DWJ: Yes, he does everything back to front. Yes, that was the bit where I thought, “Well, there are quite a lot of people who are dyslexic; let’s give them a champion, as it were.”
One thing it’s very good for, actually, being dyslexic, is solving anagrams. It ought to make me a past master at Scrabble, but it doesn’t—but I’m very good at anagrams in crosswords, because I think my brain stores things scrambled as opposed to ordinary brains.
CB: The unscrambling muscles must be quite well developed.
DWJ: I think they are, yes. Though I did fail a driving test purely through dyslexia, because every time he told me to turn right I turned left. And we got lost. The examiner was furious, seething, and he failed me on the spot. Which was reasonable, of course. Goodness knows where we ended up. It was a completely strange part of Oxford to me, and obviously to the examiner as well. He couldn’t wait to get out of the car when we finally worked our way back to civilization.
CB: It’s probably too big a question to take in one go, but it would be fascinating if you could talk through your writing process, from beginning to end. Is there a pattern which tends to repeat, or is the process with every book unique?
DWJ: If it did repeat I’d get very bored. The only pattern that does repeat is that I write it out in longhand first and concentrate on getting the story down, and then do a very careful second draft, which is for publication, in which I’ve got all the wrong bits right and so forth.
CB: And at that point has anyone else seen it? Editors? Members of your family?
DWJ: No, I wait until there’s a second draft available, because it’s in longhand and nobody can really read my writing.
CB: And do you talk about how it’s going as you write? Do you discuss the plot, and so on?
DWJ: Very rarely. I find that it kills it dead if I talk about it. I tried talking to my agent about plots early on, and I found that these were the things that just went “No, no, no,” like that, and petered out. So I found that the best thing was to keep absolutely mum and let the book do its thing. It does in many ways feel like automatic writing. And then you can talk about it, afterward. But I know what I’m doing.
They start in all sorts of different ways, books. Two have been started by pictures. One is a photograph called “Intimate Landscapes,” with a Judas tree in the foreground, and an inspissate woodland otherwise. That gave rise to Hexwood.
CB: Really?
DWJ: If you look at it there is no boundary to that wood. It just goes on. And I stared at it and stared at it and I knew that was going to produce something. Fire and Hemlock came from another photograph, which is called “Fire and Hemlock,” a nighttime picture of some straw bales burning behind a whole row of hemlock heads, which is a gorgeous photograph, though it’s faded a bit over the years. And the weird thing about that is that sometimes you look at it and you think there are people in there, and sometimes you look at it and you know there aren’t, and it really does seem to change all the time. I thought when I’d written the book that maybe the people would vanish for good, but they haven’t.
CB: Are they in the flames, or in the—
DWJ: No, in the shadowy bits around. Sometimes there are four or five of them. The Hexwood one has no people in at all.
I don’t know what caused Hexwood to need to be written back-to-front and sideways, though I always knew it was going to be. It’s just that they drop into your head in a certain shape and say, “This is how I’m going to be,” and very often you get disappointed because they never are quite what they said they would be. I’ve got used to that now, but I try to get them as close as possible.
Various books were inspired by music. The Magicians of Caprona was one.
CB: Which music was that?
DWJ: “Vltava” by Smetana. That lovely river bit; there’s a tune in there that absolutely cries out for words, and yet there are no words. And then The Homeward Bounders was inspired by train journeys at night, coming home from dreadful school visits. I would look out, and there would be several layers of reflections from the various windows, and you would get lights weaving about, and lights beyond that and reflections beyond that, and you would think this could be a transparent box of worlds, and so in the book they turned out to be.
CB: I didn’t know that.
DWJ: None of these things are making the story—they’re making the basic concept. The story is another matter, and that really wrestles itself.
CB: And do you find when you send it finally to publishers and editors that you have a good experience? Do you enjoy being edited?
DWJ: I hate being edited, because my second draft is as careful as I can get it. I try to get it absolutely mistake free, and absolutely as I feel the book needs to be. Then some editor comes along and says, “Change Chapter Eight to Chapter Five, take a huge lump out of Chapter Nine, and let’s cut Chapter One altogether.” And you think, No, I’m going to hit the ceiling any moment. Then I call for my agent before I get my hands round this person’s throat.
Editors were very majestic in the days when I first started writing. There was one who got hold of The Ogre Downstairs, and rewrote the ending entirely in her own purple prose, which was not in the least like mine, and I decided I was going to change publishers. “No, no, no,” said my agent. “You mustn’t do that. Carry on and see if you can manage to persuade her.” And of course I couldn’t persuade her. And then Charmed Life: I know by the time I’d done the second draft it was absolutely perfect, it really, really was, I mean just as it is at this moment, you know. And this woman rang me up and wrote to me and told me exactly this sort of thing: “You must take out this chunk and that chunk and rewrite this and alter that,” and I was furious. And I thought surely we can do something about this. And thank God it was the days before computers. I said, “Send me the typescript back and I’ll see what I can do.” So she did, and I cut out the bits she told me to alter, in irregular jagged shapes, then stuck them back in exactly the same place with Sellotape, only crooked, so it looked as if I’d taken pieces out and put new pieces in. And then I sent it back to her, and she rang up and said, “Oh, your alterations have made such a difference.” And I thought, “Right! Hereafter I will take no notice of anybody who tries to edit my books.” And I don’t. I make a frightful fuss if anybody tries to, now.
