Flame Chasers by Julie Pike
We think today’s blog will resonate with those who love stories and discovering where an author gets their ideas from! Thank you Julie for this lovely guest blog.
When I visit schools to chat about being an author, the question I’m most often asked is ‘where do your ideas come from?’ I always say I find them in my Story Cauldron.
Everyone has a story cauldron; it’s filled with all the books and comics they’ve ever read, all the films they’ve ever seen, and all the adventures they’ve ever had. Every cauldron is different because everyone fills theirs with different stories.
The first book I put in my cauldron was a story recommended by my mother, who had fallen in love with it herself as a child. That book was The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. From first page to last I was hooked, and so began my lifelong passion for fantasy and adventure stories. The joy of adventuring through a new world in my imagination turned me into a voracious reader – be it thick books, thin books, comic books, or poetry books.
One of the best things about going on all those adventures is they inspired me to have real-life adventures when I was older. I’ve walked underneath blue glaciers in Argentina, journeyed across the Tibetan Plains to Mount Everest, skydived over New Zealand, and camped on the Great Wall of China in a lightning storm.
Today my cauldron is brim-full of stories, and I’m always filling it with more. They are all interwoven in my imagination, so much so it is hard to see their influence on my own writing until I type ‘The End’. For my new book, Flame Chasers, if I dip a ladle into my cauldron, I see certain adventures swirl to the surface.
Christmas 1999 saw me scrabbling to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in the freezing dark. Sunrise at the summit was spectacular, but I was exhausted. If you were to read Chapter Sixteen, you might say that Ember’s own climb through the night is autobiographical.
My yearning to climb a volcano was thanks to a Pinnacle audiobook narrated by Jon Pertwee. That story was Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne. My brother and I spent hours in our bedroom adventuring underground with Axel, Hans, and Professor Otto Lidenbrock, so it was no surprise when Ember’s own volcano climb led to exciting events underground.
And what inspired the Flame Chase itself? It must be my favourite Dr Who serial, written by Barbara Clegg. Enlightenment is a story of majestic tall ships racing across the heavens, one commanded by a feisty female buccaneer named Captain Wrack. But more than this, Barbara’s story is laden with such depth that I still think about it today.
I could go on, extoling more recent stories inside my cauldron from exciting authors like Vashti Hardy, Sinéad O’Hart and Claire Fayers, but I have a limited word count and want to end this blog with a thank you.
THANK YOU to all of you at FCBG for sharing your love of stories, and enthusing children to fill their own cauldrons. I am absolutely certain that, just like my mother passed her love of stories to me, your book groups will be instrumental in inspiring the stories of the future. I can’t wait to read them!
Julie Pike grew up on a council estate in Neath, nestled in the Welsh Valleys. This inspired her debut novel The Last Spell Breather (OUP 2019), longlisted for the Waterstones Childrens’ Book of the Year. Julie now lives in the Forest of Dean where she works as an environmental consultant.
