Prague, day 1

I arrived in Prague on the evening of January 29 and was picked up from the airport by Richard Kličnick from Argo, my publisher in the Czech Republic.  He had very kindly offered to take me to my hotel, which was in the Lesser Town.

My hotel turned out to be very nice (and quiet) and I checked in, dropped off my bag and then met Richard and went for a beer and something to eat nearby, at Klub Mlejn (The Mill).  I had some kind of cheese that seemed to have been marinated in oil for a long time.  Nicer than it sounds.

The following day - my first real day in Prague, Richard picked me up from my hotel after I had discovered that breakfast clearly was not a great speciality of my hotel, and took me to a cafe called Bar Újezd, Dobrá Trafika, where I was interviewed by Šarka Nováková then Klára Kolárová, both of whom were very striking in very different ways.  You will have to take my word for it, as Richard only took photos of me, and not them.  Or if he did, he didn't show me them.

Both my interviewers spoke excellent English - along with pretty much everyone I met in Prague.  They asked me about my Tales of Terror books - all three of which are published here by Argo - and about the inspiration behind the stories, whilst Richard took lots of photos.  He took some more when they'd gone.

He took me on a little trail around the city.  I saw the famous astronomical clock and watched it do its thing as it struck the hour.  I visited the Alphonse Much museum and we took in a quick visit to a comic book shop and a gallery dedicated to the comic book artists Karel Saudek - twin brother of the photographer Jan Saudek.  Karel is in a coma following an accident in 2006.

We went for lunch at the Novoméstskéy Ležak.  Whenever I am in a foreign country I always try to eat some typical food and I ate svičková na smetané (dumplings in meat sauce) here.  It was very good and although I can't say I have ever had whipped cream with meat before, but even the trace of what appeared to be jam, seemed to work.  We also had tea in a lovely Chinese tea shop and I bought some green tea to bring home.  I had not realised that the Czechs were such tea connoisseurs.

In the afternoon we had another interview, this time with František Cinger.  We chatted about my work and about writing horror for kids and we talked about how Kafka is a lot funnier than people give him credit for and we agreed that all great cities have a river running through them.  It took place in the wonderful Unijazz cafe, which is reached by what appears to be a door to an apartment building, and a long climb up the kind of square, featureless stairwell that appears in Polanski movies.  Inside it is again full of what appear to be an inexhaustible supply of earnest, intelligent-looking young Czechs and a wonderful lounge full of books.  I'm sure I would be a much better writer if I could come here every day for coffee.

The book signing was in Palác knih Luxor - a big, bustling bookshop in the centre of town.  That is Richard on the microphone.  I have very low expectations of signings, even when they are attached to events, so I have to say I was pleased by the turnout, even if many of them were autograph hunters hoping that I might one day have the kind of fame that would make my signature something worth selling on eBay.

Two of the performers from the play - Lucie Radimerská and Michael Hnátek read extracts and there was a question and answer session with Dominika Krestánová the mother of my Czech translator - who is a translator as well - acting as interpreter.  Again, everyone involved was incredibly supportive and friendly.  And I signed quite a few books in the end.

In the evening Richard picked me up from the hotel and took me to a restaurant to meet Milan Gelnar and Alena Pokorná from Argo and Lucie from the cast of the play.  Again, it was a humbling experience to sit and be able to talk about books and life and so on with people who were able to do this in another language.  Yes, they might struggle to recall a word here and there, but we covered a lot of ground and I enjoyed myself, but felt a little guilty in making everyone speak English.  Milan assured me they needed the practice, but still it must have been exhausting.  I managed to go the entire trip without speaking a word of Czech.  Not good.

Prague

I am off to Prague tomorrow, a city I have wanted to visit for a very long time.  I am going there as guest of my Czech publisher, Argo, and Theater Puls who are doing a puppet show of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terrors.

On Wednesday at 5pm I am signing books at the Palác knih Luxor bookshop in Prague, where actors from the puppet show will read passages from the book.

On Thursday I am getting a tour of Prague and attending the premiere of the puppet show at 3pm at Divadlo Kampa.

The rest of the time I am hoping to acquaint myself with that amazing place, city of Kafka and the Golem.  I will be taking my notebook and my camera. . . .

The new year is upon us. . .

A belated happy new year.  It is normally about this time that I start to feel like the year is already starting to take a nose-dive.  I think

On Friday I am off to Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the North-East Teenage Book Award.  I'm looking forward to that one.  I was shortlisted a couple of years ago (but didn't win) and it was a really nice event, with a packed auditorium full of very excited and intelligent readers.

