That interview with Malcolm Pryce

... but which title should we go with? 

'Aberystwyth Now' / 'The King of Aberystwyth' / 'Aber’s Greatest Hits'... 

In this  revealing, entertaining and exclusive interview for The Scrawl, Malcolm Pryce, author of the six Louie Knight novels to date - aka The Aberystwyth Books - talks with Jane Williams about how he writes such inventive and surprising stories... about how he has made the Welsh Seaside Noir genre his own... about ice cream, hearing voices, and being - certainly not 'bonkers', but perhaps - 'crackers'?

Malcolm Pryce - the 'Welsh Wizard of seaside-noir-meta-fiction... 

Did you really start writing the Aberystwyth books because you heard a disembodied voice tell you to? Because I believed it!

The disembodied voice helped give shape to a project that had been gestating for a while. I was staying with a girl in the Philippines, in a place so remote the Lonely Planet warned you not to go there. I didn’t realise this until later.

She lived in a stone-age village without electricity or running water, or even glass windows, and while we were there, a cyclone arrived, forcing us to remain for a week or so. News spread that there was an ‘Amerikano’ in the village and for the next few days groups of people from far and wide would arrive to stare at me. First they would hand over a present consisting of a cream cracker wrapped in newspaper. It’s quite hard eating cream crackers without butter or cheese, but of course since it’s a gift you have to do it. Then they would stare at me for hours on end, the monotony broken only when another group from even further afield would turn up with some more cream crackers. Being stared at in this fashion is what is known as White Torture, or no-touch-torture, devised by the Communist Chinese interrogators during the Korean War. It can break a man within hours and leave him in state of total spiritual collapse. I don’t think the Koreans used cream crackers though. That was the bit that broke my spirit and awoke the disembodied voice, the one that said the talismanic words, ‘It’s Aberystwyth Jim, but not as we know it.’ Sometimes I wonder if the Philippinos were really coming because they had heard there was a white man in the village who could eat dry cream crackers.

Do people - Welsh ones, or ‘foreigners’ - really take offence at how you talk about Aberystwyth… Because I for one think that your local references and colloquialisms are absolutely genius. One of my favourite examples of this is from your first book the reference you make to ‘Ffestiniog Chardonnay’. I think that you have to be a local to realise how funny that joke is. Oh, and also the quote about how, “Mrs Pugh from Ynyslas had once famously had a rent rebate because the bells (of Cantref y Gwaelod) had kept her awake all night” - there are a few ‘old dears’ that I know who would actually think that was a great idea.

If anything, I think that I can read a great deal of love and understanding about Welsh society, history and the strange characters (weirdos) that live here (I am including myself as one of the weirdos).

Apart from famously being arrested for sedition by the Mayor of Aberystwyth, I haven’t really been confronted by angry critics, not been confronted by any stone-throwing mobs or anything. You are quite right, the books are part love poem to Aberystwyth and homage to the lost ‘craptasticness’ of the British seaside holiday. They are not piss-takes at all in my view, there would be little point wasting the precious few years we get on this earth doing something that was nothing more than that. Instead, the characters, though they live in an absurd universe, are real, with real beating feeling hearts. Just like us. They take the world seriously and that gives it, in my view, a genuine emotional core.

Did where you wrote the books have an effect on your stories or plot lines?

Only in the limited sense that actually being in Aberystwyth is inimical to the task of writing about the place because it gets in the way. Clearly my version is a parallel universe version that attaches to the real one at various geographical locations like the Pier, or the famous Stryd-y-Popty, but floats free of it in other respects. The real one is a bit drab really and it is better to consult the version lying in the ‘rag-and-bone shop of the heart’, which I think is more faithful to the spirit - if not reality - of Aberystwyth.

...a 'love poem' to Aberystwyth

I think it was Hemingway who said you can only write about a place after you have left it. Draft one of Aberystwyth Mon Amour really was written on a cargo ship bound for South America (I was a fare paying passenger, one of three), and the rest were written in Bangkok, where I lived for seven years and scrivened from dawn to dusk, tirelessly chronicling the moral turpitude of the people of Aberystwyth.

If I was an A Level English teacher (the aspirational musings of a dyslexic potter), I would ask my class about possible recurrent themes within your books. The main themes that I have picked up on is ‘identity’ and self-reinvention.

Discus (tee hee) Discuss...

