JASPER FFORDE

The acclaimed novelist picks five books that influenced his own idiosyncratic approach to literature

©Rachel Pendlebury

Red Side Story is my current book, published this month. It is the sequel to Shades of Grey, a book I wrote ten years ago, a dystopian thriller set in a world where the social hierarchy is governed by the colours you can see. Grey was high concept then and it’s high concept now, but after a slow sales start, has gained a forceful and committed following who became ever more voluminous in their demand for a sequel. So I picked up the story about a week after the first book ended, and just carried on. More reveals, more explanations, more jeopardy. I hope it works...

I like to try and hunker down in the winter and thrash the book out whilst it’s cold outside – I call it Scribernating – but it rarely works out that way. I tend to write whenever I need to, which is pretty much always as my ‘I’m making it all up as I go along’ writing style means I am often experimenting ‘on the fly’ and don’t know if the chapter I’d just written is going to be included or scrapped. It’s a workflow that keeps things fresh and experimental, as I’m not much for planning my books. The best ideas always arrive from a circuitous route of discovery. What do they say: All interesting places are reached by a winding stair?

I sort of wrote in a vacuum during my 13-year self learning process, and rarely spoke to people about what I was doing – less it all came to nought, I think, and this, learned, is not unusual. So I have less good advice I took, and a few items of bad advice I ignored, which is probably about as useful. My favourite of which was to ‘look at the best seller lists and write something similar’ which is about the worst advice you could give. Don’t write to market, be the market. Create a new genre, play with the form, write what you want.