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Biography:
Anthony Horowitz is one of the most popular authors.
He was born in North London in 1955. After attending boarding school, he went on to York University. Horowitz has
written lots of books for children, including the best selling Alex Rider series and the Diamond Brother mysteries. He also
writes for television and created the detective dramas, Midsomer Murders and Murder in Mind.
In an interview with Write
Away, Anthony Horowitz was asked some of the following questions:
1. "What inspired you to write about a teenage spy?"
"When I was about 8, 9,
10, 11, 12 and 13, the James Bond films were coming out for the first time. So, when I was about your age - every year at
Christmas I would go to see the new James Bond film. It was a big, big event in my life. First there was Dr. No, then
From Russia With Love and Goldfinger . All of those films were made in the 1960s. I loved the James Bond books
by Ian Fleming. I still think the books are really good; people have forgotten how good they are and how much better than
the films. So Bond was a big, big influence on me.
"And then I hated school.
I was very miserable there and I was a rotten student; I was bottom in everything. So I would dream that instead of being
stuck in that dreadful school and being bullied and tormented by the teachers, that I was a spy. Thirty years later I remembered
this dream and wrote a book about a teenage spy."
2. "Have you been to the locations that you write about and how do you make them real
for your readers?"
"I have been to virtually all of the locations in the
books. I've just come back from Amsterdam where Alex is chased on a bicycle, in the next book. He's given a gadget filled
bicycle by Smithers and has to chase around Amsterdam. And I have also been down to the South of France for the next book
because Alex is thrown into a bull ring with a bull - so I had to go to a bullfight and watch that. For Skeleton Key
, I have indeed been to Havana, a long time ago. I wasn't able to go to Murmansk but I did speak to people who had been and
looked at pictures and books. If I can't go to the locations myself, I read and talk to people.
"How to make it feel that you've been there or make it alive in the book? Well, I've learned that 'less is more'. The less
you write about a place the more people will feel they know it. You need one or two details that persuade the reader that
you have been there; something that just says 'this person knows'. If you write a whole page describing, let us say, Murmansk
in Russia, first of all it's going to bore the readers because they want to read about the adventures of Alex not a travel
book - they can get that somewhere else. And secondly, it's not going to be very persuasive. If you write a page saying the
shops look like this and the buses are a certain colour and the train comes from that particular station, people will realise
that you are trying too hard. But on the otherhand if you just mention a little detail - that a yellow police car goes past
- the reader says hang on police cars aren't yellow - perhaps that's what it's like in Russia. A little detail, well chosen
does more than a whole paragraph of boring description."
3. "What process do you go through when you're writing? Do you plan your stories in
detail or outline?"
"I plan very carefully. The process is this: I start with
a core idea so the core ides for Skeleton Key was that a nuclear holocaust was caused in Russia to allow the villain
to take power. The incident that gave me the idea was the story about the Kirsk submarine. In that incident the Russian President
very nearly lost power - so that gave me the idea. That's the core idea - after that, I draw up a list of ingredients. It's
a bit like being a chef and going shopping for ingredients. When I'm making a book, I need some exciting ingredients. In Skeleton
Key , I thought pretty early on about the climax with the crane and the submarine - that's one ingredient. I knew I was
going to involve the CIA. And with sports, I thought - let Alex do some surfboarding - we haven't had surboarding yet so we
can have a surfboarding chapter. Then because the books are moving forward a month at a time and I realised it was going to
be July, I thought we could have Wimbledon as an ingredient. So you build the book up with ingredients other writers might
call them bricks. I think of the ingredients as being the exciting bits. And then what I do is draw up a structure - a detailed
structure, which is sixteen or seventeen chapters. I know what every chapter's going to contain. I know that if chapter four
is going to have lots of talking then chapters three and five have got to be exciting action chapters and then readers don't
have a chance to get bored. If chapter 7 is a funny, silly chapter, then I'll make sure that chapter 8 is a serious one. That
way it's nice and varied. I do lots of doodles as well. And when I plan a television programme strucutre it's very, very detailed;
I can't start writing until every single minute of a 2 hour detective show is planned out - every single scene, every single
prop, every clue."
Anthony Horowitz knew he wanted to
be an author scince the age of 8. He published his first book, Enter Federick K. Bower, when he was 23. This great author currently resides in North London with his wife
and two sons. He writes in a small studio and is almost always accompanied by his trusty writing companion, a chocolate Labrador
named Lucky Dog.
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