1: Neanderthals, time travel, Goliath, an endless Crimean War: What came first? What was the imaginative seed from which The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book grew?

2: You do a fine job of rehabilitating Miss Havisham. Was she fun to (re)write?

3: You have described your writing style as "mnemonic"-in your stories, you supplement invention with reminding people of what they already know. How did you develop this style?

4: I would really like to read something by Daphne Farquitt. Any possibility you might include excerpts from her work in future novels? Any chance that Thursday Next might find herself inside a Farquitt romance?

5: Fictional characters jump out of their books and into Thursday's world from time to time. Now that Thursday is a character in a book herself, has she paid a visit to our world?

6: You've done a lot of interviews since The Eyre Affair came out, and you've been asked the same questions many times [particularly about how you market your books, which strikes me as rather odd]. Is there a question no interviewer has ever asked that you'd really like to answer?









1: Neanderthals, time travel, Goliath, an endless Crimean War: What came first? What was the imaginative seed from which The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book grew?

Ideas begat ideas. They spread and grow and darken like the fungus that grows on refrigerator seals. The Neanderthal plotline grew from the idea that dodos are regenerated as pets, time travel from French Revisionists going one step further, The Crimean War from me reading 'The Reason Why' (an excellent book on the Crimea by Cecilia Woodham-Smith) I thought: 'What a great thing to have in a book. Shame I can't. *lightbulb* Why not? I'm the writer. I can do what I want!' And since I set my story in 1985, then the Crimea has been on for 132 years - and thus the 'alternate history' idea was born. 2nd war didn't end in 1945, Russia still Imperial, Wales a socialist republic - ideas begat ideas begat ideas...

2: You do a fine job of rehabilitating Miss Havisham. Was she fun to (re)write?

Yes. Think of the bossiest female relative you know and throw in a fearsome PG Wodehouse Aunt and a dash of South American Dictator. Bring to the boil with a bit of the peppery cook from 'Alice' and then add Beryl Markham and Jean Bennett. Serve hot with garnishings of tattered bridal dresses and the passionate hatred of men. Then make her likable by her strict adherence to duty and comradeship, and highlight a flaw with her fanatical devotion for anything on four wheels and an engine. I think she's a very sprightly old girl - the grandmother I would have liked to have had!

3: You have described your writing style as "mnemonic"-in your stories, you supplement invention with reminding people of what they already know. How did you develop this style?

Is it a style? I have no idea. I think much comedic invention is about taking familiar objects and refashioning the links between them. Take the rabbit in 'Monty Python's Holy Grail'. Make it a dangerous monster but keep it looking like a fluffy little housepet - hey presto, it's a wonderful gag - but the elements alone are unremarkable: Monster, knights attack, rabbit. Changing the links and knowing which links to change is the fun part. It's playing with the readers expectation, taking them somewhere unexpected. The point with it all is that the elements to re-link must already be lodged in the mind of the readership. If Thursday's pet dodo was a passenger pigeon (also extinct but less famously so) the joke would fall flat. In TN2 I had mammoth migrations but I originally chose mastodons because I prefer the sound of the word. Trouble was, not so many people are conversant with mastodons - so mammoths it became. (A mastodon, by the way, is pretty much the same as a mammoth only it lived in North America and had slightly different dentition. You heard it here first)

4: I would really like to read something by Daphne Farquitt. Any possibility you might include excerpts from her work in future novels? Any chance that Thursday Next might find herself inside a Farquitt romance?

Thursday in a Farquitt? Quite possibly. This raises an interesting point about me wanting Thursday to jump into more contemporary novels. The trouble is, I am seriously restricted by other writer's copyright. Thursday can only jump into books now in public domain, and no characters still in copyright can be used in Thursday's adventures. There are, of course, exceptions - 'The Well of Lost Plots' features several of which we had to get permission - most notably Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and Shadow the Sheepdog. So in order to have Thursday enter any modern book I have to create a novelist that writes stereotypical books. We all have a very good idea what a Farquitt book is like, without ever needing to undergo the painful experience of reading one. And it is painful, believe me. Here is a section of Daphne's latest book 'Canon of Love' which she has very kindly agreed for me to quote from:

    'Nigel!' she said, looking at him the way that lovers do, 'tell me you love me, that everything will be alright, that we can leave this terrible place together and never come back!'
    'Belinda,' he replied, caressing the area of her neck where her hair ended and her collar began, 'it wouldn't work - people might talk!'
    'But Nigel, my darling, why? We're married, after all!'
    'Yes,' declaimed Nigel, relaxing the grip to which he had held about her, 'but, sadly, not to each other.'
    Belinda sobbed and looked away.
    'You always bring that up. I was tricked into marrying Edgar. I was a child, an innocent child!'

Copyright Daphne Farquitt 1986

5: Fictional characters jump out of their books and into Thursday's world from time to time. Now that Thursday is a character in a book herself, has she paid a visit to our world?

What do you mean 'Thursday is a character in a book?' Outrageous suggestion!! How do we know that Thursday's world IS the real world and we are actually a backstory in a novel somewhere about an alternative universe where you CAN'T clone dodos and Wales ISN'T a socialist republic? Seriously, it's an interesting point and the Fforde Fforum at jasperfforde.com is full of posts which contain questions and reasonings behind such riddles such as: "If Thursday is a character, could she jump into 'The Eyre Affair' and has she already done so?" or "If you jumped into a history book could you change the past?"

6: You've done a lot of interviews since The Eyre Affair came out, and you've been asked the same questions many times [particularly about how you market your books, which strikes me as rather odd]. Is there a question no interviewer has ever asked that you'd really like to answer?

Yes there is. I would really like someone to ask me: 'Hey jasp, love your books. Can I pay off your mortgage and buy you a Hawker Hurricane?'



Jasper Fforde, March 2003

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