1: In Italy Thursday Next is at her third adventure. How came the idea of this heroine?

2: In The Well of Lost Plots Thursday enters the place where the stories are created: is there any criticism about the best seller's industry?

3: In this book you speak about the originality of the stories and about the characters' autodetermination: which are the main features of an original story?

4: Do your characters ever wake you up in the night or interrupt you at inopportune moments?

5: What do you think about the future of the Novel? ( some people say that the Novel is dead...) Which is the writer, today, you can read no end and always love?






1: In Italy Thursday Next is at her third adventure. How came the idea of this heroine?

It all began with the notion that someone kidnaps Jane Eyre from her novel. The rest of the book grew from an attempt to make this notion believable, plausible, mundane and everyday. The somewhat curious events in the book - from the Crimean War to Dodos - are really there as a smoke screen. If you can re-engineer dodos back from extinction and have a time-travelling knight-errant father then kidnapping Jane Eyre seems pretty normal. Clearly this was a crime thriller and since every crime story needs a protagonist, I picked the oddest name from my list of names - Thursday Next - and started to work with the sort of person I thought she was. Although her character has developed over the series, I don't think she's changed fundamentally since I first fleshed her out in 1995. As to the details of my stories and the odder elements - I'm not really sure where they come from. My books evolve rather than grow. If you have no idea how a Jasper Fforde book is going to turn out, then you're in good company - when I'm writing them, I have no idea either.

2: In The Well of Lost Plots Thursday enters the place where the stories are created: is there any criticism about the best seller's industry?

Not really, but there are quite a few jokes about how the characters within a book are fully aware of how their book is doing - a sense of pride, almost, that if they do a good 'performance' in the book then that is reflected in the populairty. Similalry, if a book is doing badly or can't be published at all, then a cloak of depression may fall over the characters. This is one of the ideas that I love about the Bookworld - that every book we read is a little universe unto itself, and that as soon as we open the covers, the characters all leap into place and start to act away, stopping as soon as we fall asleep or close the book. If you didn't like a book that a friend recommended, it might not be you at all, but the characters having an 'off day' or even replaced by trainees. But for all of that, the characters in books are are human, and have the usual human foibles and vices; some may want a better part for themselves, while others may want to go to another book. This all has to be carefully controlled, which is where Jurisfiction comes in, the policing agency within books where a dedicated band of 'Prose Resource Operatives' tirelessly maintain the books 'as the autor intended'. As you can see from 'The Well of Lost Plots', things never go quite as smoothly as one hopes.

3: In this book you speak about the originality of the stories and about the characters' autodetermination: which are the main features of an original story?

Well, that's just the problem - there are no truly original stories any more; all we do is take the trillion or so plot points, character types, facts, words and drama and repackage them into something fresh and new. When Jursfiction speak of upgrading the Book Operating System, it is because of the lack of original stories - and yet the idea of having no ideas actually becomes the new idea itself...! It's all a bit strange, but suffice to say authors are narrative alchemists, who magically take two or three old plotpoints and fuse them together to make a new one. When Miss Havisham gives Thursday a small part of the Last Original Idea it was my way of saying that we endlessly recycle, but as Thursday correctly observes, the permuatations of possible stories are almost endless.

4: You said you got 76 rejections for the first book, then the success: Do you have any advice for a beginnig writer?

Firstly, have a long-term plan and vision for what you are wanting to do. A rough rule of thumb for the amount of time it takes to get published is about eight to ten years and four to seven books. If you the sort of person who can go from the rejection of their fourth book to sitting down to write the beginning of the fifth with no loss of enthusiasm, then you have probably got what it takes. Be your own worst critic. If you read a sentence or chapter back and it doesn't seem right, then it probably isn't, and needs work. If you feel a chapter doesn't work and you just spent six months working on it, get rid of it. Go with your instincts. Writing, like any creative endeavour, is mainly intuition. The only real qualification you need to be able to write is to being human, which comes easily to most of us. To help you better observe others, have as many strange jobs as possible - get to meet people who are totally unlike yourself. Don't expect results too soon. Don't get hung up on the 'I must be a published author by the time I'm twenty-five' thing. You may get published, but will you get established afterwards? Play the long game and stay there, play the short game and it is possible that due to a combination of inexpereince and lack of maturity, you may come crashing back down. As the saying goes: "Soon foretold, soon past, Long foretold, long past." The saying works equally well for Hollywood careers and the weather. Most of all, write because you want to, you really love it, and you can't stop yourself.

5: What do you think about the future of the Novel? ( some people say that the Novel is dead...) Which is the writer, today, you can read no end and always love?

The novel is very much alive, and with television getting worse by the second, I think the novel's life might just have got started. As for the writer who always makes me laug, I think that has to be P G Wodehouse. No contemporary author can touch him for sheer effevescene of prose, and a wit that sparkles on the page.



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