CB: You’ve created a number of different universes and multiverses, some of which have several books set within them—the Chrestomanci books, for example, and the Dalemark series. In each case, the way the world is set up is quite distinct. Does that make a lot of difference to the kind of story you can tell, and to the kind of people who can inhabit that world?
DWJ: It does. The extraordinary thing is what an enormous difference a very small change can make to a world and its inhabitants. It makes a totally different kind of story: if you were to set a Chrestomanci story in the Dalemark world, it would be quite different. The Chrestomanci world is more foursquare apart from anything else. More straightforward somehow.
CB: Yes, I know what you mean. Dalemark is slightly more at an angle, isn’t it?
DWJ: Yes, it is. It’s hard to express, but it ripples away sideways quite often. And there wouldn’t be any room for gods, and Dalemark definitely needed gods.
CB: True. I suppose there are gods in the Chrestomanci books, but in a way they’re more . . . containable.
DWJ: They are. They’re the ones we’re used to.
CB: There’s Millie, for a start!
DWJ: Yes! But also they do go to church of a Sunday—though Gwendolen makes a riot of the church service. That was pure revenge actually, because when I was sent to boarding school we were marched off every Sunday—we had to wear gloves and hats and coats and all this Sunday stuff, and we were marched off in a crocodile, two by two, and we had to sit through all this incredibly boring church service. I spent my time grinding my teeth, and hating looking at crucifixes because they always make me feel terrible—I mean, fancy doing that to anyone!—and looking in
stead at the stained-glass windows, of which thank goodness there were many, and thinking, “Oh, if only they’d come alive and start running about.” And finally I was able to get them to do that in Charmed Life. And it was somehow revenge—I wouldn’t call it therapeutic, but it was revenge for many hours of extreme boredom. Not to speak of chill, because churches were very cold in those days.
CB: In an upstairs room in your house there’s a drawer that’s jammed shut, which is full of manuscripts. Who knows what treasures lie therein? But I do know there are quite a few stories that you’ve started and not finished for one reason or another. Perhaps they didn’t want to be written then, or they petered out, or whatever. What proportion of stories that get started make it to the finishing line, and how many of them get put away, or recycled later, or cannibalized?
DWJ: Some of them are cannibalized, but mostly it’s like cod spawn. You know, masses and masses of sperm and eggs, and only a small school resulting. There’s that massive drawer, but I think what’s in there is mostly the first drafts of things that did work. I’ve got another drawer in my study, which is actually two drawers deep, which is stuffed with beginnings. And they’re certainly not all there were, either. I must have chucked quite a few out. Some of them I got quite a long way through, actually, and suddenly realized this is not working, this is swimming away into a swamp, this is simply losing shape, this is something I can’t finish in anything shorter than the size of the Bible—or else things that were just two pages long and seemed like a frightfully good idea, a sort of seminal idea, and then just hit the buffers. There was no way to go on with them, and most of the time I don’t know why. I occasionally take them out and read them, and think, “What was I even remotely intending to do with this? Where was it supposed to be going?” Because of course you do have that kind of idea—and most of the time I do not know. I know when I wrote Enchanted Glass, which did come from that drawer of half-started things, I’m pretty sure I hadn’t intended it to go like it did when I fished it out and continued from Chapter One, where it had stopped. But I can’t tell you what makes them stop, I really can’t.
CB: Well, I’m delighted that so many of them made it to the end.
Two Family Views of Diana and Her Work
These two pieces were written by Diana’s sons Colin and Richard after her death. They reflect on their mother’s lasting legacy as a writer.
Fantasies for Children
Colin Burrow
This is the transcript of a fifteen-minute talk by Diana’s son Colin Burrow that was broadcast on BBC Radio Three on July 4, 2011, as part of a series The Essay: Dark Arcadias. The series explored the history of an idea, and other contributors offered essays on topics as varied as “Wild Nature” and “The Depiction of Poverty in the Renaissance.”
My mother died earlier this year. She was the children’s author Diana Wynne Jones. She wrote more than thirty novels. Some of them are set in mythical worlds, which have their own completely convincing mythologies and histories, all of which she made up. Others blend magic into our own world. Dogsbody, which appeared in 1975, was perhaps the book in which she really worked out what she wanted to do as a writer. In Dogsbody the dog star Sirius is banished from the heavens and is born on earth as a puppy. He becomes an extremely doggy dog, who can’t resist either a bitch in heat or a dustbin. He is unmistakably modeled on our own family dog at the time, who was a serial Lothario and bin raider. Sirius the dog, though, also happens to be a celestial hero on a quest to recover a tool for mending the stars.
