"We nearly hanged my sister," Diana Wynne Jones, award-winning author, says quite seriously. "We strung her up on skipping ropes over a beam because she wanted to know what it was like to be a pantomime fairy. She was so busy trying to look graceful, she didn't notice she was slowly strangling.

"It was a weird existence. We were sort of in the margins the whole time. Our parents actually put us in an unheated one-up one-down building right across the yard from the conference centre my father ran, and just sort of left us there. I'd beg, borrow and save and get books out of the library and anything in them that struck me as adventurous I tried to do, sometimes with slightly hairy results. That's the sort of isolation we were in.

"I actually started writing at I suppose the age of 8. I finished my first book at the age of 12 because not only did nobody read stories to us, my two sisters and myself, but my father was so incredibly mean that we didn't have any books to speak of. It was a sort of famine, and that's really what started me off. I don't feel at all grateful to my father even though it did start me writing, because I was going to do that anyway."

Yet her father did tell stories - only not to his children. Diana continues, "The ghost stories he told were to the visitors at the conference centre. I think my mother had a genius for finding houses that are haunted. There was one part of the centre that I always ran through like mad. When I talked to my sisters years later, they said they did too. It just felt so weird and frightening. One day I came back from school to find the whole place was in an uproar because one of the cleaning ladies had turned round and spoken to what she thought was a fellow cleaning-lady and then she saw a notice board through her in exactly this place. It was quite funny. She went off to work in the bacon factory because she didn't mind buckets of blood but ghosts were another thing entirely!

"You know, I thought it was normal at the time. It took me years to finally realise that it was the weirdest upbringing. It makes for a dreadful adolescence. You end up lacking in social skills. You don't impinge on anything and there's a sort of deprivation. It does leave you with dreadful uncertainties and insecurities."

But Diana's take on reality is healthy. "What I don"t understand is why when people say "the real world" they always mean something depressing by it. It doesn't seem to me that reality has to be dreadful. It's about half of one and half of the other. I had a friend who was an out-and-out communist and he deliberately left a good job to go and work in one of these buildings that were all made of concrete and cover what's real is what you see and what your brain makes of it.

"Bristol is in its way a sort of fantasy city. It's full of things that surprise you. The old and the new sit side by side in a really mad way so it's a very good place for writers. In Deep Secret one of the characters makes up a fantasy game set in Bristolia. I've thought for years someone should really invent it. Sometimes like a lot of other people I slip away into a fantasy land when life is getting too much and at other times I've seemed not to. It's just how life takes you, I think. What I do most strenuously object to is those kinds of people - they're often rather bad teachers, actually - who say that doing that spoils your sense of what's real. That's not actually true.

"Writing hasn't so much changed my life as it is my life, you know? I really don't feel happy unless I'm writing something. From a very early age I've got used to the double life you lead. You know, your thoughts are in one place and yet they're of necessity on the thing that you're doing, the people you're talking to. I got so that I could play back anything the kids said to me without actually having consciously heard it.

"I've done terribly absent-minded things. When I was writing Charmed Life I always used to stop when they came home but this one time I was so busy thinking about the book and making supper at the same time and I suddenly realised I'd put my husband's shoes in to cook. I'd lined them up very neatly in the oven so that the heels were absolutely level, but I don't know what I was doing there.

"I never actually had a day job. I was one of those people at that particular time: I refused to be a secretary, I didn't want to teach and there wasn't anything else to do. I applied for various things but they were very few and far between, so actually what I did was have children and make sure that I was with them when they were at home, which you can do when you're writing because on the whole you can stop.

"I don't really have a writing routine. I fit it in round life, or rather life fits in round it when a book is coming. It tends to come like an absolute cataract and I just go back to it at every available opportunity. I remember when I was writing Fire and Hemlock, I was doing it almost sentence by sentence because life got very busy at that time. I just rushed away in between everything happening. I had to carry it around with me and write the next bit as far as I could before something else happened. That's one reason I prefer to write with pen and paper because then you can carry it around with you.

"I always write in the living-room, longhand, to start with because I don't want anything to get in the way of the actual story and I don't like to think of myself as someone writing a book, I just want to get on with the story. I want to know what happens next because I don't start out with a plan. I know the beginning, end and something in the middle and that's all. It comes to me like pictures on the television that you can't see round the edges of, and I want to see round the edges. I want to know how they get from A at the beginning to B in the middle to C at the end.

