An Interview with Cliff McNish by Jacob Hope from CILIP

We are delighted to welcome Cliff McNish for a special interview to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of The Doomspell. A special limited edition hardback of the book together with an exciting new story The Light of Armath is available now. To find out more and read an extract from this, why not visit Cliff's website www.cliffmcnish.com

Please can you tell us a little about yourself?

I started off not being a reader at all. We had precious few books at home, and no children’s ones that I recall. I read comics until my English teacher in late junior school finally thrust C.S. Lewis’s Narnian tale The Magician’s Nephew at me. I often wonder if the fact that the first novel to grip me was middle-grade magical fantasy is the reason I automatically took up writing in that vein once I began. I suspect so. But oddly I never started writing until I was 38 years old, and even then only because I’d recklessly promised my nine year-old daughter a story about a witch – recklessly because I’d never written any fiction before, so I had no idea how if I could do it or not. That story, originally called Rachel and the Witch, finally became The Doomspell.


‘The Doomspell Trilogy’ is celebrating its 20th anniversary, congratulations. Can you introduce our readers to Rachel and Eric and the adventures they face.

Doomspell is slap-bang in the venerable tradition of wizards and witches, full of spells, counter spells and High Magic, with battles and stakes escalating as the children try to stop an immensely powerful Witch from getting what she wants.

Rachel is the main character, intensely magical; her brother Eric has entirely different and unique skills. But in many ways the Witch, Dragwena, is the character many children remember best. She’s very much the sizzling White Witch of Narnia with zesty added snake-bite. A Japanese reader once sent me a fan letter saying, “My favourite character is Dragwena. Not only do I look like Dragwena [she has four jaws and spiders that live inside her], but psychologically I am like her, too.” You can’t always think of something to reply when you get letters like that.


You’ve written a new story, ‘The Light of Armath,’ what parts of returning to the world felt easiest and most challenging?

In all honesty I thought I would struggle to be enthused writing about characters I’d created and left behind so long ago. In fact, the opposite occurred: the moment I started describing Dragwena in her eye-tower again, stroking her snake, irritated and restless, her entire character came back to me in all its full-blooded glorious villainy. I actually found I couldn’t wait to write about her again, as if she’d been sitting there expecting me to all this time, tapping a wand impatiently. Dragwena is the sort of relentless character it’s always a joy to work on. But in addition to her, I also wanted to do justice to a much-loved character from the original series, Morpeth. I felt I rather short-changed my readers by largely side-lining him in the in third book of The Doomspell Trilogy, and wanted to rectify that in The Light of Armath.


What can readers expect in ‘The Light of Armarth’?

First, I hope, an honest story. Readers who enjoyed this series have a lot of fondness for the memories, and it would have been horrible to sour that with a sub-standard tale. So I decided I wouldn’t inflict it on them unless I thought it was good enough (I’m talking about for Doomspell fans here, of course. The new novella could conceivably be read stand-alone without knowing the first Doomspell book, but I wouldn’t recommend it, several aspects will be deeply confusing.).

Second good point, I hope, is that it’s not a little dinky nothing of a short story. It’s a proper novella, so it has some significant development. The last thing I wanted to do was bring out a 20th Anniversary issue with a thin story, plopped in the book as an excuse to re-release it.

Third, I guess, is that the central spell in The Light of Armath is one Doomspell readers won’t have come across before, so that’s giving them something new as well.

Fourth, it answers a couple of questions left hanging around in the original book.

And fifth, I suppose, I’ve written it very much in the style of the original book as well, so if you like THE DOOMSPELL I’m guessing or supposing and hoping you’ll like this, too.

Oh and sixth – it’s in the original cover, and in a limited edition, for any collectors who may be interested in that.

Seventh – there is no seventh. (Which sounds like the starting idea for a new story, doesn’t it? ‘You may only perform six spells,’said the arch-mage. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because the seventh spell unravels the world.’ ‘Ah,’ I said, immediately and secretly looking forward to that moment ...)


Voice feels a tremendous strength in your writing, how do you go about establishing this?

