I conducted this interview with David Almond in May 2003, after I heard him speak at the Reading Matters conference at the Australian Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria. I hope this transcript captures the conversational tone of the interview, which was for me, both fun and informative. I realise that some of the discussion rises straight from David's presentation at Reading Matters, but I hope that readers passing familiar with his novels will make sense of the conversation and benefit from his insights into his writing process. My questions are in bold. There are two pages, and, as always, copyright remains with me!

I was really interested when you talked about Skellig arising as a gift, and then you went on to say that you didn’t know what Michael was going to find in the shed and you didn’t know that Mina was going to appear. I was fascinated then to find out what part of the story came to you before you discovered all those other elements that were going to be in it that are so critical to it.

I suppose it came with… I think the reason why it just went so well, because it was a book that just went fantastically, was because all those initial elements came at the beginning. So I had Michael’s voice and I had the moving to a new house, I had the family, I had the baby coming, I had the garage, and the garage really was the thing that Michael had to go in to explore it, so it gave me this opening that Michael was exploring. He didn’t know what he’d found so it was like I could go along with Michael. And then when Michael had gone in(to the shed) a couple of times, up pops Mina. She was like the other element as well. She was an element that gave a lot of discipline to the whole thing, because Mina’s always telling people you must do this, you must do that. So Mina for me was the sort of (heart) of the story really.

In some ways she helps propel the action, she makes Michael act at times when he’s not otherwise going to.

That’s right. I think without Mina the whole thing could have collapsed into nothing and become very slushy or too long. But Mina had a kind of strictness about her which helped everybody inside the story. It certainly helped me. So in a sense I suppose I felt I was almost a character in the story as well, I was in there with them.

Has that discovery of elements and characters that you didn’t initially plan or know were going to be there, has that happened in all of the books? There seems to be a sense that as you read (your books) that things unfold. I wonder if that’s how the writing process works (for you).

It is really. I hope that I write in such a way that I allow myself to discover things as I’m writing. So often I’ll get into a story and I think, oh, so that’s what it’s about and I have to throw away everything. that went before and then make this new track, follow this new track. And I always wait for the moment when the story does take on its own life and it begins to give me something instead of me having to control everything. In Kit’s Wilderness the major moment for me as the writer was when Burning Bush, the teacher, says to the kids “Now you’re going to write a story about an ice boy” and the first sentence is His name was Lak. That really came almost out of the blue and when I wrote that I thought, oh no, I’ve got to write that story as well.

Like that “Oh, no, he’s an angel!” moment in Skellig.

Yes. And then again I thought, “Right!” But because it was given to the class it really was like, when I came to those bits of the story, to Lak’s story, it really was like, “Oh, Kit can write this”. So it was like there's another character in my head, Kit Watson, who was writing that part of the story. The Lak story just flowed in the same way that Mina’s story flowed, as Skellig did. So yes, I do tend to write in that way, it’s like putting together lots of elements, kind of assembling them in a way I suppose, like making spells. I think children do this, don’t they; they put objects together and pull things in, almost like witchery. I think I use words in that way, put them together and some kind of spell emerges from them.

I’ve heard you refer to spells and chants. Ritual in language as well as ritual as act seems to appear quite often in your work.

It does and that’s something that I haven’t deliberately pursued, but once I found it was happening I was very happy with it. It felt like a natural way to write about the things I want to write about.

Well, kids have rituals and all of the playground chants and so on are part of that.

That’s right and I love all that. The game in Kit’s Wilderness is a kind of ritual…

You said you’d actually seen kids… was it at the school you taught at?

No, it was the school, I was a kid, I was maybe five or six, and I remember the big boys played this game on the grass outside the school, and there were lots of rumours about it. Of course when you’re five or six that’s terrifying. I remember being absolutely terrified. And looking across to see them playing this game on the grass one afternoon, I was scared stiff, and then when I sat down to write Kit’s Wilderness, the memory of it just kept coming back, so the ritual was something I could construct the book around.

I really love how when you bring in those quite mysterious moments, as in Kit’s first death in the game—you’re a very different writer from Diana Wynne Jones, but you remind me of her in the way you don’t feel obliged to explain everything. That’s the thing that I really admire about her work, but it’s also something that she’s been criticised for by adults who say to her, “Your books are too difficult for children.” Have you had that kind of reaction?

