things to publishers and they didn’t want to know – and I thought why – WHY don’t they want to know? I worked out I wasn’t doing it properly.’ Invaluable lessons in storytelling came from reading Middle English classics, Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain poet, which she discussed endlessly with her husband, an English professor at Bristol. And the honing – ‘how to make your point vividly and trenchantly without going on about it’ – took place in the gaps that emerged when her three children went to school.

‘John and my children taught me more about ordinary human nature than I had learned up to then. I still had no idea what was normal, you see. After that I found the experiences of my childhood easier to assimilate and could start trying to write.’

Family life was fundamental to developing her creative process; as she writes in a biographical essay: ‘John and my children taught me more about ordinary human nature than I had learned up to then. I still had no idea what was normal, you see. After that I found the experiences of my childhood easier to assimilate and could start trying to write.’ Fostered in writing and life by her family, Wynne Jones also discovered here the potential in her writing for children. When she got going in the 1960s it occurred to her that there ‘was an absolute hole in the business – there were no books with real people in, with humour in, that told children what they need to know without preaching at them’. With perseverance, and with help from her young sons as astute critics, this was a hole she would plug.

Wynne Jones is a fearless and marvellously inventive writer. Her books are rarely predictable and they take her readers hand in hand with the novels’ heroes and heroines along dark paths, before – usually – finding the light (‘I hate not having a happy ending’). Her own path along a genre that risks being repetitive and dull has meant steering between a Scylla of sentimentality (which she despises) and a Charybdis of political correctness.

PC, she complains, is an ongoing niggle in the writing of books for children. Every five years or so the goalposts move and she finds a new thing that should not, or sometimes should be mentioned. But a book won’t bend to pressure, she declares. ‘If you try and twist round to something… more politically correct, you lose it completely. What I do is brinkmanship – I go as near as possible then squeeze around,’ she laughs. Her first publishable book, for which she found an agent, was turned down by a ‘dragon lady’ at the Oxford University Press because the story involved the striking of a match to summon the God Loki. To the editor’s mind, this would encourage pyromania. Wynne Jones took better advantage of PC to ensure her next novel would pass muster with the publishers; Wilkins’ Tooth, whose protagonist is black, was a daring but exciting prospect for the 1970s.

The author still has skirmishes with political correctness, and wonders if the novel she is currently writing, concerning a child having to cope with a parent who has lost their mind, will meet trouble. But she does not court controversy for the sake of it (‘that’s not good for literature’); if Wynne Jones has a tactic it is to keep fantasy on its toes by experimenting. For her, the rigid framework of genre is a ‘great thing to play with,’ allowing a writer to ‘put out tendrils and climb out round them.’

It’s not hard to envisage how the topsy-turvy trials of dyslexia have turned out to be a creative dynamic in this respect. Putting things back to front, and letting her brain ‘make a kaleidoscope of everything’ has helped her find new stories in old ones. As an example she points to Charmed Life, in which the conventional story of a vulnerable heroine, marooned, friendless, in an isolated country house becomes the tale of an ambitious young enchantress holed up in a castle that becomes vulnerable to her powers. ‘Not many people recognised this but it was great fun to do,’ she smiles.

And while her canny knack of twisting stories into new formations has allowed the author to express indignation at the limitations of gender roles, among other things, she also loves just playing with ideas. In her latest novel Conrad’s Fate she has fun experimenting with ‘if’ worlds by creating a ‘probability fault’, that exposes slightly different realities every time there’s a seismic shift. Which becomes rather worrisome when someone starts manipulating the shifts to their own advantage.

Wynne Jones is a maverick inventor, but, for me, her greatest innovation in children’s literature has been to make the characters that inhabit her books really real. And this goes for the adults too. When she set out to write, she says, publishers deemed that adults should be as pure as the driven snow, while villains had to be very harshly dealt with indeed. ‘It was tremendously moral. I started straight away making sure the adults were human.’

Given her childhood experiences, Wynne Jones could have made adults the total villains of the piece; instead she exposes their fallible, erratic, frustrating humanity; which is what her heroes and heroines must learn to navigate as they encounter the whims of a grown-up world.

