INTERVIEW - Patrick Ness

British writer Patrick Ness has a lot of reasons to celebrate the holidays: he has just won the BookTrust Teenage Prize for his latest book, the YA novel The Knife of Never Letting Go. Also, The Independent made The Knife of Never Letting Go one of their 50 Best Winter Reads, along with authors classic and contemporary like Edith Wharton and Ian Rankin. Just before that, I interviewed him for Fantasy Book Critic, and also reviewed the book. Below, the interview; in the next post, the review.

PWT: Upon reading The Knife of Never Letting Go, I couldn't help but think of the many authors who wrote stories featuring teens but were in fact talking to a wider audience, such as Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. Did any of these writers influence you in any way?

Patrick: Not as such. I always say when I'm teaching that the only success I've ever had (and this is 100% true) is when I've written entirely for myself. That is, wrote a book that I would kill to read myself, so in that sense I'm only ever writing for an audience of one. What I find happens is that when I'm really enjoying the story I'm telling myself, that joy sticks to the page in ways you can't see but ways a reader will pick up on and like. So I try to avoid thinking about my "audience" as much as I can, because then I start getting bogged down in what I "should" say rather than what I want to say, then the story suffers and you end up not saying very much at all.

PWT: Despite avoidance of profanity (Todd Hewitt uses the word "effing" all the time), the violence to which he is exposed in the story is truly moving--and, sometimes (as in the case of the impossible-to-kill Aaron) bloodcurdling. Can we really see Chaos Walking as a YA series?

Patrick: I think so, though adults have seemed to respond to it very well, which is nice. But yes, a YA series because I think teenagers are pretty tough. It's HARD being a teenager, and they're very articulate and thoughtful about the difficulties in the stuff they write themselves. So I think my main goal is to treat them with as much respect as I can and not pull any punches in the story. Having said that, there's another extreme you can go to where--when you're trying to be "real" for teenage readers--you end up writing only misery, as if that's more truthful than writing only happiness. I tried to tell a tough story truthfully without insulting a teenage reader who would know if I was sugar-coating, but then I also tried to show that even in tough times, there really are opportunities for connection with other people, for humour, for happiness, all those good things. And how much more real do those things seem if you've already been honest about the tough stuff? I've had a great response from teenagers (particularly, interestingly enough, Irish and Australian teens), and I think it's a YA series. If adults like it, too, that's a really pleasing bonus.

PWT: Todd Hewitt faces a true rite of passage all over the story--and that's just Volume One! What can we expect for the next books of the series?

Patrick: Oh, that would be telling! What I can say is that book two is finished and called The Ask and the Answer and will be out next year. In thematic terms, though, things do shift gears for the next two books (I'd always planned it as a trilogy); they're about different aspects of what Todd has to face and how he deals with it all. So, lots more to come! But I'm not giving any secrets away...

PWT: What are your literary influences?

Patrick: The author I admire most is Peter Carey, who I think is amazing, particularly in how his books seem to be just a smaller slice of a larger imagined world. I love that, the way you can pick up all kinds of richness in his books just by inference, so I'm huge fan of that. I also love an English writer called Nicola Barker, who takes enormous risks with language and style, but still manages to be readable and tremendous good fun. I suppose I like people who aren't afraid to be bold, though not just for the sake of itself. That's what I aim for, boldness but with a purpose. It's risky, because you can fall on your face pretty easily, but the rewards can be equally great.

PWT: The Knife of Never Letting Go can be read as a libel against intolerance. Is there an underlying message that you wanted to communicate to the readers?

Patrick: I try not to write with a message in mind, because try as you might, you always end up preaching and who wants that? But I also think that any writer responds to a story for a reason, so that story is going to contain messages whether you like it or not. The one that I really like, and what's probably most important to me in The Knife of Never Letting Go, is one of connection. Through Viola, Todd finally finds someone he can really trust, someone he has to learn about and get to know and rely on. It ends up, I hope, being so much more than a usual love story; it feels meatier and harder and deeper and therefore all the more valuable between them, and that's where I think the hope in the book lies, in the way that Todd and Viola really learn to see each other, warts and all, and still accept the other and come to depend on them. That's what I like, true connection, and that's where I think our hope as a species lies.

PWT: Lastly, congratulations on winning the 2008 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. How do you feel about it?

Patrick: Winning the Prize was fantastic! It's one of the only prizes judged exclusively by other authors, so it's people who really understand what you're trying to do. And it's been great for the book in terms of raising its profile and getting more people to read it, which is what every author wants, after all.