Robert Swindells - interviewed Jan 01

Actually it was UNBELIEVER that required a rewrite. I had intended it as an attack on Christian fundamentalism, but in its first form it seemed to be attacking Christianity as a whole. The rewrite corrected this. As to the question whether Martha's parents "get what they deserve" in ABOMINATION, I believe strongly that punsihment, retribution, revenge, whatever you prefer to call it, is pointless once the offence has been committed, unless it is likely that the offender will reoffend unless deterred or detained, or unless it can be shown that to punish the offender will have a deterrent effect on others.

Obviously Martha's parents aren't going to repeat their offence, which has dreadful consequences for them anyway. It's like the proposal to launch a reactionary nuclear strike whose only consequence will be the destruction of the whole planet instead of half: a criminally pointless act.

The whole thing needs to be more direct. I'm very pleased with how Penguin are dealing with Bloodtide - postcards in cinemas for example. I do think in general that teenage fiction needs to be detached somewhat from children's fiction and given it's own place in the sun. Music stores, magazines - all these areas are much neglected.

I don't think about the marketing side. I suppose my publishers do their best and I can't complain.

Audrey Adams from Andersen Press has been my editor since I began and I trust her judgement very much. She has the ability to judge a book with such clarity, not matter what form it takes.

Jane Nissen, at Hamish Hamilton. She's a picky editor who knows what she's doing. When she retires, I retire.

David Almond. Phillip Pullman. Anne Fine. Robert Swindells. Robert Cormier. Gillian Cross...

At that age I read very widely both above and below my age, so I would be enjoying Jacqueline Wilson, Brian Jacques, Thomas Harris, Stephen King. The list could be endless, there's so many fine writers about of all kinds.

I'd be reading Melvin Burgess, Malorie Blackman, Pete Johnson, Anne Fine, David Almond...

Also Charles Dickens, J.D. Salinger, Jack London...

Film and TV influenced me a good deal in Bloodtide. The Alien series, the Terminator series. Films like Bladerunner, too - very important in my vision of the ruined city of the future. I do think a great deal about films. Another aspect of Bloodtide is that it's a love story, and I learned from The Night Porter that you can have a love story in the most unlikely of circumstances - even murderous ones. Favourite directors include Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, James Cameron (sometimes), Quentin Tarentino. There are a host of others, who I only know by their films.

Not at all - consciously at least. I like the cinema, especially British and Australian films. I think TV has lost a lot of its quality, its cutting edge, though Channel Four has made some good stuff for the big screen.

Well, I don't always use an internal voice. I am aware that both these devices have their different uses. From a personal point of view, Ifind it very easy to pick up a voice and use it to tell a story - it's a bit like doing an impersonation. It has an element of performance about it. Even though I write on my own of course, that appeals to me, and I just love the way the viewpoint shifts from place to place and person to person, when you use a number of different viewpoints. I think with the detached viewpoint, there is more a sense of conducting the story by the author - it feels as if one has more control over the reader, whereas with the first person, I feel that the reader can more easily judge for themselves. That might be an illusion, but if I feel that a character has something to powerful to say, I want to give them their own voice, partly to give them scope, and partly so that I can engage with them as a writer without having to judge them as I go along.

I'm not aware that my readers see things from a detached camera viewpoint: I hope my central characters tell the story. A number of my books are written in the first person. Perhaps I have misunderstood the question.

Well, I have two teenage boys, 13 and 15, and I don't think they spend all that much time "keeping in touch" with youth culture. I try to be open to anything that comes along in the right way at the right time. You never know what's going to work - you just have to keep your eyes open. It's a lot of fun finding interesting ideas and then taking them into a new context, and that's something that you can play around a lot with, in terms of what's called youth culture. On the other hand, I don't think books work terribly well if they try to capture what is currently fashionable - it's changed by the time you get there and anyhow, magazines and TV shows are better at illustrating such stuff. But there is a great deal of talent, often in very surprising places, and I try to be prepared to mercilessly pinch anything that strikes my fancy.

It is certainly necessary. I observe my grandchildren, and I have young contacts I can consult on aspects of youth culture which escape me, as they increasingly do. I don't even ask about EmineM or Pokemon because I don't want to know.

