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Jubilee
Books: What
type of books do you write?
Celia Rees: Thrillers, horror, non-genre -
all kinds.
Why
did you become a writer?
I was teaching English and my students complained that they
had nothing to read and wanted stories about people like
them. My first novel was based on a true story that someone
had told me about children involved in a murder hunt, this
book became Every Step You Take 1993.
Do
you have any other hobbies?
Reading, film and cinema. I like reading all kinds of fiction;
two writers I admire are Margaret Atwood, and Annie Proulx.
I like all types of film, especially thrillers ands supernatural
thrillers. My favourite films are probably Thelma & Louise
and Desperately Seeking Susan.
What
books did you like as a child?
I read a lot and liked all kinds of books from Biggles
and Coral Island, to Little Women and
What Katy Did. I liked adventure stories, although
I preferred Malcolm Saville to Enid
Blyton. I disliked fantasy as a rule, although I liked
Wind In The Willows. I guess I didn't know it was
a fantasy.
What
children's books did you like now?
Some current favourites are: Holes by Louis Sacher,
Susan Price's Sterkarm Handshake and Philip
Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. At the
moment I am reading Jamila
Gavin's Coram Boy. Favourite scary writers/ books
Stephen King's The Shining and The Woman In Black
by Susan Hill.
Favourite
subject at school?
History, Geography and English in that order.
Favourite
television programmes?
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files and
documentary programmes like Horizon.
Favourite
food?
Chinese food is probably my favourite.
Favourite
place?
Anywhere by the sea.
What
are your good qualities?
I think that my good qualities are that I am loyal, imaginative
and determined.
What
are your bad qualities?
I can be disorganised.
The
person you admire the most?
Nelson Mandela
Where
do you write?
I write in my study and try to keep office hours but ideas
evolve all the time.
How
do come up with the idea for a book?
Ideas occur from all sources. It could be something I have
read or seen on TV, for example. I speculate on this idea
and leave it for a while, if I return to the idea and am
still excited by it I might pursue it further. If I like
the idea, I research around it and see how it will develop,
where it will go. The idea for Witch Child came to
me when I was reading the Penguin Book of the Supernatural,
researching another project, when I came across an account
of Matthew Hopkins, who was the Witch Finder General during
the Civil War. I began to think 'what if?' What if there
was a child, a girl and her grandmother was hanged as a
witch? The book Blood Sinister began after seeing
the film Dracula. It gave me the idea to write a book about
a girl who met a vampire before Bram Stoker's Dracula
was published. She keeps a diary chronicling her relationship
with this man she calls the Count. The diary is then discovered
by a girl living now.
You've
also written books on the Point Horror Unleashed series,
who comes up with the ideas for these?
The ideas for the books in this series are left totally
up to the writer. A lot of people think that there is a
formula, that the ideas are decided by someone else but
this is totally not the case.
How
do you go about creating a sense of fear?
For fear
to be created, the reader has to believe that the situation
in the book is real and plausible. They must think: this
could happen, it could happen to me. They also have to care
for the main character(s) and what happens to them. Horror
and fear lie in small details rather than lots of blood
and gore. Atmosphere is built up through layering up strangeness
and otherness within the everyday and ordinary. The tension
comes from the reader not knowing what is going to happen.
What
examples would you say achieve this successfully?
Silence of the Lambs. Both film and novel are
excellent examples. The plot is ingenious, but totally plausible.
The tension centres round Clarice Starling, not Hannibal
Lecter. Starling is a mix of competence, courage, intelligence,
intuition, but she is also emotionally vulnerable and capable
of fear. She is very human, she is up against a pair of
monsters... and she wins.
What
advice would you give to aspiring authors?
Start writing. Keep writing.
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