I also gradually became aware of all the inspiration I was drawing from a childhood spent reading books about adventures in parallel worlds, from Elidor to Neverwhere: I knew I was writing that kind of story, but I also found Isengrim telling Silas, early in the book, that ‘There’s only one world’. Those were the sorts of ideas that churned around as I got deeper into the book. I read Lewis Hyde’s book Trickster Makes This World, about how the trickster-figure, the charming, amoral mischief-maker, pops up in every storytelling tradition and plays an indispensable part in defining what it is to be human and I was fascinated by the idea that Reynard is quintessentially human in his cunning and articulacy - and yet at the same time he’s not human, he’s a fox. I remembered reading Reynard the Fox, the cycle of medieval European beast-fables about the trickster Reynard who lies and schemes his way to triumph over all the other animals, but especially over the hapless Isengrim the Wolf and I realised that when my character Silas meets a wolf and a fox on his way home from school, those animals are Isengrim and Reynard themselves, carrying on their rivalry in the present day. Once I’d started writing, trying to make sense of that link, other inspirations showed up. I wanted to write him a story that would be fun and exciting and would also help him when language was a struggle, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that there was a link between the wolves and the words. The inspirations for Wolfstongue were really handed to me by my small son Odhrán, who was having difficulties with his speech at the time and was also a big fan of wolves-we were always drawing wolf pictures and comics and playing wolf, huffing and puffing or howling. Best of all is when you sense there’s a connection between ideas but you can’t work out what it is, because then you have to write the story to find out. Inspirations are everywhere, but in my experience it’s when two or three of them collide and mesh that a story begins to grow. Stories don’t have a single starting-point.
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