Chris Wooding
Chris Wooding
Chris Woodingis a British writer born in Leicester, and now living in London. His first book, Crashing, which he wrote at the age of nineteen, was published in 1998 when he was twenty-one. Since then he has written many more, including The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray, which was silver runner-up for the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize, and Poison, which won the Lancashire Children's Book of the Year. He is also the author of three different, completed series; Broken Sky, an...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth28 February 1977
'Malice' wasn't about horror to start with but an underground comic driven by the power of rumour. However, as nothing fuels a rumour like fear, I decided that it had to be a frightening comic.
We relate comics to the main super-heroes, but it's a great medium through which all sorts of stories are told.
I have a great affection for comics, and I think that people underrate comics as a genre.
I hate SF books that think all you need to make a book is cool technology and mind-bending ideas without a decent plot or characters. And I hate when fantasy books are allowed to ramble off into five hundred page diatribes which don't advance the story one bit.
Everything you write makes you better. But if you really need a tip, here's one: a good story begins in opposition to its ending. That means you work out how it finishes first, and then begin the story as far away from that point - in terms of character development - as you can.
There was a big horror boom in the '80s, and I liked its originality and what you could get away with.
In my head, scenes are shot from certain angles; there are camera pans, all of that kind of stuff. Converting those visuals to comic format was mostly a matter of adapting them to the rhythm of paneling.
I like writing comic pages, discovering the rhythm of the panels, learning how much you can and can't express. It's good to stretch myself as a writer instead of always doing prose work; I write screenplays for the same reason.
I do screen work, adult books, kids books and comic stuff, which gives me a pretty full plate. The problem is usually choosing which one I want to work on next.
Cynicism was a one-way path, and once taken the way back was lost forever.
We may seem the weakest and most insignificant of all the Realms, but our strength comes in other ways. We have what no other race has: imagination. Any one of us, even the lowliest, can create worlds within ourselves; we can people them with the most extraordinary creatures, the most amazing inventions, the most incredible things. We can live in those worlds ourselves, if we choose; and in our own worlds, we can be as we want to be. Imagination is as close as we will ever be to godhead, Poison, for in imagination, we can create wonders.
But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without her conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, Poison found one day that she had come to know her choice.
I just wanted them to die," said Poison. "They didn't have to make such a drama about it.
Once upon a time there was a young lady who lived in a marsh, and her name was Poison.