"Children say, in letters, "Where do you get your ideas?" I think they are hoping that the author has some magical secret to reveal to them, so that they too can call up a wonderful shining idea whenever they want one, to astonish the English teacher and everyone in the class. But alas, it does not work like that. Ideas never come when you want them; they pop up unexpectedly, sometimes at the most inconvenient moments. They can't be controlled.
Ideas are mysteriously born in the unconscious mind: that shadowy place in which -- though we don't know it -- we store echoes of everything we have ever seen or heard or done, every person we've met, every story we've read. In there, all these old scraps are melted together, as if in a furnace, and once in a while, if you're lucky, they fuse into something bright and astonishing. Your ideas are fed by your thoughts and dreams, by the life you've led, the kind of person you've become.
I don't know what kind of person I have become, but I can tell you how I got there. I was born in England, in Buckinghamshire, into green countryside that has been swallowed up now by the concrete of Greater London. I have a younger brother called Rod (also a writer), and we were both rather shy and read a lot. Perhaps we found it easier to cope with books than with people. When we were small, World War II was happening, and our nights were often noisy, because German planes were dropping bombs on us and the anti-aircraft guns at the end of our street were trying, generally without success, to shoot down the planes.
When I grew up I put those days into a book called Dawn of Fear, which is a true story except for the fact that in it I turned myself into a boy called Derek. (Perhaps I did that because I wanted boys as well as girls to read the story. It's said that though girls will read books in which the central character is a boy, boys are reluctant to read books in which she's a girl. Is this true?) I've been writing ever since I can remember. In the year I turned ten, I wrote three plays for a puppet theatre built by the boy next door, collaborated on a weekly newspaper with the son of my piano teacher, and wrote and illustrated a very small book. The plays and the newspaper were a huge hit with their captive parental audiences, and I was delighted. The book was read and praised by an uncle who found it in a drawer, and I was so appalled at its exposure that I burst into tears and tore it up.
Fiction remained a private matter for a long time after that. I edited the school magazine, became the first woman to edit the Oxford University newspaper, and then spent seven rapturous years in London as a reporter and feature writer for The Sunday Times. (My first boss was Ian Fleming; he smoked too much, and was handsome and endearing only partly like the hero he created, James Bond.) I don't think journalism is the ideal career for a would-be writer, but it did give me some useful skills: I learned to make my prose tight and more vivid, how to meet deadlines, how to type very fast with four fingers, and how to write anywhere, even in a room full of shouting people. In my spare time, I wrote two novels; one was a fantasy for adults, called Mandrake, and the other a fantasy for younger people, called Over Sea, Under Stone. Then, to the horror of my friends and relations, I married an American widower and went to live in the United States, where at the age of 27 I would have three stepchildren, aged 18, 16, and 14. I remember my youngest stepson being instructed to help me unpack my belongings. "Jeeze!" he said. "What do you do with all these books?"
In America I wrote a weekly column for a British newspaper and several more adult books, including a biography of the English writer J.B. Priestly, and I produced two babies, called Jonathan and Kate. (My stepdaughter had her first baby two months before I had mine, and had to teach me how to change diapers.) I was homesick for years, and perhaps that was part of the reason for my discovering, one day, that I wanted to write a sequence of fantasy novels called The Dark Is Rising. The first of the five, I suddenly realized, was Over Sea, Under Stone, which I had written without knowing it would ever have a sequel, and now there would be four more. I sat down, on this astonishing idea-filled day, and wrote an outline of the sequence and the last page of the very last book. And then, over a period of six and a half years, I wrote The Dark Is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King, and Silver on the Tree. I dedicated two of the books to Jonathan and Kate, though it was a while before they were old enough to read them.
I had a large-scale theme for that sequence; it was like the urge that drives a composer to write a symphony instead of a sonata. I was trying to deal with the basic substance of myth: the complicated, ageless conflict between good and evil, the Light and the Dark. My stories were set in my own parts of Britain: in Buckinghamshire, in the Cornish village where we had spent holidays after the war, and in the part of North Wales in which my grandmother was born and my parents lived their last 21 years. And in ways I don't really understand, the books were haunted: by my childhood self, by a lifelong fascination with myth and legend, and by the whole of Britain's many-layered history, stretching back more than four thousand years.