This year Mister Creecher is shortlisted and in a way it is fitting to be going back to Newcastle, where I lived during my teens before leaving to go to college in Manchester.  It was in our bungalow in Kenton Bar Estate that I first saw James Whales' movie version of Frankenstein and where my obsession with the story and it's creation began.

As well as the North-East Teenage Book Award, Mister Creecher is still on the longlist for the Carnegie Medal, on the shortlist for the Coventry Inspiration Book Award, the shortlist for the Book Award St Helen's (BASH) and the longlist for North Lanarkshire's Catalyst Book Award.

At the end of the month I am hoping to be in Prague, a city I have wanted to visit for a very long time.  The details are still being finalised so I will talk more about that closer to the time.  But for the moment I will just say that a Czech puppet theatre company - Theatre Puls - are doing an adaptation of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terrors and I couldn't be more excited about it.

Other than that we are about to send Through Dead Eyes off to the printers.  This is my book set in Amsterdam and it will be out in March this year.  This is going to be the book I will be promoting through the spring and summer and that's going to be fun.  It is a slight departure for me from my recent books, because it has a contemporary setting involving a haunted hotel and a troubled boy visiting Amsterdam with his father.

The hotel is roughly based on the hotel I stayed in when I visited Amsterdam to collect my Vlag and Wimpel for the Dutch translation of Tales of Terror from the Black Ship.  I visited the hotel again for research the following year, staying in a different room in the attic.  As I was leaving I told the manager that I was writing a book about a haunted hotel in Amsterdam and he told me that the room I stayed in was one of only two rooms in the hotel that had ever reported ghosts.  Life and art curiously mixed for a moment.

In September my book set in the world of Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner will be published (along with the paperback of Through Dead Eyes).  It is now called The Dead Men Stood Together.  More about that nearer the time.

The next thing I have to come up with is an idea for the book to be published in 2014!

A fear of books

Another question that came up at the Sheffield Children's Book Awards was, 'Is it important to read books if you want to write books?'

The quick answer is yes - yes it is.

Having said that, I actually find it hard to read whilst I am writing and I am either writing or I am planning or editing an awful lot of the time.  I do have spare time, of course, but reading can feel like a distraction - another voice competing with my own.

I used to finish every book I started.  I was always committed to the author for as long as it took me to read the book, but I have become more and more intolerant of writing I do not like or admire.

But if I read a book I really admire, that can be even more of an issue.  A really good book can throw me completely.  It can make me feel dissatisfied with my own writing.  I tend not to read other authors writing for teens.  I do read some, and I read enough to know there is a lot of great writing out there, but I don't want to read too much.  I don't want to gain an idea of what kind of writing is expected.

I read a lot less now than before I was a writer and that is something I regret.  I used put this solely down to this problem of the intrusive outside voice, but I have come to suspect there is a darker reason. I think I may be developing a fear of books.

Actually, it is more a fear of writers. . .

One of the panel  said that they did not think it was important to read books to be a writer - a slightly awkward point of view to proclaim at a book award to an audience of schoolchildren, teachers and librarians - but it seems to me incontestable that you must once have read books.  How else would you know how a book worked?  Why else would it occur to you to become a writer?

That may sound trite, but it's true.  Delivering a story via a book is a very contrived thing.  You don't stumble into it by accident.  You don't wake up one morning and start writing, without having read any books.  Writers don't invent writing.  They re-invent it.

Like many writers of my generation the book as an object played a big part in my dreams of becoming a writer.  I wanted to see my words in print.  I wanted a cover with a dust jacket.  I wanted to see my name on the front.

But I don't think I ever thought of writing books for children.

I wrote at school.  We expect all children to be able to write fiction, just as we expect them to draw and paint (or rather we did when I was young).  But I trace my life as a writer back to when I was a teenager and actually started to hammer the keys of my dad's portable Brother typewriter, alone, in my bedroom.

This was unnecessary writing.  Unasked for.

I don't have much of what I wrote then, but I remember starting to write a long fantasy novel that owed a lot to Robert E Howard and the myth of Theseus.  I wrote some parable-like short stories in the mould of Ray Bradbury or John Wyndham.

In my late teens and twenties I realised that I had read very little that wasn't genre fiction of one kind or another and began working my way through a library of great writers from around the world.  I couldn't say how many books I read.  I have some of them still, but nowhere near all.  I can't remember many of them, though the best of them still shine brightly:  Kafka's The Trial, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, William Golding's The Spire, Primo Levi's If This is a Man, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.  As I got older, I discovered new authors of course, but it was the books I read in my twenties that gave me a template for what I thought was great writing.  I attempted an existentialist novel on the back of reading Satre.  After Kafka, my short stories became more Kafkaesque.