To be honest, I’m probably not the person best placed to answer questions like this. Some time ago now, I started getting emails from students at Cardiff university asking similar sorts of questions. It seemed there was a course on detective fiction being run there and my books were on it. I was quite surprised to discover this but, having always longed for an academic qualification after my name, I decided to enrol on the course incognito, thinking it should be fairly easy to get a qualification for expertise in my own books. But nothing could have been further from the truth, I did very poorly.
In order not to arouse suspicion I was quite hostile in my criticism of Malcolm Pryce, I called him ‘an unoriginal jejune chancer’. This made me deeply unpopular among the other students on the course because, of course, Malcolm Pryce was some sort of god for these kids. They said, ‘You wouldn’t say that if Malcolm Pryce was here now!’ It was a very lonely time. How I longed to tell them who I was!

I remember describing in one essay how Malcolm Pryce had developed a taste very early on for jam and cheese sandwiches and his grandparents, on seeing this, had taken him aside and pointed vaguely west saying, ‘Yonder is a great town called Aberystwyth where the people eat jam and cheese sandwiches all day.’ Later, when he went to live there his heart was broken to discover they had lied, so this provided the theme of betrayal that runs through his work. Or so I thought. But the tutor told me my theory was a silly fabrication. The irony is, it’s actually true.

How do you write your books? Does it involve lengthy planning and mapping out? Do you use sticky labels with words like aliens, ventriloquists, stovepipe hats, what the butler saw ‘snuff’ movies, Patagonia, vampires… Where do your stories and plot lines start? Oh, and how do you keep them ‘tame’ - not ‘tame’ as in passive and easy, but tame as in not running around in the jungle covered in your own scat and howling at the moon, people fleeing in horror, tame.

I think it was Flaubert, or someone like that, who said you should be neat and ordered in your daily life so you can be bonkers in  your work - I’m quoting from memory. I subscribe to that view. There is no madness visible at all in my working method. I don’t scribble things on notes and stick them on the fridge. I don’t mutter to myself. I wash. Igor doesn’t turn up at 3 a.m. with a plate of bread and water, saying. ‘You must eat, Doktor!’ I just sit and ponder for months on end, write down notes but never have to refer to them again. The act of writing them down somehow fixes them in the memory. During the course of the ‘thinking up’ stage, a world develops. Then one day, like a mariner too long from the sea, I will wake up and know it is time to go down to 'the harbour’… and start the real writing. That takes about six months.

I write about five or six drafts and throw away about seventy percent of the early ones. People wouldn’t believe how much manual toil is involved. It’s like moving a beach with a spoon. But it’s all quite calm. I like the idea that by closing the laptop lid it all disappears for the night like toys put back in the cupboard. In Bangkok, once, I did put index cards on the wall, and I was quite taken aback at how subliminally disturbing this turned out to be, after I had ‘switched off’ for the day.  I was living in a studio apartment - so living and writing in the same space, but even though I did not look at the cards, they had an insistent presence that bugged me. I’m pretty sure the reason is, even when you stop writing for the day, your unconscious is still at work on the project and it resents the intrusion, it needs time to do its work in peace.

The Aberystwyth adventures of Louie Knight continue...

As a quick explanation: my nickname was ‘Calamity’ when I was a little girl, because I loved Doris Day, I was a flamin’ liability, oh and my name is Jane. So, how did you decide on the characters of Louie Knight and Calamity Jane - was it THAT voice again?

I didn't decide on anything, I just wrote and it all emerged, like a face in an old-fashioned photographic developing bath -I know that image is no longer current, but I can’t think of a better one. I never sit down and create characters the way all the books on creative writing say you are supposed to: I don’t fill out lengthy forms answering specific biographical details. I couldn't tell you what any of my characters were doing on their fifth birthday. They usually emerge from the dialogue, as soon as they start talking they either become someone or nothing happens and they don’t get invited back.

When Louie went to the Pier at the start of Aberystwyth Mon Amour, I am pretty certain I had no idea who he was going to meet there, but he met Calamity and the dialogue between them just happened, and in the process he acquired a sidekick, but it was never planned or intended. It’s all like that. If anything, I don’t create characters, I grow them. How such a thing can happen is a mystery but I am comfortable with it being a mystery.