I don’t actually work on this consciously. What I try to do is create main characters that embody strong traits, and hook those characters into stories that seem worth telling. To some extent you, the author, describing things, are the key voice holding everything together, of course, but I think the real key is creating characters that want something desperately. If you do that, readers also start to passionately identify with or against them, and plots automatically head in interesting directions. I teach in schools a lot (usually invited by librarians!), and a couple of my main workshops focus on creating great characters and the steps needed to build a strong plot around them. If anyone would like my action worksheets on these worksheets simply ask, and I’ll send you them.


You’ve also written some highly successful Young Adult fiction including Breathe and Angel. How does your approach differ writing for Young Adults?

That’s an interesting question. And there really are some major differences. Language complexity and plot and character complexity, obviously, are greater in a teen novel – or should be! And romance is really not appropriate to mid-grade, though deep friendship is (even if you subvert that romance in teen stories, which I sometimes do).

The level of psychological tension you can sustain is also altogether greater in teen fiction, as well as the level of critical self-examination, guilt, motive-checking, angst etc. so if you want to explore those things you swim towards teen fiction.

Another massive difference is who your enemy tends to be. In mid-grade fiction the main opponents/antagonists tend to be external (eg Matilda by Roald Dahl, it’s not Matilda unable to come to terms with her crummy family, its Miss Trunchbull in all her magnificent excess), and it’s lovely to be able as a writer to focus on those external foes, keep the main children fundamentally good and supportive of each other and not constantly questioning their motivations. With teen fiction motives become murkier, the monster is often the one within, which of course is exactly what leads to opportunities for fully-rounded character development not usually so necessary in mid-grade.


Breathe has won numerous awards and selected as one of the UK Schools Library Network 100 best adult and children’s novels, what do you think makes it so popular?

I honestly don’t know. First, perhaps because there are simply not that many decent ghost novels for late juniors/early-mid teens out there, even now, so it fulfils a need (because who doesn’t like a good scary ghost story?)

But perhaps there are, if I can conjecture, a couple of other aspects: 1) the ghost mother at the centre of the plot is truly a lost soul who is utterly convinced she is acting out of love. That whole theme of love and death/love versus hatred in the novel has a resonance that seems to appeal equally to children, teens and adults. A lot of children’s ghost novels tend to skirt the surface of some of this meaty thematic stuff, but Breathe doesn’t. 2) Maybe my creation of the realm of the Nightmare Passage also has something to do with it, too. It’s a place in the novel readers tend to remember. The Nightmare Passage only occupies a small part of the novel, actually, but readers have often written to me about it or mentioned it.


Can you tell us a bit about the film script you created for this?

OMG don’t get me stated on this! First, I decided to learn to write a script with formal correctness using the standard software package, which is called Final Draft. I did that purely as an experiment to learn the medium, with a view to creating entirely new film and tv scripts. Then a major film production company based in L.A. contacted me, showing an interest in the rights for BREATHE. That led to me mentioning the script I’d written, them saying great, show us it, and then working and reworking it many times under their guidance. In the end I worked on endless drafts, but could never get them to settle on the story. It was incredibly frustrating, and put me off film scriptwriting almost for good! But I still have my final script, which I like – and it’s very different from the novel. It’s now an adult ghost story, where the central characters are two women, one alive, one dead, battling over possession of the same son. I think it has as much zest as the original children’s novel, but who can really know? It’s sitting, as they say, in my desk drawer. Like a lot of things you write, it might never get an audience. Maybe I’ll post it up for people to see one day ...


What can we expect next from you?

Writing The Light of Armath gave me a new lease of life where magical fantasy is concerned. I’d had a synopsis for a new mid-grade magical fantasy in my desk for years, basically untouched and unworked on while I concentrated on (mostly) teen age fiction projects, and also some adult horror. After finishing The Light of Armath I dusted the synopsis down, tested it on my daughter (she still reads my stuff!) and realised I liked it. Well, I’d always liked he central idea of a world (our world) with magic emerging in various extraordinary ways, but now I felt I could write it. That it would be fun to do, in other words. So I’m penning it. I guess I’ll have EARTHSPELL out to beta readers within the next six months. Either that or it’ll turn into total pap in front of me and get quietly shelved. Watch this space!

Read an extract from the new novella The Light of Armath at www.cliffmcnish.com