Mal Peet Quotes
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Writing is a form of licensed madness.
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I want to entertain, but I also want to push the barriers beyond what kids are conditioned into accepting.
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It pretty much defeats the purpose of bedtime reading if you fall asleep before the kids do. And you tend to wake up with a matchbox stuck on the end of your nose and/or a potty on your head.
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I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author's intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.
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I didn't consciously make the decision to write an adult novel. I didn't think of it as my riposte to the YA genre.
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Although I now spend most of my time writing novels for teenagers and adults, 'readaloudability' is still a criterion I try to adhere to.
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I try to write stories that will attract younger readers and make them feel part of a wider readership. I do not feel able to write books that are about, or even for, teenagers; and I am inclined to be suspicious of books which 'target' them.
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What I value in books is lucidity. I want the language to be rich; I love lexical fireworks on the page, but I have to know what it means. I want to be surprised and delighted, not merely baffled.
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'Smart', in American usage, is slicker and sharper than 'intelligent'; faster off the mark and quicker on its feet than deep thought.
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Everyone who sits on a sofa watching 'Match of the Day' is a top soccer expert, as you know. So if you start to worry about such people reading your story and saying, 'That'd never happen' you're going to freeze up. You're writing fiction, and your characters can do whatever you need them to do.
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I never knew that Americans would take up soccer, and it's a gender-free sport in high school there.
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Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.
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It's a nonsense because, as we all know, there are brilliant 15-year-old readers and hopeless 50-year-old readers. All that categorisation is a matter of bookshop shelves rather than literary categories, I think.
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Normally, I'm a grumpy old man - whenever I read about celebrity, I start to grind my teeth and pull my hair; it seems synonymous with idiocy.
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I find myself, by happy accident, writing 'Young Adult' fiction. However, I dislike such categories.
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'Keeper' is about fathers, ultimately. and also conservation, commitment and ambition.
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I feel able to steal from Emily Dickinson because she's both wonderful and dead.
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After being rejected for years, I found a publisher for 'Keeper,' and it won prizes, and then I had to write a second and a third book because I kept taking the money and spending it.
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I worry about children not having a sense of any direct connection to the past.
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The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted Time Magazine's book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.
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Disconnection or alienation from the past has political consequences.
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Remember that a good football novel has to have the same ingredients as any other good novel: drama, convincing and interesting characters, a strong story-line, and some kind of magic in the writing.
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When I'm working, I always read stuff that's as far away from what I'm working on as possible, so I'll read American crime fiction at bedtime, or Emily Dickinson.
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It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report.