FAQs

Er… sort of but I don’t want to get sued so I’m not going to say who! Most of them are composites – mixtures of lots of different people – friends, famous people, kids I’ve taught. In Socks Are Not Enough, Michael is a cross between me and a few other weird people I’ve met. His brother Ste is basically a lad who was a few years older than me. When we were in Year 11, he came along with his gelled hair and his ageing Vauxhall Cavalier and his job and his money and nabbed the best looking girl in the year. Not that I’m bitter about this of course… In actual fact, he was probably a nice guy so I had to throw in some of the nastier aspects of my mates’ big brothers as well in order to make the character really hateable. In The Jam Doughnut That Ruined My Life, Darren Gamble is definitely influenced by some of the “challenging” children I’ve taught.

The best thing is just being allowed to come up with whatever you want, and then seeing your story slowly start to come together. Oh, and I work at home so I can spend large parts of the day drinking tea and eating biscuits. The worst thing is that sometimes I go a bit nuts in a tiny room on my own!

Yes, most definitely. Creative writing was the one thing at school I was really enthusiastic about. On top of that, I guess I’ve always been a bit of a daydreamer. I like joking around, being silly and playing with words, and I’m not a big fan of people who take themselves too seriously. Hopefully this is reflected in my writing.

There are literally millions – I think as a writer you’ve got to always be taking on board new ideas and noticing things you see, hear and read. Obviously I love Roald Dahl but I seem to have a new favourite writer each week and there’s no real pattern to them – Sally Gardner, Ernest Hemmingway, Liz Pichon, John Steinbeck, Andy Mulligan, John Le Carré, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Phillip Pullman, John Vernon-Lloyd, Mario Puzo… You get the picture.

In terms of funny people, I have massive respect for all comedians and I love the way they build up to a punchline. I tried it once and it was terrifying – never again! I’m a big fan of sitcoms – everything from The Office to Allo Allo to Father Ted to Alan Partridge and so on and so on.

My family are all funny in different ways. I inherited my love of story and words from my dad – he’s a brilliant story-teller and when we were kids, he somehow managed to invent a new bed-time story for my brothers, my sister and me every day. He also used to make up jokes and play silly word games all the time. When we were really little, his favourite was to say, “I one the sick,” then we’d reply “I two the sick,” and he’d say, “I three the sick” etc. We’d go on taking turns counting til he’d say, “I seven the sick,” and we’d all scream out: “I eight the sick!” at the top of our lungs. To a three year old that is pretty much the funniest thing in the world!

Also, you never forget your favourite teachers and I’ve had some wonderful, supportive ones over the years: Mrs Sanderson and Mrs Johnston at the Harris, Ms Cocker at Broughton High, Joyce Simpson at TASC and everyone on the Winchester MA course. These were the people who inspired me to teach and write perhaps more than anyone else.

I would say from real people. Most of us have funny habits or say strange things and I’m always looking out for this. Also having a bit of banter with your mates or seeing how other people interact with each other can give you some wonderful ideas. The ideas are always there, it’s finding a good one that’s difficult…

Well, usually I start with a basic idea, like “What’s the worst thing that could happen to a teenager?” [Answer – parents who are nudists]. Or, “Imagine that your life was ruined by a jam doughnut…”

From there I sketch out a few loosely-connected scenes. For The Jam Doughnut that Ruined My Life, I came up with a few, including a scene in which Roman gets caught putting a doughnut into his lunchbox, one when he shaves a guinea pig, and one where he gets stung in the face with a jelly-fish. I’ll work these through a few times, trying to make the scenes work as well as possible.

Usually during this stage, I’ll mention a character or another situation that will make me want to develop more scenes (in this case, I came up with the idea of the class nutter – Darren Gamble – and Kevin The Vom-cano Harrison, who is always being sick). From here, I’ll slowly get an overall idea about where the story might go.

When I feel like I’m onto something, I’ll take everything I’ve written so far and start thinking of how I can turn my scenes into a story. To do this, I tease out who the main characters are. Then I think about what they want and how the main theme (doughnut, nudity etc) is going to affect them.

Once I’ve done this I write a first draft. This is usually pretty rough, so I keep re-writing, re-modelling and re-planning until I’m happy with it. Then I’ll show it to someone else and see what they think. They’ll give me some ideas and I’ll take it from there. The whole thing might take six months or it might take several years.

It’s actually brilliant fun, particularly when you know your characters well. You can put them into all sorts of situations and have a great laugh when you think about how they’d react. The difficult thing is that humour is quite personal and subjective. What one person laughs at is very different from what someone else laughs at. Also, when I tell a joke to my friends, it’s obvious when it isn’t funny because it is greeted with silence, wincing and everyone in the room suddenly realising that they have to be somewhere else urgently.  If I write a duff joke, there’s nobody to do that but me. I guess you have to be your own biggest critic, which isn’t always easy.

