Questionnaire

NAME:
Jonathan Emmett

Place of birth and birthday?
Leicester, 10^th December

What is your favourite book?
My favourite children’s book is Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and my favourite book for grown-ups is Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

What is your favourite song?
There as far too many to mention and they change all the time.

What is your favourite film?
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

What is your most treasured possession?
I can’t think of any object I own that I really treasure.

When did you start writing?
I enjoyed writing from an early age - I can remember writing a weekly serial at my primary school instead of the short stories that we were expected to write.  However, I didn’t start trying to get published until I was about twenty-three, when I was working as an architect.  My first three children’s books (a chapter fiction, a novel and a pop-up book) were never published, but they wetted my appetite for creating children’s books and my fourth book was accepted by a publisher in 1996.

Where do your ideas and inspiration come from?
I get my inspiration from anywhere and everywhere: books, films, television and things that happen to me in real life.Ideas come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes I have come up with what I think is a good title and it will be months before I have a story to go with it. Other times a story will arrive in my head fully formed. On a few occasions, I've seen a character or an object in the background of a favourite picture book by another author and have written my own story about them.If I'm already working on something, and don't want to develop the idea straight away, I will note it down and stick it in the "ideas" file that I keep on my computer. When I'm stuck for inspiration this is the first place that I will look. I never throw any of these ideas away, and often I will come back to an idea several times, over a period of months or even years, before I eventually succeed in working it up into a story.

Can you give three tips to becoming a successful author?

1     Get stuck in!  Start writing now, and don’t be disappointed if the first things you write are not as impressive as you’d hoped.  Don’t be afraid to show your stories to other people to see what they think.  You can’t learn by your mistakes if you’re not prepared to make any or have someone else point them out!

2      Think ahead!  Like many authors, I spend a lot of time working on an outline (a summary containing the key points of the plot) before I start writing a book - even a picture book.  This outline isn’t fixed - it’s constantly being revised as new ideas occur to me while writing the story.  A well-kept outline will allow you to look ahead and understand whether new ideas will work with the story as a whole and - if not - where the plot might be changed to accommodate them.

3      Always use the POINTY end of the pencil!  You’ll find it’s much easier to write with.

What is your favourite place in the world and why?
Home - because there’s no place like it and I never feel completely comfortable anywhere else. 

What are your hobbies?
Reading, making furniture, cinema, walking and tinkering with my website 

If you hadn't been an author and illustrator, what do you think you would have been?
I used to be an architect but, after spending seven years training, I found the job very unrewarding.  So I would probably have left anyway to try my hand at some other area of design or possibly become a teacher instead.