Fire and Hemlock

Q: How did you start writing fantasy?
A: I started writing fantasy, rather to my surprise, when my children were old enough to start reading books for themselves. What they preferred was fantasy, but there wasn't much in those days that was any good. When they had read Kipling, Lewis, the Oz books, and Joan Aikin, they looked round for more, and my eldest son said wistfully that what he really liked was books that made him laugh. There were even fewer of those. So I tried it myself. But as soon as I had got started, I realized that what I was writing were the kind of books that I was never allowed as a child. I had almost no books as a child. In fact, I started actually writing out of sheer book-starvation when I was twelve, but I didn't know about fantasy in those days. What I wrote then were adventure stories, all very bad. But there was in my mind a picture of the ideal book, which was magical and exciting, and humorous too. I have been trying to write that book ever since.

Q: Where do your ideas come from?
A: My ideas come from all sorts of sources. One book started with my favorite road, chalky white and winding over blue distance; another with a tune that ought to have had words and didn't. My dog gave me the idea for "Dogsbody. Some of them just started from the characters in them, who were hanging around in my head demanding a book that fitted them, and still others from a tiny word or phrase, like "Hope is an anchor" or "Let's get weaving." One at least began because I was so fed up with the way other writers handled a subject; and thevery latest began because Susan, my editor at Greenwillow, wanted more, more, more about griffins. There have also been the odd few books which have sprung almost fully formed into my head, and I have not the faintest notion what gave me the idea for those.

Q: Your books have a great deal of crossover appeal. Do you write for any specific audience?
A: I don't write for anyone particularly. I find if I have a specific person in mind, it makes me too self-conscious to write — and the same goes for a larger audience. I prefer just to concentrate on the story, which is, after all, the main thing. But when I first started writing, it was when my husband was valiantly trying to read books aloud at bedtime to our children. Three sentences in, he fell asleep, was woken by shrieks of indignation, and fell asleep again because the stories bored him so. I vowed then that I would write books that had some interest in them for adults too.

Q: "Year of the Griffin, is a sequel to "Dark Lord of Derkholm. Did you know there would be a second book when you wrote the first? Will there be more?
A: I did not know there would be a sequel to "Dark Lord of Derkholm. "Year of the Griffin happened because I just had surgery and was wondering if I would ever have the energy to write again, when Susan Hirschman phoned and demanded more about griffins. I can't promise another, although I can see there ought to be a story in there about Wizard Derk's winged children. The way I write, continuations always take me by surprise.

Q: What authors have influenced you? And how do you feel when you are cited as an influence on other writers?
A: What authors have influenced me? The very few fantasywriters I came across as a child: Kipling, Elizabeth Goudge, P.L. Travers. These were augmented by books in tiny print filched from my parents' shelves: "Malory's Morte D'Arthur and one called "Epics and Romances of the Middle Ages, together with a lot of fairy stories (the Brothers Grimm in a learned edition and other queer collections) and a book of stories from "The Arabian Nights. I did not meet the usual books people read until my children were of an age to need them. It was like discovering treasure.
If I am cited as an influence on others, I am always very surprised and pleased — and just a bit exasperated, thinking, "Why can't they think of things themselves, the way I had to?

Q: If you weren't a writer, what would you be?
A: If I were not a writer, I would be a very miserable person.

Polly has two sets of memories...

One is normal: school, home, friends. The other, stranger memories begin nine years ago, when she was ten and gate-crashed an odd funeral in the mansion near her grandmother's house. Polly's just beginning to recall the sometimes marvelous, sometimes frightening adventures she embarked on with Tom Lynn after that. And then she did something terrible, and everything changed.

But what did she do? Why can't she remember? Polly mustuncover the secret, or her true love — and perhaps Polly herself — will be lost.

One of Diana Wynne Jones's most complex and fascinating fantasies, Fire and Hemlock has been unavailable for almost a decade and is now back in print for the delight of fans old and new.

In Her Own Words...

"I decided to be a writer at the age of eight, but I did not receive any encouragement in this ambition until thirty years later. I think this ambition was fired-or perhaps exacerbated is a better word-by early marginal contacts with the Great, when we were evacuated to the English Lakes during the war. The house we were in had belonged to Ruskin's secretary and had also been the home of the children in the books of Arthur Ransome. One day, finding I had no paper to draw on, I stole from the attic a stack of exquisite flower-drawings, almost certainly by Ruskin himself, and proceeded to rub them out. I was punished for this. Soon after, we children offended Arthur Ransome by making a noise on the shore beside his houseboat. He complained. So likewise did Beatrix Potter, who lived nearby. It struck me then that the Great were remarkably touchy and unpleasant (even if, in Ruskin's case, it was posthumous), and I thought I would like to be the same, without the unpleasantness.

"I started writing children's books when we moved to a village in Essex where there were almost no books. The main activities there were hand-weaving, hand-making pottery, and singing madrigals, for none of which I had either taste or talent. So, in intervals between trying to haunt the church and sitting on roofs hoping to learn to fly, I wrote enormous epic adventure stories which I read to my sisters instead of the real books we did not have. This writing was stopped, though, when it was decided I must be coached to go to University. A local philosopher was engaged to teach me Greek and philosophy in exchange for a dollhouse (my family never did things normally), and I eventually got a place at Oxford.

"At this stage, despite attending lectures by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, I did not expect to be writing fantasy. But that was what I started to write when I was married and had children of my own. It was what they liked best. But small children do not allow you the use of your brain. They used to jump on my feet to stop me thinking. And I had not realized how much I needed to teach myself about writing. I took years to learn, and it was not until my youngest child began school that I was able to produce a book which a publisher did not send straight back.

"As soon as my books began to be published, they started coming true. Fantastic things that I thought I had made up keep happening to me. The most spectacular was Drowned Ammet. The first time I went on a boat after writing that book, an island grew up out of the sea and stranded us. This sort of thing, combined with the fact that I have a travel jinx, means that my life is never dull."

Diana Wynne Jones is the author of many highly praised books for young readers, as well as three plays for children and a novel for adults. She lives in Bristol, England, with her husband, a professor of English at Bristol University. They have three sons.