Occasionally people have tried to float that. But if people say that to me I really take no notice, and I think, well how absurd. If it’s too difficult then they wouldn’t read it. And as a writer your job is simply to give everything you can to each book. There’s loads of stuff in the books that people don’t see and I don’t expect them to see, because they’re very personal to me. But the books can only work if I commit everything. If I held back, said I can’t put that in because it’s too complicated, you know you can’t kill the book off, so you have write unfettered. And the thing that holds you, the thing that disciplines you is the language, is the story. You put everything that you can into that story. And it has loads of things that people will see and loads of things that people won’t see…

And things that they’ll see that you won’t see…

…that I don’t see. I’ve found out things about my books from sitting in front of kids, "have you got any questions?", and a boy or a girl will ask me a question, and I’ll think, That’s why I did that!

Can you think of any examples of that?

There was one boy put his hand up one day—it was just after Kit had been released, there were just the two books, Skellig and Kit’s Wilderness, and he said Mina’s got a cat, and Askew’s got a dog. He said, so there’s some relationship between Mina and Askew and the cat and the dog, you know, the relationship that children and animals have, familiars…

Had he read Philip Pullman?

I don’t know, he may well have. It started to come to me, yes there is a kind of relationship between Mina and John Askew that the boy had seen that I hadn’t seen.

I suppose they play a similar function in terms of the structure and the plot. Of course, they’re very different characters.

Yes. Of course, a lot of this is stuff that adults say kids won’t get. If you write books that seem quite complicated, a lot of adults say, well we’ll get those bits and the kids’ll get the nice story. It’s a very kind of patronising attitude towards kids. A kid one day put up his hand and said, “After Skellig goes away, Doctor MacNabola is never there either. We go back to the hospital and Dr MacNabola isn’t there.” And I said, yes that’s right. So he said, “Possibly, Dr MacNabola was like an element of Skellig, of Skelligness.”

That’s a very sophisticated response.

Yes. And I looked through the book again, and I thought, well! It could well be there. Another thing that struck me the other day, and again it was about Kit’s Wilderness, a few times a boy or girl has said, “When they’re doing the death game, they really die, don’t they?” and I’ve always said, “No, they don’t, it’s just a game, they’re kids, it’s just a game of pretend”. And then I was in a school in Brisbane the other day and I read them the first chapter, which is about them coming back out into the light again, and I was reading it and I thought, My God! They could have died, maybe they did die, and the whole thing is a post-death experience. So children do all this wonderful, sophisticated re-imagining of the book, which as a writer—what more can you ask for?

Again, Diana Wynne Jones says she prefers writing for children because when she writes for adults she has to keep stopping and explaining things. She never feels obliged to do that for children. Perhaps there’s a sense of trust that children still have that the author will take them wherever they’re meant to go, and things will become clear or not as the story requires.

Yes. Kids don’t have this need to know everything. As adults we think, if I don’t know something I’ve got to make sure that I do know it. But kids live in this sort of area where they know that they don’t know everything, so that’s there sort of natural way of being.

You wrote for many years before Skellig was published, primarily I take it for an adult audience, however one makes those distinctions. Did that other writing have in common with the books you’ve since had published for a young audience—I won’t even say blend—that recognition of the mysterious and the fantastic in the every day?

Some if it did, yes, but I hadn’t really found a way to manage it. I wrote a long novel that was based on the boundaries between what we know and what we don’t know, between the real and imagined. Then I half-wrote another novel that was exploring quite obviously religious themes, and bringing it up today, and using a character like the character in my new novel The Fire-Eaters, someone who bangs up against the edge of the world of dreams and something else. But it had never settled, and there was something about writing for children that let me find a form to write what I wanted to write about in a way I wanted to write, and also to write fluently. I write much more fluently than I did when I was writing short stories. I used to write short stories and as is natural to short stories everything sort of shrank. I made things very small and neat. But when I began to write for children—this obvious thing as a writer, what do you do? You tell stories, so the storytelling thing really sort of released all this and gave me a sort of manner that I could write through.

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©Judith Ridge 2003