If I live long enough, I think I shall some day write other books in the same genre as the Dark Is Rising sequence. But my imagination throws many different kinds of ideas at me; perhaps I haven't changed much since I was that busy ten-year-old. In the last few years I've written five stories for younger children (illustrated by three distinguished artists: Ashley Bryan, Warwick Hutton, and Jos. A. Smith); an assortment of short plays, songs, and verse for John Langstaff's Christmas Revels productions, which take place in seven American cities at Christmastime; and -- in collaboration with the actor Hume Cronyn -- a play called Foxfire, which, after productions in Stratford, Ontario, and at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, ran for seven months on Broadway. I adapted the play for television and wrote several other TV films, and together Hume and I adapted two novels for the screen: Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker, for Jane Fonda and ABC-TV, and Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
Oddly enough, when I look back at all the characters I wrote about in those years, the one I can remember with most affection has nothing to do with any of the plays or films. He's a strange little non-human creature called Peth, who appears in Seaward, the only fantasy I have written since the Dark Is Rising books. I miss him, as I miss Will and Merriman.
The letters to authors also say, often, "Where do you live? Do you have any pets? What are your hobbies?" I live in a tall white house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a tree-shaded yard and unusual plants in pots on the windowsills. (I travel a lot, especially to the islands, and have a habit of collecting seeds wherever I go.) Jonathan and Kate come home often. We have no pets at the moment, except for the plants, though once we had a cat named Robinson, and before that a squirrel named Sleepy. Hobbies? Well, I play the piano, but soon there won't be time, because I am about to write a book. You see, I've had this idea . . .
"The life of an expatriate writer, especially one with deep roots in his or her own country, takes a very odd course. I've lived it for fourteen years now: I can chart the three stages.
First come about five years of acute and barely tolerable homesickness. Then, as the scars heal, there's a disturbing sense of rootlessness: who am I? Finally there's a release. You suddenly realise one day that provided your imagination is well-nourished by its by its beginnings, it really doesn't matter much where you live. You have reached the condition of flotsam. Inside your head, you take your own world with you wherever you go.
My world used to be journalism. When I came down from Oxford, where (of course) I read English, I spent seven years as a reporter and then feature writer for The Sunday Times. I was romantically in love with newspapers, and perhaps I still am, but it's a good thing I'm not there now. The books might have appeared nonetheless - the first two were written at weekends and in evenings after work - but I don't think they would have been the same.
As an author I'm hard to classify. Three of my books have been published for adults: a so-called science fiction novel; a biography of J.B. Priestley; a study of America called Behind The Golden Curtain. Of the books published for children, Dawn of Fear is a solitary: an autobiographical portrait of childhood in Britain during the bombings of World War Two. The rest are linked together: a five-book sequence named The Dark Is Rising.
I don't know exactly what kind of hubris it is that sends a writer into the making of deliberately-shaped sequence of books. It's like the urge that sends a composer to a symphony instead of a string quartet; a large-scale theme turns up demanding large-scale expression. In my case the theme came out of the basic substance of myth: the complicated, ageless conflict between good and evil, the Light and the Dark. But of course it emerged as it has for every similar venturer from the Beowulf poet on down, in a shape moulded by my own background.
My sequence belongs to the vanished rural Buckinghamshire in which I lived my first eighteen years; to the Cornwall of my childhood holidays; to the part of North Wales in which my grandmother was born and my parents have lived the last twenty years. Haunted places all, true springs of the matter of Britain. Bronze Age barrows littered our landscape; Celt and Anglo-Saxon merged in our faces; Arthur invaded our daydreams; the Welsh legends our darker dreams at night. The mixture bubbled out into the first children's book I wrote, Over Sea, Under Stone.
It was only years later, after I had married an American widower with three teenage children and gone, rather nervously, to live in the United States, that the second book slipped into my head. And with it, came the pattern and shape of all the rest, the sequence of five, so the first thing I did was to sit down and write the last page of the very last book. Then, over a period of six years, I wrote The Dark Is Rising, Greenwitch, The Grey King and Silver on the Tree.
I don't know what will come next. I have to wait and see what my imagination tells me to do. I'm not a 'children's writer'. I am a writer whose work sometimes turns out to belong on the children's list, and sometimes elsewhere. To tell the truth, I don't write for you, whoever you are; I write for me.
And when one gets past forty years old, 'me' is a very complicated word, embracing everything from a bright-eyed eight-year-old to a moderately sophisticated lady. The only things that remain constant are the talent, such as it is, and the dogged hard work.
I live in a small town outside Boston. My husband is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first three children are all grown up; now I have Jonathan (born 1966) who plays soccer and the piano, and Kate (born 1968) who will either be a writer or an actress. In summer, we disappear to a small primitive house in the British Virgin Islands, where the children swim and I do the best of my work. I remember, when I was working on The Dark Is Rising, writing about Will Stanton tramping through cold deep snow while I sat in a swimsuit with my back to the Caribbean sea and a small lizard standing on my typewriter.
In the end, as I was saying, you take your own world with you, wherever you go."
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