An Author Interview with Amy Wilson, Author of Lightning Falls

Hey, guys!!! Isabelle Knight back here with SUPER exciting and awesome news and eeek I CANNOT BELIEVE IT!!!! Another author interview!! With one of my favorite authors of all time!!!! So you can imagine why I am freaking out. 🙂 The wonderful, fantastic, ever so imaginative author I’ll be interviewing today is none other than…

Amy Wilson!!!

Amy Wilson is a middle-grade fantasy author of many, many magical, whimsical, and amazing books, including Lightning Falls! Which was the book I read! Fun fact – my first ever book review on YouTube was of Lightning Falls! So it kind of makes this interview feel super special! Well, all my interviews feel special, but this one even more so!!

I actually read Lightning Falls in a bookstore in China, and oh my goodness, it was so good I had to buy it!! So it is now comfortably sitting on my writing desk, along with Skandar and the Unicorn Thief and The Thief Who Sang Storms! I loved Lightning Falls so much, I of course asked Amy Wilson to an interview!

And she agreed!!! Eeek! I was so excited when she replied!!! So excited I practically screamed and jumped up and down in my room………. 🙂 Totally normal reaction.

Right?

But yeah. I’ve probably rambled on enough. I shall now let you hear from Amy Wilson herself!!

1. What was one of the things that inspired Lightning Falls? Did you ever steal/take ideas from other novels or even from your own childhood?

This is a good question – I think I’m inspired by everything I do, see or read. So in a way, what I write is like a melting pot of all of those things. I love a good ghost story, and a haunted, rackety old house. And I love to tell stories about young people who perhaps haven’t quite found their way yet, and explore with them their world and how they fit within it. One of my favourite books was The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne Jones, I loved the world she created, and the adventures the children had there.

2. What did the first draft of Lightning Falls look like and how many drafts did it take to get to the final draft? How much of that first draft did you keep?

I usually keep the first few chapters, because those are the ones that came in a moment of inspiration. They will need a bit of polishing, but they tend to stay pretty much the same. Then there’s a lot of editing through the middle to the end, because I’m not a huge fan of planning and I do tend to get in a bit of a muddle! Thankfully, I have help from my agent and my editor, to sort it all out.

3. The world of Lightning Falls is so rich and magical, and I think your writing really brings it to life! How did the idea for this world come to you? Did it come all at once, or did you have to work slowly and pull ideas from lots of other places to really build that world?

Thank you so much. I think I just allowed my imagination to see somewhere I’d really love to visit myself. Somewhere utterly different, beautiful, and a little bit dangerous. And magical. Of course in the back of my mind I will have been inspired by all of my favourite places, and images from films and books – it’s not conscious, but it all ends up in there!

4. Who’s your favorite character in Lightning Falls? Do you ever base characters on real people?

I love them all. I do have a soft spot for Meg, because she’s a sister, and she’s a fierce, loving one, which is a special thing to have, I think. Again, there are probably bits of all sorts of people in there, based on real people or fictional characters I’ve met over the years, but no one particular person – they’re just who they are, when they come to me, and I try to stay true to that initial idea of them.

5. I love the idea about the Anchors and the viaduct in your book!! How did you really choose what objects their Anchors were going to be?

I do love a magical artefact, something you can hold that makes you feel empowered; that perhaps helps to show you the magic you already have inside you. I don’t know how I chose those things specifically, they just came to me while I was writing!

6. What would you do if you had found a viaduct that led to a magical world?

I would pack a sandwich and go off exploring – though I’d definitely be concerned about getting back home again afterwards. Perhaps I’d try to leave some sort of trail behind me, just like they do in the best fairy tales.

7. I’ve seen some more of your books (sadly, I’ve yet to read them all…), and they all look so magical! What made you decide you wanted to write these kinds of books, childrens’ books that are just really fun and magical and whimsical?

Thank you! There’s a lot of work that goes in to them, from designers, illustrators and editors, to make them look beautiful, and I’m very grateful. They’re the sorts of stories I wanted to read when I was young. They’re about young people who are a little different, perhaps feeling a bit out of place – who go on this journey together, through magic, to find out who they are, and what they really need to make them feel good about themselves. I love it. I think that writing them helps to remind me who I am, and why writing and reading is so important.

8. What do you think is the hardest part about writing for you? What’s the best part?

Planning is hard! I sort of don’t want to know what’s going to happen next, because I want it to be an exciting surprise, but of course then I do blunder down all the wrong paths, before eventually working it out. I love getting lost in the writing. Just not worrying about anything else – plot, spelling, grammar – and losing myself in the magic of the words.

9. What’s your advice for young writers (or writers of any age!) who really want to start writing, get their books out there, and have them become a success?

Write what feels exciting to you, and it will probably be exciting to your reader too. And then, keep going! There will always be sticky bits. If you get really lost, step back and think about your characters, and what you really want from your story. That’s when I tend to go back to my notebook, rather than the laptop – it has all sorts of random notes and ideas, and lots of questions that need to be answered. When you’ve done all that and you’ve got a first draft, celebrate! It might be full of muddly bits – it probably will be – but it’s a huge achievement and one to be really proud of. And once it’s all there, you can go back and work on it – it definitely doesn’t have to be perfect first time round. Also, keep reading! The more you read, the more you’ll discover, and along the way you’ll be learning about dialogue, world building, characterisation, almost without even realising.

~ ~ ~

And hello!!! It’s me, Isabelle! This interview was such fun to put together, and I’m so incredibly grateful for it! Amy, your answers were absolutely wonderful! As are your books! And you give incredibly marvelous advice for writers! I also love how you write children’s books because they’re the stories you wanted to read when you were younger!

And thank you, to my wonderful blog readers for reading this interview!!! I hope you enjoyed reading through Amy Wilson’s fantastic answers, and I do hope you’re now intrigued about her books…. They’re magical, fantastical, whimsical, everything you could want in a middle-grade book!!! So I do hope you’ll check them out sometimes! Her other book, The Shadows of Winterspell, is on my to be read list!

Funny thing, I also have an idea for a book called Winterspell… And it came to me before I even knew that that book existed! How odd. Well, I doubt the two will be very much alike, but…

But yeah! Thank you guys so much for coming, I hope you enjoyed this interview, and I shall see thee again in the next post!!! Well, either in the next post or in the virtual event Journey and I are about to do on March 31, 10 AM EST!!! (can you tell I’m trying to get people to come?? hehe…) It’s called Reading, Writing, and Everything-In-Between!!! Go search it on YT and you should be able to find it. I think.

Adios, cheerio, and until next time!

Isabelle

P.S. If you guys want to check out more book reviews/interviews/writing tips, don’t forget to check out Marvelous Middle Grade Monday!