The way I describe my texts, in terms of their accessibility, is that the story is unpredictable. You shouldn't be able to guess what the end is going to be - you want to know, if you don't want to know it would be boring, but you shouldn't be able to work out what's going to happen. But that journey is going to be a nice easy one. Yeah, I've been really interested, because the books have now been translated into Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, and I've had letters from most of these countries, I've started getting letters from Japan at the moment. And my feeling is that the secret to writing for children is to understand their culture.
Children have the biggest homogenous culture in the world.
It's marked out by several features, which are lack of power, being a small person with everyone around you big people. And children have developed their own attitude to adults and to their powerlessness, by having all sorts of little games and rhymes and attitudes and things they wish would happen. And when you want to write for children, you have to be able to get into that culture. You have to be able to find that child within yourself, from when you were young, that is still there. And when you do that, the children know.