Talking is a mystery too – no one can explain how it can be possible to hold an intelligent conversation in real time, on the fly, without preparation or premeditation. It’s amazing, even very stupid people can do it. If you ever stop to wonder about that it is baffling. Where do the words come from? Clearly there is a team of homunculi inside the brain choosing the right ones, but how do they know what to say? To see just how beautiful the mystery is, consider this. I recently noticed something about Marty, Louie’s schoolmate with TB, who, as you know, had the note from his Ma rejected and was sent off to die on a cross-country run in a blizzard. I noticed last week, 15 years after I wrote the first book, that if you add the letter ‘R’ to his name you get martyr. And that, of course, is quite clearly his symbolic function in the books. I know for sure that I did not choose the name with that in mind, in fact I have occasionally wondered what made me choose that name. Why Marty and not, say, Martin?  I don’t believe for one second it is accidental. It’s the homunculi. You have to hand it to them.

Are any of your characters, other than Herod Jenkins, based on real people that you know?

No, except, of course, Louie is me…

Are you this funny - book funny - in real life? Please try not to disappoint me, she says, oh and answer honestly, you can ‘call a friend’.

I was going to answer this with a true story about a man who found my humour so wearisome he tried to maroon me on the Pacific atoll of Suvarow, but then I thought, ‘See! That’s exactly what comedy is about, you are using it as a device to avoid the painful truths of this world’.

So here’s the serious answer: On a good day, probably yes, but the days are not always good, are they? In fact, I have spent a good many of them in the past seven years in the arms of that savage god known anaemically as depression - we really need a better name, like ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death Syndrome’.

This seems to be a very common experience of people who write funny things. Wikipedia has a whole page devoted to them. There are various neurological explanations for this: the similarity between creativity, comedy and, well, madness. But you don’t really have to go that far, you just need to cast a dispassionate glance at the universe. As the old Yiddish saying goes, ‘if God lived on Earth they would break his windows’.

How much time did you spend researching your six books?

None whatsoever, I just make everything up. It’s quicker and safer because you can’t get it wrong.

You have broadened my knowledge of Wales - I thought that you were making Hughesovka up. I knew a little about Patagonia and the Welsh connection, but I had no idea how seriously this ‘Welsh Promised Land’ was taken. Also, all of your classical allusions boggle my brain - it’s all Greek to me, boom boom! Were you born with this stuff in your head or have you a team of researchers helping you out?

I think over the years I have read very eclectically, and stored a lot of strange material in the rag-and-bone shop of my heart. The team of homunculi who work there have a very good retrieval system. If I read something on prairie voles seven years ago and it would be useful they automatically retrieve it. I think that is the essence of creativity.

Have we seen the last of Aberystwyth from you? …and if not do you envisage Louie’s adventures coming to a climactic conclusion?

No definitely not, I have some good ideas in the pipeline, and have no intention to end the series. Nor will I do anything dramatic and climactic with the characters. It would feel like a cheap trick and a sort of betrayal. I’m quite fond of them and, in a sense, have the power to halt time for them, so they can live on in a permanent state of reasonable contentment.

Why doesn't Louie ‘get the girl?’

Because, like his creator, he dedicates his life to a higher calling; he is a knight in (tarnished) armour for the secular age. All private detectives fulfil this function. They sacrifice themselves for the common good and must, alas, forego the comforts of the hearth.  Marlowe never gets the girl. Nor does Rick in Casablanca. It’s the paradigm. I didn’t realise this when I began writing the series, but it quickly became instinctively evident to me. It means that poor old Myfanwy always has things going wrong for her. I think she’s in a sanatorium in Switzerland at the moment, having lost her singing voice.

...and finally. do you like ice cream?

I’m not nuts about it, it’s just OK. I used to resent the way adults automatically expected me as a kid to be crazy about it and willing to be bribed by its promise. But, of course, in my books the ice cream dispensed by Sospan is not really ice cream, it’s the Sacrament.

- Thank you Mr Malcolm Pryce!

Malcolm Pryce was talking with Jane Williams. 

You can learn more about the six Aberystwth novels, so far, at the official Malcolm Pryce website.

Go to the Malcolm Pryce author page at amazon to read reviews and purchase his books, including:

The Case of the Hail Mary Celeste, 

the new book by Malcolm Pryce - published today!

