Lari Don was brought up mainly in the north-east of Scotland, attended the University of Glasgow and now lives in Edinburgh. Before becoming a full-time writer, she was a press officer for the Scottish National Party and made social affairs programmes for BBC Radio. She wrote short stories for adults, one of which won a Canongate Prize, before moving on to writing fantasy fiction for children.

Telling stories to her own two daughters led her to train as a storyteller and research characters and themes from traditional folklore, which found their way into her writing. In her first novel for children, First Aid for Fairies nd Other Fabled Beasts, published by Floris in 2008, mythological creatures tangle with the world of humans. Vet’s daughter Helen treats an injured centaur called Yann and meets his friends including Rona (a selkie), Sapphire (a dragon), Lavender (a fairy) and Catesby (a phoenix). The young fabled creatures have lost their community’s living Book of Knowledge and must trace it before it is captured by the Master of the Maze (the Minotaur). The action shifts to locations rich in folklore: the Ring of Brodgar stone circle on Orkney, a labyrinth beneath Edinburgh and Tam Linn’s Well at Carterhaugh near Helen’s home in the Scottish Borders.

First Aid for Fairies was nominated for a Royal Mail children’s book award. The sequel, Wolf Notes and Other Musical Mishaps, was published this summer. It involves most of the same creatures plus some new ones. Helen, who is also a talented violinist, finds her music summer school disrupted by the faeries’ battle with a tribe of wolves for control of the ancient forest nearby. Her attempts to free a human child stolen by the Faery Queen involves more journeys to evocative settings such as the Isle of Skye and even the Celtic heroes’ paradise, Tir nan Og.

Also this year, Lari has retold Robert Burns’ poem Tam O’Shanter for the Reloaded series of myths and legends published by Barrington Stoke. The edition, with a reading age of eight-plus and an interest age of 10 to 14, was commissioned to mark the 250th anniversary of Burns’ birth and support Homecoming 2009, a global promotion of Scotland and its culture.

Lari is registered as a storyteller with the Scottish Storytelling Centre and regularly runs storytelling and story-making sessions in schools and community arts venues.

In this interview Lari talks to Geraldine Brennan about storytelling, the sense of place and the Scottish influence in her writing.

Sense of place is very important in your stories...

That is rooted in my childhood. I grew up on Speyside and had an open-air childhood of the kind it’s harder for children to have now, climbing trees and playing beside the river and going off on adventures. I believe that stories happen outdoors, when you are on a journey, perhaps with a map and a pathway. I have lived in the Borders where Helen lives and my mum is from Skye.

Wolf Notes is set in a glen in the north-west of Scotland with an ancient forest in it. It’s not quite a real place although I know the glen I was thinking of while I was writing. I’ve called it Dorry Shee, which is Anglicised Gaelic for ‘fairy grove’. Dunvegan Castle on Skye is real, of course. I went there as a tourist to research a way that my characters could break into it (my plan would not be any use to today’s criminals, because it depends on arriving on the back of a dragon). I was invited to do several events at Dunvegan for the launch of Wolf Notes but they only let me into the garden.

One of the things I most love about writing is going to see where the story happened. While I was working on Tam O’Shanter, I visited Alloway, which is Burns country, and walked along the route that Tam and his horse Meg took from the Kirk to the bridge and got a feel for how steep and sinuous that road is. The bridge is much higher than I had realised and I could sense what a huge feat it was for tired old Meg to run up that bridge. I’d love to take children outdoors to a churchyard, an old bridge or a forest to read them the story.

'Tam O’Shanter' is probably the most treasured poem in Scotland. Were you nervous about retelling the story?

There is a feeling that Burns is sacred, T'am O’Shanter' in particular. When Barrington Stoke asked me to do it I thought, how can I – how can anybody – change a word of it? But then I thought: it’s a story, and I’m a storyteller. I can just tell the story. I discovered to my delight (and my relief) that Burns admitted using traditional tales of witches at Alloway Kirk he’d heard as a wee boy as inspiration for his narrative poem. I found a letter describing the stories he had heard in his own words. So I excavated the original folklore: took the stories he had put into his poem and turned them into a book.

The first third of the poem is not immediately attractive to children. It’s about a man sitting in the pub and being henpecked by his wife. Also, hearing Burns’ poem read by someone who knows how to do it is an amazing experience but if you are reading it on the page it can be a little bit daunting and if you are not fluent in Scots you would probably need to know the story before you start. I am not translating Burns’ Scots, though: it’s a retelling, not a translation. I wanted to engage the readers right away so I literally cut to the chase, to the story of Tam being pursued by the witches on his way home at night. I needed to make all the excitement and drama of the tale very obvious.

