Patrick Ness
Last night on one of those wonderful evenings at my favourite bookshop -Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath- I met Patrick Ness, writer of some some truly amazing and different YA novels, my most loved there being the Chaos Walking trilogy. These evenings at Mr. B’s include music played by their “own” Bookshop Band, a buffet with wonderful food, wine and a lot of mingling and chat, but here I will concentrate just on the guest author of the evening, said Patrick Ness.
He brought a flipchart – rather unusual, at least in my experience, so we knew it wouldn’t just be a reading. He must have been equally surprised about the fact that the audience were not his usual teenage demographic but rather approaching middle age. He started introducing himself in a very interesting way – showing how easy it can be to develop an idea that might lead to a novel. An idea might be a good one, but will never lead to anything if it is not backed up with a string of facts and smaller ideas to give it enough substance to be made into a story. So he -and probably many other authors- draws on his own life. His dual nationality, being the youngest of three, his love of running marathons and some bad experience there that left him bleeding but still running, an early childhood spend in Hawaii – all this are recognizable, if slightly altered, in The Knife of Never Letting Go. One of the only two Teenagers at the event was asked to come forward and introduce herself in a similar way and with those notes we were asked to quickly throw ideas into the round for a Sci-Fi novel. It worked rather well. Another rather interesting fact was his approach to his beta readers and editor – he does not ask for critic but wants people to ask him questions about the book and in those he determines what is wrong or right with the story, where he has reached his goal and where more work is needed – that struck me as a very good way.
Patrick read a short excerpt from the first book of the trilogy and not only did he read very well, but he also read very fast to give us an impression of the young boy’s voice and the way he thinks – he hit the note there brilliantly, very impressive, because exactly that voice was in my head when I read the book.
What this evening did to me was a wish to write myself, seeing as it was so easy – but don’t worry, after a nights sleep I am ok again, I am not an author, I am a reader. But should you feel the need to write – there is one big bit of advice Patrick Ness gave to all might-be-authors: Only write the book you desperately want to read. If it is funny you need to laugh, if it is sad you will feel the tears, anything less and it won’t be a good book.
Seems sensible to me, this.