"The other thing is that I find I make myself laugh. My husband can't believe this. When I was writing Howl's Moving Castle, there was one point where I howled with laughter and rolled off the sofa. I'm a bit of a nuisance actually. I do try not to get in the way but sometimes there's a clash of interests there. He'll be peacefully watching television and I say 'Turn that thing off! I've got to finish this chapter!' He's tremendously understanding, and good in that he wants to read it as soon as I've finished it, you know? And he doesn't like anything that he thinks of as science fiction.

"I find that, if I'm writing a book, about sixty things occur which are something to do with it, either telling me essential information or finding just the book I need or something will happen that is obviously going to be the next incident almost. There may not be such a thing as coincidence but I don't take it any further than that because I've so often found that as someone said, 'Once is coincidence, twice is happenstance and three times is enemy action.' Anything I write comes true on me sooner or later in some way. I was just writing A Tale of Time City, having Time City falling down, and the houses were crashing down and shooting rubble across the road and I heard a distinct noise of something crashing down and shooting out from my study. Fortunately I wasn't in it due to my habit of writing in the living room, which probably saved my life because the entire roof of the study came thundering in and left a hole through to the sky. I thought, 'Oh bugger, I know just what's happened. I'll finish this sentence before I go and look'. So I finished about the house shooting into the road and then I went and looked and sure enough, rubble and squish. Ever since I finished The Dark Lord of Derkholm I keep wondering if I'm going to meet a flying pig."

Having made her name with children's fiction, Diana Wynne Jones is moving more into adult fiction but it isn't always a conscious decision. "It's a funny thing," she says, "books you're writing sort of have lives of their own. I don't think you decide 'Right, I"m going to write for people aged 11 or people aged 90'. Books I start on just sort of decide for themselves. It makes my relationships with publishers a bit worrying at times. They get so stressed about not being able to fit them into pigeonholes. Mind you, Jo Fletcher (Diana's editor at Gollancz) is not one of those, but a lot of people are.

"When somebody asked me to write A Sudden Wild Magic specifically for adults, that felt like a great weight on my shoulders. When I'd done that I thought, 'Well this is silly'. The only thing that adults seem to require is that you tell them things more than once. Kids can remember things. They're used to not knowing and they're used to picking up on really quite small hints, but adults don't do that any more. By the time you reach a certain age you're sort of programmed to know it all and so you don't actually bother so much. You can't blame them. After a day's work they want to put their feet up so you need to keep them hitched in to the facts by mentioning them oftener. But that is honestly the only difference I think. I remember I was doing a signing once in a shop and this nine-year-old boy came in and he'd been reading Homeward Bounders. His mum came in with him and she said, "I don't think you should have written this book. I couldn't understand a word of it. I don't know what it was about" And the boy just grimaced and said, "Don't listen to her. She's stupid."

Wynne Jones is a great believer in empowerment for young people. She says, "That's one of the reasons I used to go to schools a lot because there I am, a person, and they could see I was a person and that I'd managed to do something, and just realising that is a form of empowerment. I think that a lot of people are underempowered through no fault of their own and possibly nobody else's fault. They just don't realise that people have potential. I was at this school and people got enthusiastic. There was an awful lot of give and take of ideas and during the question bit this boy - I remember him very clearly - suddenly said, 'Have you ever written anything about a moving castle?' and 'I said no, I haven't, but it sounds like a really good idea. Can I use it? I promise I'll say that you gave me the idea' so I took his name and address solemnly on something he tore out of his exercise book but sadly I lost it. I do hope he knows the book's for him.

"And of course it"s great fun putting people you dislike into print. I've done that several times. There's a book I wrote called Who got rid of Angus Flint and that was directly in revenge when he stranded me out in the country, which happens in the book. I had to walk back and I got blisters, and as my blisters grew I thought, 'Right, my lad! You'll go in a book and people will laugh at you.'

"I do like all books that I write and I do find that books are so much my life, I like them to be positive. I don't terribly like the current custom for having everything rather gloom and doom and problems getting so overwhelming that you can't win. I do think books are there to encourage you to be positive and to win, and also to comfort you when things are going wrong. The nicest letters I've ever had from anyone were those that said 'Such and such was going on with me and it comforted me because I read your book' and I think 'Oh yes, that's what books are for.' And I miss it terribly when I'm not doing it."

The Dark Lord of Derkholm is out now in hardback from Gollancz, price £16.99. Deep Secret is also available in paperback from Gollancz/Vista at £5.99

©Anne Gay 1999