The Devil You Do or The Devil You Don't by Michael Robotham In my interview with Michael Robotham, the crime writer said that he thought crime writers must be naturally inclined towards religion, but for him it was simply a backdrop for his writing. “What I find interesting about most religions is that they’re a huge moral compass for people,” he said. “Morality is so important, which is why I think novels deal with the question of how do we behave ethically and morally? I think there’s an overwhelming need for that and an overwhelming need to figure out our place in the world.” He admitted that his own spirituality was rather a private affair. “I don’t know how to be religious, so I don’t go to church. I have a personal relationship with God that’s not the same as, let’s say, my Jewish friends. I say that because I don’t feel I need to go to church, to speak to God on a daily basis. “But I believe in spirituality and I like that I can’t explain the spiritual, but there is something and when you’re there it’s okay, but if you try and describe it you go all gooey. I’ve never managed to adequately describe it myself, it’s just a feeling I’ve always had. “It would be ridiculous for me to say you can’t be spiritual if you don’t go to church, but if you do go to church it doesn’t mean you’re not spiritual. I think everybody has a unique relationship with God.” More info: My Kind of Sunday by Michael Robotham How to be an Author by James Patterson and Ian Rankin I interviewed both authors to find out how they managed to strike such a winning formula. James Patterson said, “You have to find the most interesting thing that happens to you every day. I love the daily grind. I can’t help but think how a little detail can make a character’s day.” Ian Rankin, a much more humble individual, said, “You can’t not think of it. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to write it down.” They both agreed that the first draft is the most fun part of the process because it’s freewheeling. “It’s a completely mindless activity,” said James. “You just let it fly, and it’s wonderful because you don’t know where it’s going. I don’t edit, even during the writing.” More info: How to be a novelist by Michael Joseph How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr Seuss The most surprising thing about interviewing Dr Seuss was how animated he was about some of the things that had already been said about his work. “It seems to me, if you have a child who is sick and you’re in the hospital with them and if you’re saying this is what is wrong with you and this is what you can do about it, a great deal of the time that’s what they want to know,” said Dr Seuss. “They want you to tell them about the problem. My favorite piece is, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. “I remember coming home from one of the children’s hospitals I worked in and walking through the playground and seeing all these beautiful little boys, only they all looked like they had acne. They were all different ages but they all looked the same, and there was no rhyme or reason to it. It’s a problem I never solved. You see, when you work in a hospital, you see the same faces again and again and again.” More info: Dr Seuss' Christmas in July by Dr Seuss Life of Pi by Yann Martel “The question that comes first to my mind is, how do you turn a movie into a book?” said Yann Martel in his interview with Literary Hub. “The challenge was to write it, narrate it, draw it, take it to the screen and then come back with a book, to imagine it all.” He had the advantage of knowing before he started that it would be called Life of Pi, and he used that element to great effect. He wrote the book, he told me, over the course of six years. “Life of Pi is different from my other books because in Life of Pi I decided at the very beginning that it was going to be a long book, because in order to deal with a book that long you have to do it in a very different way. It takes me 20 years to write a book, and if it’s not a book I’ve done, it’s a very unusual book, and this one I decided that I had to find a way of making it as concise as possible. “The writing of Life of Pi was something else. When I finished it I thought it was so difficult that I thought it would be very hard for other people to read. “I read it again and thought this can’t be true, because I worked so hard on it. It’s so much work! But it is true. It’s so hard.” More info: Life of Pi by Yann Martel Stardust by Neil Gaiman Neil Gaiman is a prolific writer, with the ability to produce novels at the rate of one per year, but he told me that this is just one of the projects that he is working on at the moment. “For me it was really about the challenge,” he said. “I’ve written very big books before. All I have to do is give myself the assignment to write something big and it feels like I can do it.” For his next project, though, he would like to write a book about monsters that were inspired by ancient myth and fairy tale. “I want to write about a monster living in a small village,” he said. “And also some of the questions of the kind of monster you have, which is a very nice idea in itself, and I think a very interesting thing to write about.” The author also discussed the issue of why people like his novels and how it has grown since his first book was published. “I’m pretty sure it’s not what I was doing that everybody liked,” he said. “It’s more what was happening with the language and style and what the stories were. Now it’s very different.” More info: Stardust by Neil Gaiman A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness In my interview with Patrick Ness, he told me he was originally writing a book about an evil tree, but his editor convinced him to change it. “It was a terrible thing because the moment I started writing that book I knew exactly how the story was going to end,” he said. “But the trick for me was just to write the book as honestly as possible and have enough faith to know it wasn’t actually going to be as terrible as I thought it was going to be. “I read an amazing review of that book, I think it was in The Guardian by some girl called Jessica [Lee]. She said, ‘He’s actually writing this book for the child inside himself.’ And I thought, ‘That’s exactly right.’ “But then it turned out that maybe I shouldn’t change it. It meant that the story was more complicated to write and it ended up being an experiment to see what I could do with the language. That was really exciting, because I’ve had my mind stretched by that book in all sorts of wonderful ways and it’s a little bit of a challenge. I had never really allowed myself to use words the way I do in the book. “That’s one of the things that drew me to it. It has a lovely sense of poetry to it, but it’s not sentimental. It’s not a tear jerker. It’s more beautiful than that. And I think that’s one of the reasons that people have responded so positively to the book, and maybe the main reason.” More info: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith Robert Galbraith’s The Man Who Was Thursday was once described by the author himself as “a bit of autobiographical fiction.” He told me that his next book, The Silkworm, would be exactly the same. “I’m not doing anything to disguise anything,” he said. “It’s all true. It’s my experience and I would hope a little interesting, because it is about spying.” But that’s only part of the story, of course. Robert Galbraith is a former spy who helped create MI6, and so The Silkworm is really the story of how he used his role to try to save the British Secret Service from itself. “What I’m trying to do is to make some sense of it,” he said. “It’s all true, but not in a factual way.” He wanted the book to be a thriller that showed how difficult it is