Crave is a strong word. I'm very proud to be writing for young adults for all sorts of reasons. Because it's all fairly new there are so many areas that haven't been touched. Who could resist it? Secondly, being an area that is perceived by the book establishment as being somehow "less" or not as important as real proper important literature for real proper important grown-up people allows you to mess about and not take life as seriously - always a good thing when working with the imagination. Having said that, I am producing books for older people, I know adults do often get a very great deal out of reading them, and of course it's always nice to have more people reading your work. One day, maybe, I'll do a truly adult book - something about bringing up teenage children or being a grandparent, if I ever live that long. Then I'll crave an adult readership.

I don't want an adult readership. See my answer to Q16.

I think I've said all I need to on that one... (see Melvin's answer to Q4)

I think the important ones fell in the sixties and seventies. I get mildly irritated when someone writes to my publisher because they've found the expression 'bugger off' in my book. Where have such people been these past thirty years?

I didn't regard Ghost as being about invisibility. [ACHUKA: Although the main character never becomes truly invisible, he does remain hidden from view for much of the book...] I thought of it as being about two things - one, using ghosts as imagery. What is a ghost? The idea of it being a memory really struck me the first time I heard it years ago, and the idea of loosing a part of yourself in old age - my uncle very recently died of a heart attack, after suffering from Alzheimer's for several years - struck me very powerfully. It's like someone loosing their personality, loosing "themselves," if you like. And it was about that "really big adventure" of children's fiction - death. Every since I wrote a book called An Angel for May, which was about depression (and is hopefully going to be turned into a film in just a few months) I've wanted to have a look at that subject, and try and make it into an exciting book - I hope this one is it. I don't believe in fairies, though. Oops! There goes another one.

Invisibility was a fantasy of mine when I was a boy. Also flying like Peter Pan. I suppose it was the wish for a means of escape. I suspect kids still fantasize this way, so I wrote about it.

As for Fairies, I believe in the Cottingley fairies: the clincher for me was when the snapshots were examined at NASA who said they couldn't have been faked. I suspect the photographer's 'confession' in old age was a bid finally to be left alone.

As far as Ghost is concerned, I hope it will help readers to understand something about the frailties of old age, and perhaps to see how it is posisble to reach an acceptance of death - tricky thing to imagine when you're ten or so. Those themes are tied up in imagery of the ghost itself, which in itself is something to do with the idea of self. I hope the portrayal of Mr Alveston is sympathetic, and that it penetrates; but probably, the imagery of the ghost is the most important part of the book in getting these things across.

My own work apart, I think that the idea of how books move people, which they undoubtedly do, is a much more difficult question than it might seem. The effect stories can have on people is complicated and often mysterious. They can do so much - provide refuge, or insight, lead to understanding, provide channels for change or just pass a few hours - not to mention being boring, at their worst. Stories are a very deeply rooted part of our lives and culture, but more than that, I tihnk they are a part of being human. All cultures and people's have stories. Myth and religion is born into stories, so God himself appears to people in narrative form, before he comes as an image. We relate our pasts, present and future to each other in story form. I dislike the romantic idea of the mysterious, which is often just an excuse to be obscure, but I do think stories can provide a spiritual side in our lives which is difficult to pin down. Educationally, of course, stories have always been used as an illustration, or as a way to lead people to understanding and insight, or to put across information and I'm sure novels will continue to be used like that. But I do think that one of the greatest strengths of novels is in deeper stylistic qualities, stylisitc qualitites, perhaps, which lead the reader to identify with people or events with which they may not previously have realised how much they have in common, or to see things in themselves they may not have known were there before, or even to sense elements of life they haven't even thought of. Although they are made up of words, I think stories can reveal things to us in a pre-verbal form - a thought or feeling before we find the words to frame it. When I think of the novels that had a big effect on me in the past, such as Catch-22, or Gormanghast, or the Norse myths, or The Wind in the Willows, I think I could describe what it is that fascinated and influenced me, but the concepts would be far removed from anything on the school curriculum.

I can only speak about my own experience. Books I read as a child/adolescent certainly opened windows for me on all sorts of worlds, including the world of adults. In fact, I find it impossible to imagine what would have become of me, what sort of person I would have grown up to be, if I hadn't been a reader. Certainly I wouldn't be a writer now.

It's my hope that my work will play a part in opening a window or two for some of today's young readers. That's why I'm not interested in attracting adult readers: closed windows in their lives usually stay closed, and some have minds to match.