Any Problem Can Be Solved

A Notion For A Story Is For Me A Confluence Of Real Events, Historical Perhaps, Or From My Own Memory To Create An Exciting Fusion.

I Spend Months, Sometimes Years, Doing What I Call Dreamtime, Weaving It Together Inside My Head. But When I Actually Feel That The Egg Of My Story Is Ready To Hatch, Then I Can Write It In Three Months. Then I Know The Landscape And The People Well And From The Inside, But I Don't Necessarily Know Where The Story Is Going To Take Us.

Perhaps It Is Partly That We Need To Love Books Ourselves As Parents, Grandparents And Teachers In Order To Pass On That Passion For Stories To Our Children. It's Not About Testing And Reading Schemes, But About Loving Stories And Passing On That Passion To Our Children.

Any Problem Can Be Solved Between People If Only They Can Trust Each Other

Any Story That Gets Us Thinking, And Particularly Young People, Thinking Why? Whether It's As A Result Of Reading The Book, Or Coming Out Of The Theatre Or The Cinema, I Think We Should Just Simply Be Asking The Question 'why'? Why Did It Happen To Those People? Was It Necessary? And Anything That Gets Us Thinking Like That Is Really Important.