Michelle Paver

In a ghost story, usually you've got to hang on until daylight, and you'll be alright. But if daylight's four months away, then you have a problem.

Changing from biochemistry to law was easy because I was rubbish in the laboratory. I could never decide how much to put in a test tube because I'm not very good at maths.

I wanted to write a very simple story about a boy, a wolf, a girl, a bear and a forest, so I thought I might set it in the past. I didn't realise that it went back to when I was 10: I used to love the Stone Age when I was a kid and wanted to live in it, and I got rid of my bed and slept on the floor, but I didn't remember it.

I could be less impatient with people. I sometimes judge by impressions.

I hate it when you see in films people with their anoraks flapping open in a blizzard. They'd be dead in a couple of minutes. It's got to be real. It's got to work.

I live on my own, happily, and I've never wanted children, but it did occur to me one day that there's part of me in 'Torak' - he's a loner, I'm a loner - as there's part of me in 'Renn,' who's quite waspish. I think, in some senses, 'Torak' is the son I never had.

My mother had to stop me reading to make me go and get some fresh air. I used to get so annoyed. She actually had to sit on my book because, otherwise, I would find it.

It's the little details I love. How to fletch your arrows with owl feathers, because owls fly silently, so maybe your arrows will, too. How to carry fire in a piece of smouldering fungus wrapped in birchbark. These are the things which help a world come alive.

For a novelist, the great thing about the Stone Age people is that we know virtually nothing about their beliefs - which means that I get to make it up! But it's still got to be plausible.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

Even if you plan your book, the actual writing is unplanned.

I'm constantly being surprised and finding unplanned things - because the writing is a process of experiencing things on the ground with the characters.

I'd been interested in animal behaviour as a teenager and had thought of studying it at one point.

At university - when I was supposed to be studying biochemistry - I had tried to write a children's book about a boy and a wolf cub, and there was a paragraph in that which was from the wolf's point of view.

I rode 300 miles through the forest and ate all sorts of strange food. And every time 'Torak' did something new, like swimming with killer whales or kayaking, I thought I'd better go and do it.

When my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1991, I asked him if he had any regrets, and he said no. I was a burnt-out litigation solicitor in my thirties, hating my life, and his cancer made me re-evaluate it all.

I don't use the Internet, as I don't like living with lots of distractions. I have tried, but I found it a hindrance. as my sense of priorities goes out of the window and it pulls me out of my writing, particularly with email. I'd sit there for hours just replying to emails.

Doing field trips rather than simply researching online allows me to experience the story from the point of view of my main character; you can't get that by sitting at a desk.

People often ask writers where they get their inspiration, and for me, the short answer is that I haven't a clue; I'm just grateful that I get them.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

I actually carry a little picture of a wolf in my wallet, rather like people carry a picture of their kids. The reason I do that is to remind myself why I'm doing this, to remind myself of the story.

I didn't do it for the money. I know a lot of people say that, but if I'd wanted to be rich, I'd have stayed working as a city lawyer. I gave that up eight years ago and took a massive drop in salary, and I didn't mind because I was doing what I loved. There's plenty of material for the other five books.

I didn't wake up one day and think, 'I'm not going to have children.' My mother was a housewife and brought up three children, so I just thought it would happen.

My thirties merged into my forties, and I sort of gradually realised that I don't really want children. Now I'm glad I don't have them. Part of that is because I have my books.

I loved the myths of ancient Greece and Egypt.

Mostly, research is much more fun than the actual writing.

I want to make the world real. I have to be able to believe that it could happen. I can't put Pegasus in my stories because horses can't fly. It's just a quirk in my brain.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

Indigenous people all over the world take quite a lot of trouble with their hair and their clothes.

I think true wilderness can still be found, but it's hard to reach and dangerous when you get there, which is probably why it still exists.

My novel 'Wolf Brother' is set in northern Scandinavia during the late Stone Age, so I was aware from the start of Norse influences. I used some Norse names, and the soul-eater Thiazzi is based on the Norse storm giant, Thiassi.

Why do so many children love the idea of being snowed in or shipwrecked, of having to survive on one's own? When I was a child, I was no exception. I wanted to hunt with a bow and arrow like the Stone Age people: to skin deer and build my own shelter. And I desperately wanted a wolf. As we lived in London, my options were limited.

I saw myself as a trailblazer in the 1980s as a female lawyer in the City. It was exciting, as women were outnumbered by men five to one. But while I had this sense of trailblazing, in reality, I wasn't pushing boundaries; it was just a personal myth I'd created, as I was doing a job I wasn't enjoying.

To experience the northern forest in the raw, I went to northern Finland and Lapland, travelling on horseback, and sleeping on reindeer skins in the traditional open-fronted Finnish laavu. I ate elk heart, reindeer and lingonberries, and tried out spruce resin: the chewing gum of the Stone Age.

The most remote place I've been to was in Greenland. I remember setting out for a solo hike from a small cabin, itself several hours' boat ride from the nearest settlement.

I talk to children in schools all over the world, and I've found that both boys and girls are fascinated by how hunter-gatherers manage to survive entirely on what's around them in their environment: trees, rocks, animals and plants.

There's this whole thing of being two people. You are the person you want to be - the writer - and then there's this weird other life of going on tour and talking about the writing. And that really is weird.

I'm quite happy trekking around Greenland on my own, but those big book tours in America or the Far East are the only time I ever really feel lonely.

I've wanted to write a ghost story for years, and my main aim was to write the most frightening ghost story that I could think of.

It's true to say that once I've got the bare bones of a story, I often get ideas from my own research trips to faraway places.

When a wolf doesn't want to do something, they look really cute.

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.

I definitely don't write with any kind of 'message' or 'lesson,' probably because when I was a child, I used to run a mile from books like that.

I would love to live in the wilds of nowhere, and when writing 'Chronicles,' I would occasionally rent a cottage in the middle of nowhere that had no mobile reception, but I'm not about to move away from my family.

I've climbed Stromboli when it's erupting, which is quite a heavy climb: three hours with a helmet to get to the top. When you're there, and it's dark, and you can see this eruption and feel it, it's quite different to watching it on TV.

I sometimes wonder why I do so much research - I look at other successful writers, and I think it must just be so relaxing to write about flying horses or something, but I have to make it plausible.

A lot of my writing is wish-fulfilment, making things the way I want them to be.

To get the feel of the polar night, I went back to Spitsbergen in winter. I went snowshoeing in the dark and experimented with headlamps and climbed a glacier in driving snow.

If you get a sense that your writing isn't quite working, change it. Or cut it out. Don't just tell yourself it'll do, because it won't.

I'm not the next J. K. Rowling. We've got one already. It's flattering to be compared to her. I like her books and loved the first three particularly, but apart from the fact that they've got young boys as heroes, they're very different.