![]() ![]() A lot of people think that if you’re writing about an imaginary world you start off by making a map and then work out its history and language and then set a story there, but I’m not interested in doing that. I tend to think the best way to do world-building is to just start writing. But I do find ideas seep across from one to the other – I think Utterly Dark and her home in the Autumn Isles has developed out of the same ideas that we used in our first book, Oliver and the Seawigs. And Sarah now gets to read all my solo books while I’m writing them, and we talk about them together, so she’s a big influence on them all.Īll of your solo series are set in such different landscapes with unique characters, do they evolve together or do you spend time worldbuilding before setting to writing story? It’s not that different, because it’s still about inventing a story and putting it into words, but it’s much more fun, because we get to share ideas and make each other giggle a lot. Writing for younger readers with Sarah McIntyre must be very different, has working as part of a duo changed the way you approach your solo novels? So the research is important in helping me understand the characters and get a sense of their world, but I try not to let too much of it clutter up the finished book. One of the characters in Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild is an ex-soldier called Figgy Dan, so I spent some time working out when he did his soldiering and what battles he had fought in, but actually that’s not important for the story, you just need to know he’s been a soldier. So that means that Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild is happening in 1811, and a lot of it happens on a different island called Summertide, which is a bit bigger and a bit more developed, so I did have to do a bit more research about how grand country houses ran in those days, etc – but of course, if I get something wrong, or want to change something, I can always say, ah, well, they did things a bit differently on Summertide….Īnd a lot of the research I do doesn’t end up in the actual book. I always knew it was somewhere you’d get to on a sailing ship rather than a car ferry, so I set the story in a sort of vaguely olden-days 18th or early 19th Century period, and gradually as I wrote I worked out it was happening in 1810. Not very much, because Wildsea, where most of Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep is set, is an imaginary island. Utterly lives in a magical but realistic historical period, how much research did you do to make it historically accurate? I was thrilled to be given the chance to ask him a few questions! This is the sequel to the equally brilliant UTTERLY DARK AND THE FACE OF THE DEEP, from one of my very favourite authors, Philip Reeve. ![]()
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