:00:08. > :00:14.We all know what it feels like to get lost in a book. In Scarlett
:00:15. > :00:20.Thomas's novel Dragon's Green she turns it into a story of magic and
:00:21. > :00:25.danger. Eight children's quest to make sense of a police turned upside
:00:26. > :00:29.down by a catastrophic event called worldquake. A writer who has had
:00:30. > :00:33.great success with what is called literary fiction, she has had an
:00:34. > :00:34.experience that has changed her as much as any of her characters.
:00:35. > :00:52.Welcome. So what did you discover about
:00:53. > :00:57.writing and about your own writing when you brought magic into the
:00:58. > :01:06.equation? Eight lot is the answer to that. Evelyn in my career I started
:01:07. > :01:12.writing about maths and then I moved onto physics and then botany and no
:01:13. > :01:15.magic! Like so many classics of children's fiction you're stepping
:01:16. > :01:22.into another world, whether through a wardrobe or bony rabbits all and
:01:23. > :01:26.in this case by going back to a book as the doorway to some different
:01:27. > :01:31.world, it is obviously something that energises you. And for me, this
:01:32. > :01:39.is part of the whole concept of magic. I think books are magic. I
:01:40. > :01:43.think lots of things are magic but books are definitely magic and when
:01:44. > :01:51.you open the pages and there are a black marks on a white sheet and
:01:52. > :02:00.they can you, they can really do almost anything, it is astonishing.
:02:01. > :02:02.You wrote somewhere in the course of describing your meditation with the
:02:03. > :02:05.categorisation of books and we shouldn't think of literary fiction
:02:06. > :02:13.and children's fiction as being separate things, you also said every
:02:14. > :02:17.children's story, every novel I think you said, is a political text.
:02:18. > :02:23.Can you explain that? How long have you got? When you write children's
:02:24. > :02:28.fiction you have to make lots of decisions and especially in a
:02:29. > :02:33.non-realist setting and world building from scratch, so I had to
:02:34. > :02:37.decide, for example, in the otherworldly characters called to
:02:38. > :02:42.there are a lovely big houses and groans and everything is a bit PG
:02:43. > :02:46.Wodehouse, but how do you maintain that without servants and they kind
:02:47. > :02:51.of feudal situation which I don't believe is right for people to live
:02:52. > :02:57.in, so I immediately I have to confront these problems. If the
:02:58. > :03:02.characters brought breakfast only three, who does that and why? Is she
:03:03. > :03:07.a servant? We discover more about how that world works. So you have
:03:08. > :03:14.two invent rules and therefore you are saying things about how people
:03:15. > :03:18.live. When I studied politics years and years ago I discovered that
:03:19. > :03:22.politics happens in any situation with limited resources and you have
:03:23. > :03:27.to do decide how to divide things up. It also happens at any fictional
:03:28. > :03:32.situation in which the author has made fundamental things. How
:03:33. > :03:39.difficult did you find it to think about the right rules for your
:03:40. > :03:45.world? It require the same leaps of imagination. It is plotting a world
:03:46. > :03:50.rather than just a story with any world, so at times it was easy and
:03:51. > :03:54.other times it took me months to come up with solutions, and some of
:03:55. > :04:00.them I are still working on! One of the things I am fascinated by years
:04:01. > :04:06.in the early sections particularly you are talking about life in school
:04:07. > :04:12.in many passages, and the sort of rules and the way that school works,
:04:13. > :04:22.and you clearly have an affection for the kind of discipline, almost,
:04:23. > :04:25.that would get people into learning. There is a very distinct kind of
:04:26. > :04:31.schoolroom that you described. Can you tell us how that came about
:04:32. > :04:38.because I am intrigued. I think it is partly a kind of nostalgia. Not
:04:39. > :04:41.political nostalgia but an anaesthetic nostalgia, not so much
:04:42. > :04:44.for what my school was like but what books were like when I was at
:04:45. > :04:52.school. We are going back quite far now. The main teacher who actually
:04:53. > :04:58.has your best interests at heart, that is an archetype that we find in
:04:59. > :05:04.a lot of areas. It is a reassuring archetype to you? I think so because
:05:05. > :05:08.I suppose I believe no one is really that mean. Even the baddies in the
:05:09. > :05:16.books are all from the world up blushing, by the way. Funny, that.
