“Once I get a story in my head, it circles round and round in there repeating on itself, like a demented endless row-row-row your boat until I can get it down on paper and give myself some closure. For me, stories are unfinished business that need to be given their due and made real. And characters are worse, they are not as easy to exorcise. You come up with a character, say a teenage criminal mastermind, and then for years you have nowhere to put him. You try to shoehorn him into whatever you have going on, but it’s not right and you both know it. So after a few years you have a light opera’s worth of characters haunting the space behind your eyeballs, distracting you when you’re trying to type. But then that sweet moment comes when your mind twists a few jigsaw pieces around and you see it so clearly and get a shiver down your spine and know that this is where the little bastard belongs. I love those moments. I’ve had about three.“Of course, the money is nice too ...”
Eoin Colfer’s ARTEMIS FOWL AND THE LOST COLONY is available in all good bookshops.
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