That fusion of the completely ordinary and the completely magical was entirely typical of my mother’s way of writing. It was also how she looked at reality. Normality could never just be normality. So if she got caught in traffic on the M25 it was not because it’s one of the busiest roads in Europe. It was because she had her own particular travel jinx.
The obituaries all said nice things about her work, though I’m not sure they got her quite right. Most of them said that Diana Wynne Jones was the person who made Harry Potter possible. This is probably true, but she would hate to be remembered like that. She had a very low view of J. K. Rowling. Because my mother read English at Oxford while Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were lecturing there, the obituaries also said that they were the main influence on her writing.
Lewis and Tolkien played their parts, but the biggest literary influence on Diana Wynne Jones was, I think, a woman: E. Nesbit, whose books Mum read to us from a very early age. E. Nesbit was described by Bernard Shaw as “an audaciously unconventional lady.” She smoked cigarettes and cut her hair short. She was a Fabian and a socialist and had a very odd love life. Her children’s books wove together sand fairies and ginger beer, magic and experiences from her own life in a way that anticipates the mixture of magic and reality in a lot of contemporary children’s fiction.
She was the main spirit behind Diana Wynne Jones’s fiction. In my mother’s best novel, Fire and Hemlock—which retells the story of “Tam Lin,” but which is also about her own love for my father—the heroine, Polly, is sent a series of children’s books which her admirer Thomas Lynn says nobody should grow up without reading. They include E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It and The Treasure Seekers. When Thomas sends her The Lord of the Rings a bit later on, it’s something of a disaster, since Polly starts to imitate Tolkien in her own writings, and Thomas tells her off for doing so.
Writing for children is often regarded as escapist, and fantasy in general is often sneered at as the simplest kind of utopian fiction. You create a world in which everything works out, as if by magic, and that’s the end of it: Arcadia without darkness or death. Children’s writing and fantasy in the line descended from E. Nesbit is not at all like that. E. Nesbit had an unhappy childhood. She often directly wrote about people she knew in her fiction. And her most utopian writing—particularly her late work The Magic City—is not simply escapist. It imagines a new and better world because of what is wrong with the present one. E. Nesbit created a kind of children’s fiction which was always aware of the bad things it was trying to escape from—fathers in prison, or parents who are absent, or worlds that are wrecked. As a result her followers, including Diana Wynne Jones, created a kind of fantasy which does not simply run away into ideal or magical worlds, but which uses those ideal worlds to work out real problems from their own lives. This can make the worlds they describe serious and dark.
“Dark” is perhaps an odd word to use of Diana Wynne Jones’s writing, since it is full of fun. Where else could you find a description of a griffin going to the vet, or indeed of a griffin cracking its way out of an egg? But her books are profoundly serious despite the jokes. They are quite consistently driven by rage against unfairness. Very often characters in her novels discover that they are being manipulated or controlled by people who have no right to do so, and they cry out (as my mother did, rather often and usually at high volume), “That’s not fair!”
Diana Wynne Jones repeatedly embodied evil in people who are unfair in one particular way. She hated exploiters, people who tried to suck the magic and vitality from others. In Charmed Life, the central character Eric has a sister who steals his magic and stops him believing in himself. In The Dark Lord of Derkholm, a magical world parallel to our own is having the magic stolen from it by a cold entrepreneur who organizes fantasy tours through the countryside. He holds the whole world by the purse-strings: dragons are losing their luster, the Wizard’s University is under threat, and the whole of Arcadia is being wrecked by commercial exploitation.
This sounds like a tract for our own times, though The Dark Lord of Derkholm was written in 1998. And it suggests that children’s fiction about alternative worlds can be partly about politics. Diana Wynne Jones’s magical worlds don’t grow from politics in the sense of government policy or levels of taxation. They’re much more about the politics of the spirit. Her books repeatedly represent acts of rebellion against anything or anyone that makes people ordinary and gray when they could be imagina
tive and alive.
Much of that comes from E. Nesbit. Some of it also comes from the poet Shelley, whom Diana Wynne Jones much admired. But her fiction was also underpinned by a profound sadness which was all her own. Many of Diana Wynne Jones’s heroes and heroines are writers. Almost all of these have problems. Some have their words stolen by evil magicians who use them in nefarious magical ways (this happens in Archer’s Goon as well as in Fire and Hemlock). Others have to give up the things they love in order to make the world better. The narrator of The Homeward Bounders is called Jamie. He discovers that a group of demons are playing an elaborate war game with the fates of all the worlds and all the people on them. For finding this out, he is ejected from his own world and is condemned to go seeking his home from universe to universe. Eventually, when he has given up all hope, he leads a rebellion against the demons who are destroying and exploiting the universes. The price of his victory is that he has to wander through the worlds for eternity on his own. It’s from this position of profound loss that he relates his story.
In Fire and Hemlock, the heroine Polly also writes stories, and she eventually discovers that she can only win her true love back from the ice-cold queen of the fairies by giving him up. Repeatedly in the fiction of Diana Wynne Jones, a writer is a person who has to give up everything, and go through despair, in order to set other people free.