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.
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 wanted to write an adventure in the old-fashioned way, something to which I could apply the adjective 'rollicking' and not feel embarrassed. But I've never liked my heroes to be too heroic, so they ended up being a bunch of criminals instead.
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.
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.
There was a big horror boom in the '80s, and I liked its originality and what you could get away with.
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 have a great affection for comics, and I think that people underrate comics as a genre.
Well, wherever you go, whatever you do, you're still you. You can change your surroundings, start a new life, but you'll always fall into the same old patterns, make the same kind of friends, commit the same mistakes. The thing you need to change is yourself.
If there was one thing worse than being cheated, it was being cheated by someone who referred to themselves in the third person.
How was is that life never worked out the way it did in his head?
Not for the first time, he wished he commanded a highly trained bunch of soldiers instead of a ragtag mob of rejects in varying stages of alcoholism.
Things just seem so much better in theory than in practice.
Some of us are born in the right place, and some of us have to go look for it.