Perhaps the reason I no longer seek out great writing is because it would remind me that it was this writing to which I once aspired.  Perhaps they would make me feel inadequate where they once made me feel more alive.  I do not write literary fiction - I write genre fiction.  For children and teenagers.  I consider that to be a very fine way to earn a living, incidentally.  And I also think that genre fiction in the right hands - in the hands of Raymond Chandler or M R James - can be enough; more than enough.  The fact remains, though, that the great sweeping novel I saw myself writing is probably never going to be written.  Or not by me anyway.

But I still believe in the power of the novel to change lives as well as to entertain.  I do mean that literally.  Novels certainly shaped me.  Perhaps, in the end, they shaped me more as a person than as a writer.

But of course I write the way I do because of the person I am, and one of the reason's I am the person I am is because I read the books I did, when I did.  As much as the people I met or the jobs I have done or the places I have been or the things I have seen, books shaped me.  They made sense of things that hadn't made sense before and they introduced doubt where there had been youthful certainty.

So yes, it is important to read if you want to be a writer.  But I think it's also important to read if you just want to be.

Do you set yourself writing goals?

There was an interesting session at the Sheffield Childrens Book Award where all the authors in the YA and Quick Read sections sat along the stage and answered some very good questions from the young audience.  One of the said questions was: 'Do you set yourself writing goals?'

I was the first to answer, simply by dint of me being sat at one end and I made the classic mistake of trying to make a general statement about writing.  There is no one kind of writer any more than there is one kind of writing.  But my answer went pretty much as follows...

I said that I am - and always have been - a bit suspicious of writers who say they work every day except Christmas Day and write 2000 or 3000 or whatever, every day.  Personally I can't see how that works.  It certainly wouldn't work for me.  I can't promise myself that I will write a certain number of words on a given day, neither would I want to force myself to write that number simple because it was my 'goal'.

When I say I am suspicious of this, it isn't that I don't think a writer can write 2000 or 3000 good words in a day.  It is perfectly possible to write 6000 good words in a day.  It's not even that I doubt that this could be done every day - which I do doubt - it is that writing large amounts of words is only part of the job of a writer.

Writing lots of words is a big part, don't get me wrong, and when you have publishing deadlines you need to keep that word count up or you quickly get into trouble.  When I am writing a book I set myself deadlines and usually hit them, but I don't set myself a daily target.

But I don't see where editing fits in.  Or planning?  Or dreaming.  Or living?  On one hand I have the undisciplined's admiration for the disciplined, but on the other I simply don't understand it.  One writer said they wrote 5000 words every day.  Every day?  That's 1,300,000 words a year on a five day week.  Really?  That's a lot of words for a writer of children's books, even allowing for over-writing.

The writing of fiction - for me anyway - is a messy pulling together of persistent imaginings - things that refuse to go away and demand to be put into words.  I am not talking about waiting for these things to come unbidden - I have a mortgage to pay and don't have the luxury of waiting passively for my characters and plots to turn up.

I was looking through my computer once looking for any ideas I might have forgotten.  I say a document headed 'Head floating up through clouded water.'  Intrigued, I opened it up to find that it simply said, 'Head floating up through clouded water.'  That is how most of my ideas come to me.  They emerge out of the fog.  They demand my attention.  They follow me about.  They nag me.

I write like I draw and paint.  I do a little bit.  I pace around for a while.  I pounce on it again and do some more.  I pace around a bit more.  I rarely have a rigid framework to work within.  It is normally a set of unconnected images and scenes that I have to find a home for.  When I am caught up in a book I can write for hours, but when I am trying to make sense of a book I can write next to nothing.

But I am guilty of thinking that this makes objective sense - rather than that it makes sense for me. I can't present this as a technique.  It is just the way I am.  Books are different because writers are different.  The books have been prepared and cooked in different ways, even if they appear superficially to be using very similar ingredients.

As in so much with writing, there is no 'right' and 'wrong'.  It is all about the result and finding a way that suits your temperament and the books you wish to write.

When asked about their working day, writers tend to fall into two camps - as we did here - between those who have an amount of time they set aside to write and hope they will write a reasonable amount, and those who have a specific word count in mind.  Often it is a mix between the two - Anthony McGowan said that he feels bad if he doesn't write at least 1000 words and I'm the same.

But I would be lying if I said that I don't feel bad regularly.  If not often.

The important thing for me is to write something - even if it is just a few lines in my notebook - and to keep alive that fragile sense that I might actually write something really good. . .

