Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it’s very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.
Why do so many children love the idea of being snowed in or shipwrecked, of having to survive on one’s own? When I was a child, I was no exception. I wanted to hunt with a bow and arrow like the Stone Age people: to skin deer and build my own shelter. And I desperately wanted a wolf. As we lived in London, my options were limited.
When my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1991, I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said no. I was a burnt-out litigation solicitor in my thirties, hating my life, and his cancer made me re-evaluate it all.
To get the feel of the polar night, I went back to Spitsbergen in winter. I went snowshoeing in the dark and experimented with headlamps and climbed a glacier in driving snow.
To experience the northern forest in the raw, I went to northern Finland and Lapland, travelling on horseback, and sleeping on reindeer skins in the traditional open-fronted Finnish laavu. I ate elk heart, reindeer and lingonberries, and tried out spruce resin: the chewing gum of the Stone Age.
There’s this whole thing of being two people. You are the person you want to be – the writer – and then there’s this weird other life of going on tour and talking about the writing. And that really is weird.
The most remote place I’ve been to was in Greenland. I remember setting out for a solo hike from a small cabin, itself several hours’ boat ride from the nearest settlement.
My thirties merged into my forties, and I sort of gradually realised that I don’t really want children. Now I’m glad I don’t have them. Part of that is because I have my books.
My mother had to stop me reading to make me go and get some fresh air. I used to get so annoyed. She actually had to sit on my book because, otherwise, I would find it.
It’s the little details I love. How to fletch your arrows with owl feathers, because owls fly silently, so maybe your arrows will, too. How to carry fire in a piece of smouldering fungus wrapped in birchbark. These are the things which help a world come alive.
In general, when I’m writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it’s for.
I’ve climbed Stromboli when it’s erupting, which is quite a heavy climb: three hours with a helmet to get to the top. When you’re there, and it’s dark, and you can see this eruption and feel it, it’s quite different to watching it on TV.
I’m not the next J. K. Rowling. We’ve got one already. It’s flattering to be compared to her. I like her books and loved the first three particularly, but apart from the fact that they’ve got young boys as heroes, they’re very different.
I’m constantly being surprised and finding unplanned things – because the writing is a process of experiencing things on the ground with the characters.
I would love to live in the wilds of nowhere, and when writing ‘Chronicles,’ I would occasionally rent a cottage in the middle of nowhere that had no mobile reception, but I’m not about to move away from my family.