Author Skype with Tim Wynne-Jones

Today we had a video chat with Tim Wynne-Jones, a Canadian author who is just completing his thirty-sixth book. He's written picture books, novels for children, novels for adults, radio plays, and we even found out he wrote songs for the television show, "Fraggle Rock." With all of that writing experience comes great wisdom. He was able, for instance, when asked what the main difference between a novel and a short story is, to say that a short story is short.

When asked if it was better to write in first person or second person (or third person), he said that first person can be fun to write and to read because you're pretending to be someone else, but it can also feel claustrophobic because you're trapped inside one person's head. Third person point of view gives the reader a little more distance and a little more space to watch a character from the outside. Second person point of view, which Tim Wynne-Jones used in his book "Blink and Caution," isn't very common, but in that case the second person point of view took on the role of someone watching the character over his shoulder and talking to him, trying to help him but not being able to.

Tim Wynne-Jones said he usually doesn't outline a story, but instead writes several drafts. For instance, the book he's finishing now took twelve drafts, and at one point it was six hundred pages long. Now it is only three hundred pages, and at his very favorite stage of the writing process. The story is all there at last, and everything is about polishing, making every word be the right word in the right place.

To the question of how do you get emotion into a story, Tim Wynne-Jones suggested that a writer needs to understand what every character wants. The most interesting stories come about when two characters aren't necessarily good or bad, but have different, conflicting things that they want. Even more interesting is when a character gets what he wants, but then discovers that he didn't want it after all!

After studying architecture for three years of college, Tim Wynne-Jones joined a rock band and started writing songs. He found he enjoyed this so much that he wrote more and more, and eventually began publishing books. We'd like to thank him for giving the world so many great books to read, and for taking some time out to visit with us today! Mahalo!