KEY POINTS:
If there is one author who should have a ready-made answer to that perennial question: "where do you get your ideas from?" it would have to be Jasper Fforde.
The English writer is the creator of the bestselling Thursday Next series - the chronicles of the titular literary
detective who polices Bookworld, a parallel dimension where all literature from novels to plays and even non-fiction exists in sentient form.
"You just think up some silly idea and one idea begets other ideas," says Fforde. "You start with a small idea, like I suddenly thought of this concept of having a surplus of stupidity. Stupidity is a property of human beings and if you don't use it up with this little drip-feed like we do every day - because we do stupid things every day - what you have is this huge surplus of stupidity that has to be used up on something of such mind-boggling insanity that it can actually do you a danger."
That stupidity surplus is central to the premise of First Among Sequels, Fforde's latest Thursday Next novel.
"There were always going to be more Thursday books," says Fforde. "The great thing about series books is you know the characters very well and you can think `right, what am I going to do with them?' You can throw them into some kind of jeopardy, invent some bizarre thing going on and then put them in it and they react the way they usually react. The thing almost writes itself."
As its title indicates, First Among Sequels does not begin immediately after the last Thursday Next story, Something Rotten, concluded. "The first four books are actually one volume in four annual instalments," explains Fforde. "When we came to Something Rotten, all the storylines had been dealt with and we'd reached a good place to stop. First Among Sequels is the first part of a four-part second volume so there's lots of stuff going on and although it's vaguely a stand-alone book, there are a lot of threads that will be developed in later books."
First Among Sequels takes place 14 years after the conclusion of Something Rotten and much has changed for the now 52-year-old Thursday. Her son Friday is now a surly adolescent, her mentor Mycroft is dead, although his ghost returns to haunt her, and SpecOps, the shadowy government division that Thursday works for, has apparently been disbanded.
"You have to make big changes to keep it all running," says Fforde. "I wanted Friday to be a grunty teenager who saves the world by doing nothing; by sleeping in, essentially. That was the idea I started with and then, of course, he had to be 16 so it had to be 14 years later."
After incorporating archetypal characters such as Jane Eyre and Hamlet into the four previous editions, Fforde executes the ultimate post-modern trick in First Among Sequels by integrating Thursday, the literary character, into the plot.
"Thursday's adventures have been written about in her world so we have a fictional Thursday who has a fictional Thursday as well, so she's doubly fictional in that way," says Fforde. "Unfortunately, the first four books are not very good in Thursday's world and she's a bit annoyed about this. There's also a fifth in the series, The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco that goes the other way to the other books. They were very violent while the Thursday of the fifth book was a bit of a hippie. It was only a matter of thinking that they should meet and actually interact with one another."
The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco is listed under Fforde's previous publications at the front of First Among Sequels and although it is crossed out and apparently unavailable, surely some more gullible fans will search for the non-existent tome on the internet?
"They won't find it," laughs Fforde. "But it would be fun to write it at a later date. The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco was a title that I've had knocking around for quite a while. It was a potential book that might have been written and in Thursday's world, it has been written but it's no longer with us."
Fforde has enjoyed reacquainting himself with Thursday but is in no hurry to return once again to the series. "The next book is probably not another Thursday book," he says. "What I'll do is another book and then another Thursday. I'll keep interspersing them so that I can stretch myself and do other projects that I've been wanting to get off the blocks for a while."
Fforde spent nearly 20 years in the film industry, working on movies such as Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment before the phenomenal success of the first Thursday novel The Eyre Affair in 2001. Now he says what he will certainly not do is waste his time adapting his work into screenplays that never get made.
"I know what happens in the film industry and I know how it works," he says. "Producers will do anything to get the maximum return at the minimum of costs, that's market forces. If you try and condense one of my books like The Eyre Affair into 90 minutes, the possibility of making a complete pig's ear of it, of getting the spirit of the piece entirely wrong, is too great. You hear a lot of authors saying, `they took my book and ruined it' but you shouldn't sell it if you're going to be upset if they screw it up."
- Detours, HoS