The author never writes directly about her childhood, but admits to drawing on it. ‘I’ve got lots and lots of stuff there. Lots of villains and villainesses. Tear my parents into 16 different pieces and you’ve got 16 books with baddies in!’ Her laughter – and she’s good at seeing the funny side – is bittersweet.

Seeing the funny side is key to Wynne Jones’ writing. ‘There are lots of situations that are much better to deal with in fantasy because you can stand back from it, make it fun, and learn from it’. And when things go crooked, what better way to cope than turn it to caprice, fantasy? It works for Wynne Jones, and it works for her readers.

DIANA WYNNE JONES was born in London and grew up during the Second World War. Her first book was published in 1973, and she has written over 40 books for children and adults. Charmed Life won the 1977 Guardian Award for Children’s Books, and she has been twice runner-up for the Carnegie Medal. In 1999 she won the Karl Edward Wagner Award, awarded by the British Fantasy Society to those who have made a significant impact on fantasy.

My first memory

‘I was 18 months old, having a competition with a baby in a pram across the way to throw everything out of the pram. I won because I could get my gloves off and she couldn’t. She began shrieking.’

My first writing

‘I was about four, and my parents, who were very strong on not paying too much money, managed to get hold of a second-hand rocking horse. He was actually rather beautiful, dapple grey with a red harness. I called him Amigi and wrote a poem: “Amigi is a gee gee”.’

Thanks to…

‘My parents were both unbelievably mean, but my father could have Scrooged for Earth against Mars. Being a teacher he knew that we ought to have books, but he couldn’t bring himself to buy any. So, when I was about 12, I started writing stories that I could read out at night to my sisters. So I suppose I have him to thank for turning me into a writer.’

The first book that affected me

‘We visited a local library once a month – the books never changed, so you’d read them all quite soon. One was by an author called E Nesbit. It was an obscure set of Oswald stories – the odd stories she wrote later on – about a large family that gets up to all sorts of extraordinary things. It was terrific.’

100 WAYS TO WRITE A BOOK

*26 The Wynne Jones Method

• You experience the first inklings of a novel as a taste in the head, and almost instantly there are characters. Or a particular character who’s been walking around in your head suddenly finds a story to belong to.
• Take a big plain unlined pad and some nice new pens. You write your first draft in longhand in biro, but they run out too quickly and you hate being interrupted by trivialities.
• Sometimes a novel rushes at you. It’s all in your head; you just have to write it down. When that happens you can’t focus on anything else and often write until four in the morning, or until someone says ‘When’s supper?’. Once you put your husband’s shoes in the oven to bake.
• When a book comes more slowly, sit in a saggy chair with saggy posture and think and think.
• If your story gets complicated, you may make hectic notes, but do not plan; it kills your inspiration. Just follow where the book leads, allowing yourself to be surprised or amused (once you laughed yourself right off the sofa).
• You know how your book starts and ends, and maybe a crucial scene in the middle. These scenes are perfectly clear in your mind. You know exactly what people are doing, saying, smelling like; exactly where the furniture is.
• Next thing is to get your characters from the beginning to the middle, and then to the end. Put in some attractive scenes to work towards, like carrots, to force yourself to do the donkeywork in between.
• Endings are hard. It may take longer to write the last two chapters than the whole of the rest of the book because you have to be so careful. Sometimes there isn’t a happy ending, and that’s upsetting. To keep going, pretend to yourself that you don’t know what’s going to happen.
• Don’t worry about getting it exactly right first time around. You can put it right in the second draft, which you do on the computer. This is when you become very meticulous, examining every word in relation to other words, then every sentence, every paragraph, and then all of these in relation to the whole book.
• When writing the second draft you work more regular hours, at morning and at night, and the family gets fed properly and the shoes are safe.
• Near the end, when you’re sure you have finished your final draft, you find that several significant chunks of the book need to be completely rewritten immediately. You will also find that you have to cut out several of your favourite passages. Only then is it really finished.

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