It’s really a series of answered questions. So if someone is caught in this modern-day Oliver Twist/Fagin situation - how do you get them out of that, without putting them in gaol? How do you not make them too good? The Dickensian way of doing this is to have angels and devils, but you don’t want them to be too goody-two-shoes, so you shade it. So you ask yourself questions and then answer them and that gives you your plot.Īnd the questions arise from the character? Why would you be doing that if you’re not actually morally corrupt? Who are you scared of? Then I thought, how would you survive like that? Well, you might be a thief. So you work one character out through the other. So then I had this kind of genius guy, and I thought, who’s the most opposite to that? Somebody who’s on the outside of society, who’s never been to school, is the obvious place to go with that. I just nodded to what the brothers were like, whilst describing the youngest one. In the case of the Finding Sky series, by mistake I’d set myself all my heroes, because it was supposed to be a stand-alone. There are obviously as many permutations of couples as there are couples, but I’d look for some sort of chemistry first. So I would start by thinking, is this Romeo and Juliet? Is this ‘the other side of the tracks’ kind of story? Is this Beatrice and Benedick, who are really feisty but insult each other? Working out the chemistry of the central relationship comes first. The afternoon is when things start going downhill for me, so I do emails then.

Now that’s all gone, but I’m used to having a pattern of short bursts in which you have to be fully creative. I worked around sleep, as you can imagine. I multi-task at home, whereas I don’t in a café, so my concentration is better.īeing self-employed, you have to impose some discipline on yourself, in whatever way that works for you. When I’m not doing school visits, I will write from about half past eight to about half past ten, in a café. I know that I’m a lark rather than an owl, so I frontload the writing onto the beginning of the day. Could you talk me through your writing routine?

Joss stirling finding sky series