:05:17. > :05:23.They are all a bit too clever for their own good. They do have bad
:05:24. > :05:27.aims in mind. Other than that I try to be compassionate towards my
:05:28. > :05:32.character, so the mean old teacher wants the children to do well, and
:05:33. > :05:41.she is hilarious. And the heroine of the book, what is your feeling about
:05:42. > :05:49.her? Is that a lot of you in higher? Their vows. And the idea of the
:05:50. > :05:53.General Hugo who sets off on a quest and difficult things happen and she
:05:54. > :05:57.has to keep going, that was important to me when I was writing
:05:58. > :06:02.the book, I had been ill and it was a struggle to get better, and I
:06:03. > :06:06.found reading about other female heroes really inspiring. You have
:06:07. > :06:10.been quite open about the fact that you had for want of a better word we
:06:11. > :06:15.will call it a nervous breakdown, and this is a book that followed
:06:16. > :06:19.that, so it is inevitable that you must feel quite strongly about some
:06:20. > :06:24.of the ideas about in the video was in some other things that come out
:06:25. > :06:29.in this book, that it is not just a chance collision of atoms, it is
:06:30. > :06:32.something that sprang from your own experience? Absolutely. There were
:06:33. > :06:37.some scenes that I wrote that as I wrote them they kind of made me
:06:38. > :06:43.better, so when they go through the forest and she confronts her Demons,
:06:44. > :06:50.something in me sort of settled. A straightforward metaphorical thing.
:06:51. > :06:52.And I find especially with children's fiction and magical
:06:53. > :06:57.fiction that you are operating in that more archetypal sort of realm
:06:58. > :07:00.where you are dealing with these deep things, and I am completely
:07:01. > :07:05.better now just in case anybody is wondering. In some ways you want it
:07:06. > :07:10.to deal with them and it strikes me that you have found this form that
:07:11. > :07:14.came to you quite naturally, although there is a lot of hard work
:07:15. > :07:18.and problems to be solved, but the idea of doing it, that once you
:07:19. > :07:24.picked it up you never wanted to let it go, it allowed you that freedom.
:07:25. > :07:27.Absolutely, and something about the voice that I was able to access for
:07:28. > :07:34.this book. Different from any of your other novels. Sort of or more a
:07:35. > :07:36.development of. I think each book is a development of the one that came
:07:37. > :07:48.before and this definitely develops the voice from The Seed Collectors
:07:49. > :07:52.which is an omniscient, free direct style. Is it always useful to have
:07:53. > :07:58.some characters who are always seen from the outside. You don't know
:07:59. > :08:03.what's going on inside their heads. You can have that rule and when
:08:04. > :08:06.you're writing, rules and restrictions are good because they
:08:07. > :08:13.make you work hard and imaginatively to solve problems, but on the other
:08:14. > :08:18.hand, I think I do go everywhere with this book and it is quite fun.
:08:19. > :08:21.You're suddenly with a villain minor character or are you zoom out to
:08:22. > :08:34.this strange narrator who isn't quite bored but is next -- isn't
:08:35. > :08:39.quite God but is next to God. For me, I have found a voice that I
:08:40. > :08:42.didn't let myself use for a long time, or I just didn't try it out
:08:43. > :08:46.and now I have found that it is amazing. I don't think it is
:08:47. > :08:52.necessarily an easy thing to do, but for me it was kind of coming home to
:08:53. > :08:55.my true voice. Scarlett Thomas, author of Dragon's Green and many
:08:56. > :08:58.more to come, thank you. Thank you.