A lot of things in it felt too convenient and just ended up happening … It was just this very, very organic and genuine thing.’ ‘ Jasper Jones felt like this universal sort of tale that, with a lot of hard work, was going to unfurl itself. It caused a dilemma and a terrible crisis: to abandon a recalcitrant novel into which he’d already put so much time and effort or ‘follow Jasper Jones to his glade in the dead of night.’ Speaking about himself in his introduction to the novel: ‘For a fastidious little man who stubbornly needs to shepherd things to their bitter end, the decision was a difficult one.’ But having made the decision, he never regretted it. Silvey found himself thinking about Jasper Jones when he should have been thinking about solving his current book. And I had to work out who this person was.’ ‘It just sort of whispered into my head and I couldn’t let it go. ‘It sort of appeared,’ he told an interviewer. One night, awake and fretful about his progress, the name Jasper Jones came to him. Late in 2006, he was a couple of years into his second novel and struggling to push towards completion a narrative that had long lost momentum. That’s how Jasper Jones occurred to Craig Silvey. And there’s nothing a writer can do about it. Novelists don’t always choose their subjects sometimes an idea will arrive unbidden and decide to stay.
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