My very latest book was sitting there, and it’s been sitting there for five years as a sort of indigestible gelatinous ball, it’s collected no end of stuff to the point where I was really bewildered by it, and I needed the thing that would bring them all together, the thread that went through the whole narrative, and it so happened that I was in America, in Minneapolis, and we had one of those rather curious conversations, you know, the British side versus the American side, and then there was suddenly a point where we all agreed, and we looked at one another in bewilderment, and then, again, this friend that writes horror stories, and for this reason I’ve dedicated the book to him, suddenly said, “Oh yes, this is what it is.” What we were actually talking about was the primordial forest, and one of the queer things which we’d all been talking about was how when you get to England, and you go into just the tiniest piece of left-over woodland where-ever, with main roads on either side, the last little nub of Sherwood Forest, somehow you get lost, even if it’s only about half the width of this across, and Neil said “Yes, because it’s being the primordial forest when you get into it.” and this was just what I needed, it was the one uniting fact.”
A 1992 Interview with Diana Wynne Jones –
Source – http://misrule.com.au/wordpress/?page_id=412
Words on the Wall 
No trackbacks yet.