The Glass Demon
Page 33
Have you ever based a character on someone you know?
Funnily enough, I have based only one character on a real person, and that was Kate Kolvenbach, the mother of Pia Kolvenbach, heroine of The Vanishing of Katharina Linden. Just for fun, I based her on myself. She says a lot of things which I say when I’m feeling grumpy. When I came to submit the manuscript of the book to different agents, one of the first people who read it told me that he liked the book but that Pia’s mother was a bitch!
Do you have any tips to becoming a successful writer?
Read as much as you can, experience as many different things as you can, and take an interest in human behaviour. Some people say, ‘Write what you know,’ but I write about murders without having committed one! However, the fact that I have travelled a lot and lived in different countries is hugely inspiring for me. It means that I can write confidently about unusual locations.
The other thing is just to keep writing – practice definitely makes perfect (or, at least, a lot better!).
Which authors did you love as a child? Did you have a favourite book?
I loved good old Victorian and Edwardian adventure stories. I inherited quite a lot of the books my parents had had as kids in the 1940s. I loved Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, but my hands-down favourite was She by H. Rider Haggard. It’s about a lost kingdom in Africa, ruled by a queen who stays eternally young and beautiful. I liked the fact that the author went to the trouble of including documents in ancient Greek and Latin, giving clues to the location of the lost kingdom. The book also has a terrifically dramatic shock ending.
Which writers inspire you now?
I admire Anthony Trollope not only for his novels themselves but for his discipline. He aimed to write a set amount of words every day, in spite of the fact that he also had a job, often writing while travelling. Also he is credited with inventing the postbox. I think it’s fantastic that he could be creative and practical!
For sheer grand-scale imagination I think the science-fiction writer Stephen Baxter is amazing. In one of his books he starts with the destruction of a planet and works up to a climax.
Are you writing anything at the moment?
Yes, I’m working on my third novel. It’s also set in the Eifel region of Germany – it’s a place I find very inspiring, because it is full of lonely pine forests and creepy old castles. I like to base my plots on real historical events and genuine folk legends, and in this case the story was inspired by the witch trials that took place in the Eifel in the sixteenth century. The heroine of this book is a bit different from Pia Kolvenbach (heroine of The Vanishing of Katharina Linden) and Lin Fox; she’s very shy and one of the things she has to do in order to solve the mystery at the centre of the story is to discover her own inner strength. I’m enjoying seeing her do that!