Books without barriers

Hello.

I'm a writer. As a writer, these days, you are expected not only to sell your work, but also yourself. You need to be able to sum up what you do. With me, it's tricky. I write books for grown-ups and books for children. But then, I also write screenplays. I have written bestsellers and, erm, whatever the opposite of a bestseller is (worst-seller?) in a variety of genres.

But to me, everything I do is consistent. My writing always stems from exactly the same place - a desire to tell a story that offers a new way of seeing the world. Novel means new, after all.

Which is why most of my books exist on the intersection between reality and fantasy. Sometimes it is easier to look at something from outside it. For instance, an alien might be the best observer of human weirdness.

The biggest and most passionate belief I have is that people will always need stories. Stories console us, and protect us, and distract us, and stimulate us, but most of all they help us to understand who we are. Anyone who wants to limit our access to stories is an enemy. Anyone who makes them more available and attractive is a hero. A simple world view, but there you go.

During my stint as Booktrust writer in residence, I plan to be as honest as possible about my own writing process, as these six months will see me writing my first novel for teenagers, and waiting for the release of my next book for adults, The Humans. But I'll mainly be talking about all the reasons we should be positive about the future.

There may be a lot of uncertainty in the world of books right now. No sane person likes to see a closed library, and e-books look set to shake up things in ways we still don't understand. But I believe a lot of healthy things are happening.

Genre snobbery is fading. For the first time since Mary Shelley, the words 'literary' and 'science fiction' aren't seen as incompatible. Graphic novels and children's books are getting more respect than ever before. The solid line between serious books and commercial books is becoming happily blurred, as writers and readers realise that books that entertain can be intelligent, and vice versa. Imagination with set divisions is not really imagination.  As a writer, I want access to as many ingredients as possible. As a reader I want that too.

Stories have the power to set us free. But for that to happen, stories themselves need to be set free. Who says comedy is less significant than 'serious' fiction? Or that vampires and zombies are just for teenagers?

Let us not read or write in a box. After all, Shakespeare didn't. (Hamlet was a philosophical-historical-supernatural-tragi-comic-murder story, for instance.)

Let's leave prejudices at the door, and lose ourselves in the primitive wonder of narrative. And above all else let us stop worrying about pretentions and snobberies. They belong to a vertical age of class systems.

This is the horizontal twenty-first century. We have things like the internet here. For books to survive they need to be more than status symbols.

There you go. That's my vision. You're bound to hear more about it.