‘Blow Your Own Trumpet’ – Jasper Fforde in conversation with Jane Williams

Jasper Fforde handles rejection well, having been turned down more than 70 times before he began his published odyssey in 2001 with The Eyre Affair – the first in a series of seven books to feature the character Thursday Next. In the 13 (yes thirteen) years since, he has become one of the UK’s most well-loved cult-authors - with annual fan conventions dedicated to his books - and is a bona fide New York Times Bestselling Author. So why was there so much resistance from the publishing world to begin with? Because his books were 'weird' – or so those publishers thought… There was not anything really like them (although he now gets routinely mentioned along with Sir Terry Pratchett) and so that meant risk, which publishers of fiction do not like.

Jasper Fforde photographed by Mari Fforde

Now, with 16 novels (that is 13 + 3) and more on the way, he has become the leading light of the genre… what genre? Ffordean novels are set in a parallel world that overlaps with ours, but is also very different – Thursday Next operates her detective agency from Swindon, in the Britain of the 1980s, where George Formby is President and the Crimean War is still on - actually that is sort of true in our real world right now! She is involved in ‘policing’ characters and unrealised plot threads from the literary world. In the first novel, she has to rescue the denouement of Jane Eyre and make sure we get the right ending to the story in our world. The world of books comes alive and creates a complex, overlapping world of imagination. Thursday has a pet Dodo.

So what genre is that? Well, as it can potentially involve any book in the 'Great Library' that is hard to pin down. Fforde’s books have been referred to as metafiction, fantasy-parody, fabulist, satire, comedy… and they are all those things. The books fit most comfortably into the emergent genre of parallel-histories – where authors work with alternative versions of how our world might be if certain historical events had taken different turns, or where the fiction of our history is treated with the same integrity as academic history. Fforde is a leading proponent of this approach, along with the likes of Alan Moore, Jonathan Stroud, Mark Frost, and steampunks like Liesel Schwarz - writers who have an unabashed sense of fun and adventure, who are not afraid to treat fact and fiction in the same inventive, irreverent and entertaining way. After all, ‘real’ history has often been shown to be a thinly veiled fiction.

Jasper Fforde's debut novel...
but not his first!

The Scrawl editors had an idea that it might be interesting to get writers to talk to creatives from other disciplines, so to test out this theorem, we put potter Jane Williams together with author Jasper Fforde... and they talked about America, Wales, children, cheese… and writing.

Jane: Thank you so much for speaking to me, is now a good time?

Jasper: Yes, I have just finished my supper actually.

Jane: Do you need to digest or anything?

Jasper: Why? What have you got planned for me? No, now is fine!

Jane: I believe that you are off to America, you have been to America before…

Jasper: Oh yeah, I’ve been going to America for the past 14 years.

Jane: Do you find that there is a difference between American readers and audiences and British readers and audiences?

Jasper: No not really…. In the UK, audiences tend to fill from the back forwards, in the US the audiences fill from the front to the back. Americans are a much more forward sort of people “I’m going to sit at the front…” whereas the British, “Well, I’ll sit at the back, just in case there are any questions….”

Jane: ...the British are terribly reserved?

Jasper: Yes, but apart from that, they are very similar.

Jane: So, you are promoting The Eye of Zoltar - the third book in The Last Dragonslayer series. I have two quite young kids and my son asked me yesterday whether dragons really exist, and this question is an extension of that really… what kind of age, or what type of audience, is the Last Dragonslayer series aimed at?

Jasper: It’s a good question really. The audience that I aimed it at was an audience that existed when I was that age, because young adults in my day - ha ha, ‘cause I’m so old! - Young adults, back in ‘my day’, were still kind of ‘Tolkein-esque’. Although my work is not 'Tolkein-esque', it IS funny and serious and all that, but nowadays YA - the young adult audience that I would be aiming at - is much more vampire orientated, a lot more sex and a lot more violence, and I’m not doing that. So, I’m now put in the ‘middle grade’, which is 12 to 15-ish.

Third in the Dragonslayer series

Jane: There are some quite adult themes, I’m thinking about Jennifer being an orphan and this idea that ‘orphans’ are a disposable commodity... and she does like boys! So those are some themes which tick the ‘teenage’ boxes aren’t they?

Jasper: I’m hoping to find a very sophisticated twelve-year-old reader - well, not very sophisticated - but I’m hoping to find a twelve-year-old reader who understands that this is a genre, but a genre which could be subverted. Which is a modern thing, I think - a very fashionable thing at the moment. In the same way as the retelling of nursery rhymes, with a different take on them. They are hitting the screens at 12A, which is the age that they are aimed at. Also, perhaps the older teens that don’t really want to go down the route of the vampires and stuff… who just want a bit of fun, really.

