I love fairy tales because of their haunting beauty and magical strangeness. They are set in worlds where anything can happen. Frogs can be kings, a thicket of brambles can hide a castle where a royal court has lain asleep for a hundred years, a boy can outwit a giant, and a girl can break a curse with nothing but her courage and steadfastness.
Fairy tales are stories of triumph and transformation and true love, all things I fervently believe in.
Every word we speak calls on 37 muscles and thousands of nerves. It's not surprising that sometimes these nerves and muscles fail us.
The ogres and witches and giants of fairytales stand in as metaphors for those obstacles that we all face in our own lives.
I wrote my novel 'Bitter Greens' as the creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts and am now looking at the history of the Rapunzel tale as my theoretical component.
Fairytales work on two levels. On a conscious level, they are stories of true love and triumph and overcoming difficult odds and so are pleasurable to read. But they work on a deeper and symbolic level in that they play out our universal psychological dramas and hidden desires and fears.
The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.
I have struggled all my life with my stuttering. Not to mention all my other speech impediments. I think I have every language disorder known to speech pathologists.
Once upon a time, I was a little girl sick in the hospital, and my mother gave me a copy of 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' to comfort me.
Stories are the common ground that allow people to connect, despite all our defences and all our differences.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is to think that what you need to write a novel is imagination, creativity and a facility with words. Yes, you need all those things, but a novel is a highly complex organism that needs to be dealt with in quite a logical manner.
It has always seemed a cruel joke to me that the very word 'stutter' is difficult for many stutterers to pronounce. It is onomatopoeic, an imitation of the halting, repetitive sound made by people with this speech dysfunction.
I was attacked by a dog when I was a toddler, and my injuries were so bad, I spent quite a bit of my childhood in and out of hospital. Books were absolutely my salvation during those years.
As I grew up, I read and loved many fairy-tale retellings and began to think about writing my own reimagining of 'Rapunzel.'
Many people think fairy tales and retellings of fairy tales are only for children, but I'm not the only writer to take an old tale and retell it for a sophisticated adult audience.
As an adult, I have often been deep in serious conversation with someone I've highly respected and seen them roll an eye as my mouth has mangled yet another magnificently conceived, clumsily articulated sentence. In my mind, the words are mellifluous as honey. In my mouth, they are shards of glass.
You cannot write a book unless it is totally inhabiting your imagination and you are totally engrossed with it. Which is a kind word for obsession.
Since the moment I could hold a pencil, I have spent nearly all day every day writing. And there is not an age group that I have not written for. You can read me from birth 'til death.
One reason why so little is known about the German resistance is because it was never a united movement in the way that it was in France or Poland. It was simply too dangerous.
Stories are like that. Like cities, they are built on the stones and bones of the past.
