Archer's Goon

"I could’ve picked pretty much any Diana Wynne Jones novel. Diana is magnificent author. People who aren’t yet familiar with her may recognize her Howl’s Moving Castle , which was made into a movie by Hayao Miyazaki—although the novel and the film are very different. Diana’s Archer’s Goon is set in a city very much like Bristol, where she lived. The father is a university professor, just as Diana’s husband Charlie was a university professor. The novel itself involves seven strange entities or demigods who are bound to this town. They cannot leave, although they want to, and they each control a specific thing that happens in the town: crime, perhaps, or technology. One of them, we learn, lives, literally, in the past. A young boy gets to the bottom of what’s going on. It’s a complicated story, as much written for adults as for kids. Lockdown, in theory, ought to be giving me lots and lots of time to write. Lockdown, in practice, is me so lonely that I’m saying yes to the incredible number of helpful, charitable and social things that people would like me to do. So I can stumble away after having spent an entire day looking at people on computer screens and realize I’ve done absolutely no writing at all. It’s very peculiar. “There is something profound about a good collaboration” I love the central conceit of Archer’s Goon , which is writing to break through writer’s block. During lockdown, I had to write a short story rather suddenly and that was how I did it. I sat down and knew I had to write this story for a Doctor Who charity anthology and the editors said they’d like me to write a story about a character I had created for Doctor Who called the Corsair. I had no idea what it was going to be about, but I knew I had to write it because it’s for a charity anthology. That was terrifying but it flowed. I’ve always admired the kinds of writers who do lots of different things. Part of the joy of being a writer is you can have all sorts of different kinds of adventures. If you’re writing something funny, it should be funny. And if you’re writing something scary, it should be scary. And if you’re writing something that is intelligent, it should be intelligent. And if you’re writing something for kids, it should be the best writing for kids. And there’s nothing wrong, there’s everything right, about that. Early in my career I wrote an awful lot of comics . Comics is a medium that gets mistaken for a genre. Nobody minded if, in Sandman , or in graphic novels, I lurched from doing historical fiction to social realism to eschatological imaginings to children’s fantasies to horror in comics. It was all comics, so therefore it was all one thing. When I found myself drifting more and more over into prose, I wasn’t prepared to give that up. I wasn’t prepared to stop writing what I wanted. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So, genre fluidity was a freedom I wasn’t prepared to give up, even though I understood that it was not a great idea commercially. Commercially, what you’re meant to do is write another book like the last one and have it out a year after the last one was published. If you write horror , you’re meant to write another horror novel. If you write a boy wizard story and it’s commercially successful, you’re meant to write another boy wizard story. I’ve never done that. I followed up American Gods with Coraline . And I’d much rather look back on a life in which I got to follow up American Gods with Coraline then one in which I followed up American Gods with American Devils . Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Now I have an answer when people say, ‘I never read you. What should I read?’ I’ve been asked that unbelievably often, especially by taxi drivers. At that point, I always asked, ‘Well, what do you like?’ And I would try to triangulate from what they like to what I wrote. So, for someone who likes Jane Austen, I’d point at Stardust . I’d think they’d enjoy the understatedness of it, the love story threading its way through it and its setting in Victorian times. Now, whenever anyone asks, ‘What should I read?’ I have a 750-page doorstop to suggest in which they’ll probably find something that they’ll like. There are excerpts from novels, there are a lot of stories. You are not expected to like everything. You can dip into it and dip out. When you find something you like, you can probably find something else like it. When you get to the end of it, you’ll have an idea of who I am and what I’ve done."