Jane: I don’t know what camp I’m in really, as I’m 40.  I would cite those three books (the Last Dragonslayer series) as being the books that I am most looking forward to sharing with my kids, who are tiny at the mo. For me they tick all of the boxes - they are ‘wholesome’, yet subversive, funny, yet sad at the same time, and I cannot wait to share them with my children...

You have strong female leads in your books, Thursday Next and Jennifer Strange, have you always thought about strong female leads?

Jasper: No, not really, I sort of moved into that area. The first two books that I wrote are my ‘Nursery Crimes’ books - The Humpty Dumpty book and The Fourth Bear. They had a male protagonist, ‘Jack Spratt’ but I found his side kick, Mary Mary, and his wife, Madeleine, much more interesting characters. So after I couldn’t get those published I moved on to write the Eyre Affair and that is the first time that I have used a female protagonist, which is much more interesting to me. I don’t know why, but it is. Strong, yet slightly vulnerable, driven women, I think are very interesting… What was it I said the other day in another interview? …Oh I know: Remarkable women are more remarkable than remarkable men.

Jane: Oh I like that!

Jasper: Oh good, you like that do you?

Jane: Yeah, I do like that, though I’m not sure that I whole-heartedly agree - there are exceptions to every rule.

I found it very interesting, in that you write in the first person and the narrative is very much a female voice. I just wandered how difficult it was for a male writer to do that with real validity - although I think that you pull it off really well!

Jasper: Thanks. That’s nice!

Jane: What was the first book that you can remember reading which had an impact on your life when you were younger.

Jasper: Well, this might have some bearing on it. The first book I remember reading when I was young - and remember, when you are young you are told to read 30 or 40 books - in my day it was the Ladybird books, 1B - John and Jane, and you are told to read these. Then, as your skills develop as a reader, all of a sudden you can choose to read a book! I can remember this moment and I was quite young, perhaps five or six, and I remember thinking that reading doesn’t have to be something that you do in school, it can be something that you can do on your own. You can choose to read a book. In the same way that when you can ride a bicycle you can choose to go to ‘Tommy’s’ house. When you’ve get your licence you can drive wherever you want and it is a wonderful empowering fantastic moment. Walking might be the same, for those of us that are lucky enough to walk - that sudden sort of amazing leap.

I remember going to my parents’ house and looking at their bookshelf to see if there was something suitable for me and I pulled down a copy of Alice in Wonderland. I took it into the living room and curled up onto the sofa and read it and loved it. It’s not a long book, so I finished reading it, and read it again. It kind of stuck with me, that very strange subtle humour. It is very funny and very clever. The characters are very real and strange and the whole world is very, very weird. I think that stayed with me and Alice - this very gentle and accepting, understanding character, who all these weird things keep happening to and she remains unfazed by it. She’s not girly about it, a squealing girly who says, “agh!” She says, “now I’m as big as a house so let’s deal with it!” So I think that might have had something to do with it.

Jane: I’ve done some background research on you. I was tentative about going onto your website as it is fantastic and filled with all the information that I may need and I did not want to sound trite or worry about asking you questions that you have been asked before. However, one of the first things that I read was the fact that Alice in Wonderland was one of your favourite books and everything sort of fell into place. Because there are so many bizarre and obscure story lines in your books , yet all of your characters take it in their stride... It's fine for Mrs Tiggywinkle to be a supercool superhero. [ Editor's note: Mrs Tiggywinkle is a ‘Bookworld’ character in the Thursday Next stories. ] There’s so much about your storylines that are hyper-real and obviously as soon as I read that Alice in Wonderland was a favourite book, I could completely and utterly see that… it was fantastic.

So, do your children read your books?

Jasper: Usually. The two smallest are too small really, the two eldest are too grown up really, but generally they do. My second son reads everything I write, so in general they all do. When my two eldest girls were teenagers it was quite funny really, as their friends used to read me and say, ‘Your dad is really cool, he rocks’. They would reply, ‘No he doesn’t, and you know nothing about my father, how dare you! He is completely unfunny and rubbish,’ although I think that they were secretly proud.

