A Writer in Residence ... Inside Your Computer

Novels, even short stories, eat ideas like forest fires eat trees. If you’re setting out on an epic novel with just one idea, you’re probably going to peter out. What I do is take an idea that interests me, that I can feel an emotional response to, and then chuck it into my head to stew for a day or a week or a year, and then see if another idea sticks to it.

Author Patrick Ness will be offering regular advice to the wannabe-publisheds [via] in his new role as writer-in-residence for the UK organisation Booktrust. (This could be the first time that the such a residence has an online address rather than a location in the location in the physical world - and that's great because we can all get to share!).

Ness is the winner of both the Booktrust Teenage Prize and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize with The Knife of Never Letting Go, described as a very contemporary coming-of-age story.