Like I wrote earlier, it’s impossible to pick one and if you ask me on a different day I’ll probably give you an entirely different answer. I’d say for younger kids, it has to be The Giant Jam Sandwich – it was my favourite book when I was little and my children absolutely love it. For 7-9 years it’d be George’s Marvellous Medicine. I love how Grandma is such an old cow! For 10-12 year olds, Holes or Trash are my favourites. Holes because it’s so clever and so carefully-written. Trash simply because it’s a wonderful story. For 12+ maybe His Dark Materials, which is an utter masterpiece. My favourite adult books is probably The Godfather. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but the character of the Don – and how he orchestrates the world around him – is mesmerising. I always think that you should give this book to any fifteen year old boy who won’t read.

On my writing days I get up early-ish, change a few nappies , wash my hands and grab some breakfast – and yes, this sometimes includes coco-pops! It takes me a while to wake up in the morning so I usually have to play a few games of Minesweeper or check my emails before I feel ready to get started. Then I work in 2-3 hour stints until about 5ish. Writing is a brilliant job but sitting alone at your computer all day can send you a bit mad if you’re not careful so you need to take lots of breaks… or at least that’s what I tell my girlfriend when she catches me coming downstairs for my fifteenth cup of tea and a hob-nob of the day!

Er. No. If they were I would not be seeking any publicity at all – I would be hiding in my room with the curtains closed, eating cheese and crying.

The best thing is just being allowed to come up with whatever you want, and then seeing your story slowly start to come together. Oh, and I work at home so I can spend most of the day eating biscuits. The worst thing is that sometimes I go a bit nuts in a tiny room on my own all day!

I guess I always wanted to write. When I was at school I had a pretty low attention span and I was more interested in being a clown than getting on with my work. The only subject that I really loved was English, and especially creative writing. As a teacher, if I’m teaching about poetry or a particular kind of story, I have to find examples to fit with what I want the children to do. I just figured out that it was easier to write my own than to spend hours scouring the library. Reading that back, I’m basically saying that I wanted to be a writer because I’m lazy!

Yes. I’m currently working on a sequel to Socks Are Not Enough, which I’m hoping will come out in 2013. After that, I’m not quite sure if it would be fair to put poor Michael through any further traumas…

I would say the main inspirations are real people. Most of us have funny habits or say strange things and I’m always looking out for this. When I was at school I used to love doing impressions of my teachers and friends. Unfortunately they all sounded pretty much the same (like me but with different degrees of tonsillitis) but it meant I was always looking for people’s odd little idiosyncrasies. I also love to read and watch TV and films. It’s good fun to think about how writers build a joke and what kinds of things people laugh at.

I’m a complete comedy nerd. Anyone who stands up on stage and tries to make a roomful of strangers laugh has my total respect and admiration. I tried it once and it was pretty much the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. Never again! I grew up watching people like The Two Ronnies and Russ Abbot, then Frank Skinner and Steve Coogan. Later on I loved to watch Peter Kay and Eddie Izzard and Lee Evans and Vic Reeves. These days comedy is everywhere and it’s great to see. I love silly joke-tellers like Tim Vine and Milton Jones. I think Miranda Hart is brilliant, and so are Lee Mack and Sean Lock. In short… hundreds of people!

Again – it’s literally impossible to say because they’re all so different. I love anything that makes me laugh! Here’s a list of some of my favourites: Allo Allo, The Two Ronnies, Have I got News for You, Father Ted, Fawlty Towers, Peep Show, Flight of the Conchords, Blackadder, Summer Heights High, I’m Alan Partridge, The Royle Family, The Office, Extras and the list goes on! At the moment, I watch a lot of the American version of The Office. They’ve done well over a hundred episodes and it’s still very fresh and very funny – quite amazing. For me the most perfectly-written comedy film I’ve ever seen is Hot Fuzz. It manages to be clever, silly and very, very funny all at the same time. But then again, I also love Napoleon Dynamite and Anchorman and… I really should stop – it’s getting boring now!

It’s actually brilliant fun, particularly when you know your characters well. You can put them into all sorts of situations and have a great laugh when you think about how they’d react. The difficult thing is that humour is quite personal and subjective. What one person laughs at is very different from what someone else laughs at. Also, when I tell a joke to my friends, it’s obvious when it isn’t funny because it is greeted with silence, wincing and everyone in the room suddenly realising that they have to be somewhere else urgently. If I write a duff joke, there’s nobody to do that but me. I guess you have to be your own biggest critic.

Yes.

The mullet.

Naughty Humphrey.

Ok, so no-one has actually ever asked me this but still…