Jane: Your father was a banker which I would not have imagined, reading your work. I mean some of your storylines are fairly ‘out there’ and I just imagined this incredibly bohemian, literary upbringing acting as  inspiration for some of your ’crazy’ ideas, I mean, is this how you grew up?

Jasper: No, we are not bohemian at all. I mean dad was an economist. I think escapism was important in my childhood and teens. My family are fairly ordinary, we did not have a bad childhood at all by any stretch of the imagination, it was just very ordinary. I think that for escapism in the 1970’s and early 80’s there was a lot going on - some good sitcoms and very funny movies and I did a lot of reading. Most authors you find are fairly solitary people - I think that is because we have spent a lot of time on our own over the years. Within that vacuum, if you are not going out and shouting and jumping up and down with your mates, you are actually doing something - usually that means drawing, painting, reading, writing or anything like that. There is a strange duality in being a writer, you have to give up this ‘socialness’ to actually put in the hours for this bizarre sort of input.

Jane: When people meet you and know your background, and perhaps know your books, do they expect you to be the funny man at the dinner party?

Jasper: Yeah, they do… They say, ‘Jasper you seem fairly ‘ordinary’ to me,’ meaning, ‘I find you fairly dull,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I make up silly ideas and that’s where my skill lies’. If something happens over the dinner table, I will make some ‘silly’ connection. But mostly my family know me and it’s not anything remotely unusual.

Jane: There are so many things about Wales in your books that make me laugh, and they are so true! You have a strong personal connection with Wales...

Jasper: I’m not actually Welsh, but spent all my childhood holidays here in the Wye valley, which means my connection to the area goes back to 1966. My favourite river swimming spot has remained unchanged and revisited for the past forty four years. My Great Uncle farmed the Olchon Valley and is buried in Llanveynoe. My parents were married there in 1953. I have a Welsh wife, and two Welsh daughters.

Shades of Grey parallels Wales

With such strong connections to Wales - quite apart from having lived here since 2000 - it would seem obvious to feature Wales, in some part, in nearly all of my books. Some feature Welsh plotlines, others - Shades of Grey, Early Riser, Eye of Zoltar - are entirely set here. The Elan Valley is featured as a location in three of my novels, each Elan subtly different. The Elan is a particular favourite. We call it ‘The Empty Quarter’, an area of Wales that is magnificently desolate - upland moorland where little happens except drainage and sheep. It is not visited in any great numbers, but it seems to have an almost magnetic hold on me.

Further up North, we have Cadir Idris, a mountain that is once again heavily featured in Eye of Zoltar, but reimagined by me as a vast pinnacle of rock with stairs hewn into the stone, and on the top, the carved stone chair of Idris. I also made it permanently swathed in cloud due to the fact that even after three treks to the summit, I have yet to see the view.

Jane: As much as anything it is cheese that really makes me laugh. I work in Dolgellau and I have read, with childlike glee, that the strongest of your cheeses come from Machynlleth and Dolgellau...

Jasper: The cheese subplot was great fun - but the choice of place names random - I just liked the idea of Wales being a place in which super strong cheeses could be made in an unregulated way and then smuggled across the border to England, or ‘Poundland’, or ‘East Wales’, as we call it.

I often put adverts in the back of my books - the strapline to my unofficial Welsh Tourism plug is: ‘Visit Wales. Not always raining’.

In short, I write about Wales because I really love it, despite the rain, despite the fact that I don’t understand rugby, or watch Doctor Who, or can speak Welsh, or sometimes feel that a Welsh winter is like living in Tupperware. But if, as I once heard, that, ‘you can be Welsh if you love it,’ then I can indeed boast Wales as my nationality.

Jane: Do you have a routine to writing? Your themes and plots are so complex, how do you keep a handle on it all?

Jasper: I don’t, although I think that I need to start having a routine, because it takes me a long time to write, literally. I have several ideas at a time and I think, ‘right, what is going to happen with this next book’. The one that I am working on at the moment is called Early Riser. It is a crime-thriller set in a world in which humans have always hibernated. And you think, ‘ok then,’ this is a really interesting concept, because if we have always done it, it becomes second nature. How does this mechanism function and where can we find the crime and all this kind of stuff. So, in general, I just start off with these kind of ideas, then I put in a few characters, you know male or female. What kind of person are they? Then I just start writing and I see where it goes. But of course often this can lead you up a blind alley, and you have to re write it and then I have to try out something else... So planning would work a lot better! But I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work for me! I tend to get my best ideas literally ‘on the hoof’.