Writer's block

I was up at the Sheffield Book Award yesterday where Mister Creecher was awarded Highly Commended in the YA section that was won by Martyn Bedford with his book Flip.  Afterwards, at the book signing, one of my visitors - a thirteen year old girl called Ida - said that she was a writer but was suffering from writer's block.

Ida left a comment on this blog, but I didn't publish it because she also gave the name of her school and I was a bit concerned she might not have intended to give so much information.  Anyway, I thought I'd carry on the conversation I was having with her in this post.

Some people don't think there is any such thing as writer's block, and that it is just the over-dramatisation of a perfectly normal problems writers encounter all the time.  It does feel like a bit of a curse, and that even talking about it can't be a good thing.  But the fact is that whether we believe that it exists or not, sometimes it is harder to write than it is at other times.

Sometimes we run out of ideas.  Or we run out of ideas we want to use, which isn't exactly the same thing.  The ideas we have may no longer seem right for the kind of writer we want to be.  Because that can change over time.

Sometimes we have the ideas - lots of them - but we don't seem satisfied with what we write in answer to those ideas.  We lose confidence in our ability to deliver those great ideas we have.

Perhaps we have things going on in our lives that are a distraction.  They might be things that will later inspire a really great piece of writing, but we haven't had time to digest them yet.  Maybe where we work has changed somehow and it has disrupted our routine or is breaking our concentration.  Maybe we are too miserable.  Or too happy.

Worst of all, maybe we have that terrible demon on our shoulder saying that we just aren't good enough.

Well, I'm going to work on the assumption that this isn't true.  So what can we do, if we don't seem able to write?  What can Ida do?  Well, I think there are a few things she can try.

If you get stuck in a piece of writing for too long that it is stopping you from working, then put it in a drawer and don't look at it for as long as you can.  When you next look at it, you will have a better idea about whether it was as bad as you thought or is actually a lot better than that.  Either way it will be clearer what needs to be done to save it, or whether - as we have to do sometimes - it is better to accept that it isn't worth any more of your precious time.

But more importantly, with that piece put away in the drawer you can write something else.  I would suggest writing something short - a short story, a blog post, a book review - anything really.  Just write something.  And try and write something every day, or as often as you can.  Maybe you could keep a diary.

If your block has happened before you even start a project and even these short pieces seem to be painful, then I would suggest reading a book.  Read something you really like - either something you have read before and loved or something by a favourite author - someone you admire.  Remind yourself of how exciting writing is and why you wanted to write stuff in the first place.

But get back to writing as soon as possible.  Don't weigh yourself down with your own expectations.  Play to your strengths and write something you would like to read yourself.

Now as Ida is 13 I will also say here that sometimes - not always, but sometimes - the problem with young writers is one of planning.  I have no set rule about planning.  Sometimes I plan very rigidly and sometimes not.  It depends on the book, and even when I plan rigidly, the book goes its own way once I start writing.

But sometimes a plan can be very liberating because you know where the story is going and you have these stepping stones as a route.  It means that you are filling the gaps rather than trying to fill the whole book every time you sit down to write.  If you are having problems getting your ideas written, try planning the story before you start.  There are lots of ways to do this.  Here is one:

On a sheet of A4 lined paper, write the number 1 to 10 in the margin, leaving several lines between (obviously you can do this on a computer if you'd prefer, but I find that for the first plan I still pick up a pen).  If you imagine 1 to be the first scene and 10 to be the last, then put a paragraph next to each number giving yourself some idea of what happens in that part of the story.

This will give you a written framework to refer back to each time you write and will help you to make decisions that may block your writing.  If you get all of the 'When does this character die?', 'When do these characters first meet?' stuff out of the way, all you have to do is write.  Don't allow details to stop you.  Can't think of character's name?  Steal a name from the phone book or an index or a magazine.

This is perhaps most useful for a short story, but you could do the same for chapters in a book - list the chapters as numbers and give yourself a little note about what you want to happen in each.  But maybe a short story is the very thing you need to write.  Maybe a novel is going to be too much.

Even if you never use this method again, have a try and see if it works to get you started.  Because getting started is the key thing.  When I don't write for a while it takes me a long time to get myself back in the zone I need to be in.  The longer you go without writing, the more likely it is that you will be disappointed with what you write.

So good luck Ida, and good luck anyone else out there having problems.  Hope this helps.

Un grande romanzo gotico

The Italian edition of Mister Creecher - La Creatura - is now out, published by Newton Compton.  I'm still waiting for that book tour of Italy. . .