'People care about people. Understand that and you can write anything'

Loneliness, rereading, The Secret Garden - the author of The Dangerous Book for Boys reveals the motivation behind his writing and his advice for new writers.
Conn Iggulden
'People care about people. Understand that and you can write anything'. Photograph: Guardian

What was your favourite book as a child?
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. At a very young age, I wanted to have a special bond with animals and birds. I wanted there to be magic in the world, or at least in me. In The Secret Garden, Dickon had that bond and I remember envying him. I also have the idea that he was as grubby as I usually was.

Yes. The house was filled with them. I ate breakfast with Adrian Mole propped under my plate of toast. I read in the bath, in trees and occasionally on the roof. My brother slept under a set of shelves so bowed that I honestly thought they would one day collapse and kill him.

Was there someone who got you interested in reading books or writing?
My Irish mother told me vivid stories of history and grisly executions from a young age. She quotes poems and loves words to this day. I doubt I'd be writing without her tales. Still, I don't really know where the original story-telling bug came from - loneliness, perhaps.

What made you want to write when you were starting out?
I began with fantasy novels and loved the wild flights of imagination. That was a drug to me and a world I wanted to join. It's difficult to explain, but it's a wonderful feeling when the words come.

Do you find writing easy? Does it get any easier?
Sometimes it is. There are chapters, even whole books that have come easily. Others are murder. Honestly, it depends if I'm smoking or not. If I am, I can write up a storm. If not, I am earthbound - a miserable, healthy plodder.

What makes you write now?
The parts when my fingers blur and my heart races and I read it aloud and I know I've written a good scene. It isn't better than sex, (thank goodness) but it can be better than that first, gasping cigarette in the morning. Perhaps.


By filling the other hours with life and family, friends and a dog. There are times when I have to be alone to stay sane, but just as many when I need to be in the pub.

"Get the characters right and the plot will follow." I also liked Robert Heinlein's old advice for people who say they want to be writers: Read a lot, write a lot and send away what you write.

What advice would you give to new writers?
Stop emailing me. I'm warning you.

Is there a secret to writing?
From the densest, most obscure bit of literary fiction to something that makes your heart race, it all boils down to this: people care about people. Cows don't. Wolves don't. We do. Understand that and you can write anything.

It probably helps to be a little bit autistic as well, so that you can write as an observer.

What are you working on at the moment?
The third Genghis Khan book, the second Dangerous Pocket Book and a book of Heroes with my brother David. I like to keep busy.

· Conn Iggulden's The Dangerous Book for Boys won the 2007 Galaxy British Book Awards Book of the Year and he is the first author to have reached the number one spot in both the fiction and non-fiction charts. The Dangerous Book for Boys Yearbook, and the paperback edition of Wolf of the Plains are published this month by Harper Collins.

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