Jane: I’m fortunate to work, and be friends, with some really fantastic artists and very creative people and I have found that there are two schools of thought, either you plan, plan, plan or you ‘wing it’.

So when you have these ‘crazy out there ideas’, do you have a little Jasper that reins you in? How do you know if your ideas are working? Do you have someone that you can run your ideas by?

Jasper: No. I’m really on my own. All authors are basically on their own, unless they are working in close collaboration with someone else. There is a ‘little voice’ - the little Jasper that you mentioned - that says, ‘this is really too stupid’. For example in this new book, which is slightly more serious, every now and again I keep putting in silly jokes, which would make total sense in any of my other books, but in this book they don’t quite set the tone… and once you’ve played around with the character, set them up in 20 or 30,000 words, you know how he or she is going react in a given situation. Once everything starts coming together the book starts writing itself in an odd kind of way and the tone and the atmosphere all slot in to place.

So although the first 20 or 30,000 words may be difficult and may lead you down blind alleys, the rest of it can pop into place. There is always that little voice that says if this is working or this isn’t working. When the little voice says, ‘this is not working’, and you’ve just spent a week working on it, it can be fairly frustrating. But you have to listen to that voice. Ninety percent of writing skills can be taught to someone, and then they could be writing for ten years and gain another five percent, but the remaining five percent is the stuff that you can never, never teach – that’s the magic sparkle and the charm that brings a novel alive. It’s that last five perent that makes a novel, if you could put in that five percent, and the rest was pretty ropy, it wouldn’t really matter.

Jane: When did you discover that you had that five percent then?

Jasper: I dunno… when people buy the books! You get emails from people from the other side of the planet saying, ‘your book really spoke to me and I really liked it and it really made me laugh out loud on the bus!’ And you think, ‘OK, that’s really great,’ because you are communicating these bizarre ideas and then it kind of makes sense.

Jane: So was this fairly early on in your career?

Jasper: I wish…

Jane: Because I discovered you fairly later on… its only been in the past three or four years that I have been reading your work, and you got me through some particularly difficult all-nighters with the sprogs.

Jasper: Oh good, I’m glad of that... No, I spent the first eleven years of my writing 'career' not being published. I wrote seven books in eleven years. I’d been trying to figure out how to make it work - it’s only been through constant experimentation and merciless self-criticism that you finally think, ‘yes this is kind of working now’. Then you can hand it out to the publishers or agents and they say, ‘yes, we can sell this, this is pretty much there’.

Jane: So would this be your tip to an aspiring writer then, to keep plugging and to keep pushing…

Jasper: Yes, my tip to an aspiring writer is wholly counter to today’s way of working really. For example you can be a fantastic photographer with two clicks of a mouse, and you can do everything really quickly and really easily, unfortunately writing is not one of them. I equate it to playing the trumpet.

You can buy the best trumpet, buy the best books on how to play the trumpet. You can listen to the best trumpeters, you can talk to the best trumpeters, you can do all these things - join the trumpet players club, but really when you put the trumpet to your mouth can you play it? The answer is no. You have to put in ten-to-fifteen years of solid graft and practice.

There are no short cuts to writing. Of course, being human is part of that experience, but distilling what it is to be human on the page is something that you cannot do straight away, unless of course you are brilliant, as some people are. So, my tips for writers are: think long term, if you can move from the rejection of your fifth novel to the starting of your sixth with no loss of enthusiasm, then you have what it is to be a writer. But if after writing your first two chapters, you send it off to an agent and when they say, ‘no,’ you give up, then you are not a writer.

Jane: That is what I say to students that I teach in the visual arts. Funnily enough, fifteen years is how long it has taken me to be able to throw a pot on the wheel. Maybe it’s something about that magic fifteen years.

Well, thank you so much for your time, and really have a fantastic time in America. And thank you very much again, it’s been very enjoyable reading your work.

Jasper: Thanks.

- Jasper Fforde was talking with Jane Williams

There is a wealth of Ffordean information at 

the author’s official, entertaining and extensive, website - lots of fun stuff!

Jane Williams is a potter who lives and works near the coast in North Wales, where she also appreciates cheese and teaches in the arts department of a local college.

A pair of Jane's jugs attracting one of her 'mad birds'

You can find out more about Jane Williams and her work here.