Retelling stories is how you keep them alive. Whenever I am telling stories in schools I always say to the children, ‘If you like this story, tell it to someone else.’ And I always invite them to tell me the variations on my stories that they know. They will be told differently in Perthshire than in the Borders. For example, I was telling a story about the Vikings trying to invade Scotland at a school in Edinburgh (a Viking steps on a thistle and the noise he makes raises the alarm, and that is how the thistle became the emblem of Scotland). I know about six variations on that story, some of them about the English rather than the Vikings, and a boy in the Primary 3 class knew another one. That helps children feel that the stories belong to them, and if stories belong to them books belong to them too, because books are full of stories.

Are storytelling and writing separate or linked activities for you?

I am a writer first and foremost but storytelling has been very useful for me. At first I wanted to be better at telling stories to my children and then I realised what a wealth of stories, images and ideas that the traditional tales offered me as a writer. I trained with the Scottish Storytelling Centre, but it’s not a formal training: you watch other storytellers and are mentored by a storyteller, and when they think you’re ready they put you on a register. I use storytelling skills a lot in my author events, which tend to involve shouting, leaping up and down and killing dragons. I do whatever it takes to pull children into the story: it is very physical and I will be dripping with sweat afterwards. Storytelling has given me the courage to take risks and made me better at reading the audience. If I am doing a session at a school I will change tack or tell a different story in response to the mood of the class, as long as we still cover what I have agreed with the school.

Perhaps because of my work in radio, which I think has influenced my writing more than storytelling has, I am a great believer in the power of the spoken word. I run storymaking sessions in schools which might start with me telling a story but the main activity will be the children pooling the words and ideas in their heads to create a collective story. Children who struggle with writing can use their imagination and create their own narratives without the barrier of a pencil and a piece of paper between them and the story, and they don’t have to worry about the title or neat handwriting. If I start by retelling a story, that can move on to helping them imagine a scene or start their own story. Sharing and contributing stories is excellent practice for speaking and listening.

Has working in radio helped your writing in other ways?

I am an absolutely ruthless editor. I remember editing in the old-fashioned way with a razor blade and watching all the surplus words drop on the floor on bits of tape, and realising that what you take out is not the issue: all that matters to the listener or the reader is what you leave in, and you are taking something out to make it better. You are the only person who knows the missing words were ever there. Nothing pleases me more than cutting a chapter of 5,000 words down to 3,500 without losing any of the tension or the character development. I always write very quickly and then do a serious edit. When I wrote Wolf Notes (faster than First Aid for Fairies because I had a contract and a deadline) I spent four months writing and a month editing with a few weeks’ break in between.

Your stories always gather momentum very quickly. Is that deliberate and do you ever think about slowing down?

I haven’t got a lot of patience with scene-setting and description as a reader or a writer. I always want to get on with what happens next. Even children who really enjoy reading are always having to put their book down – to get ready for school, have their tea, go to their music lesson or football practice or whatever – so I need to make sure they have a good reason to pick it up again. There has to be something they are dying to know. My characters don’t sit down for long discussions or periods of introspection. They are always talking while climbing a tree or riding a dragon. There is always more than one thing happening at once. Occasionally, though, I do let them have a breather, usually in a beautiful place.

Yann the centaur is a complex figure and Helen and Yann have some lively sparring matches. How far do you want the mythological characters to operate as humans and how far do you need to show how they are different?

I deal with different kinds of beasts, and I decided that those who are half-human or shape changers, such as the centaur Yann, the selkie Rona and the wolf-girl Sylvie, would be able to talk to Helen in English. The dragon Sapphire and the phoenix Catesby can’t speak to her, however, although they can speak to the other fabled beasts. So there are times when Helen is alone with Sapphire and Sapphire is desperate to communicate with her but she can’t. It adds another layer of interest that Helen can’t know everything. I have given human personalities to the beasts who are half-human or sometimes human. Yann is like a grouchy teenage boy in many ways and fiercely argumentative and unbending in a human way. But the fabled characters also display attitudes that belong to their world rather than the contemporary human world in the way they approach quests and adventures and the importance they attach to loyalty and comradeship. These attitudes could seem old-fashioned but are important for their survival, and Helen instinctively has some of the same values. She is very concerned about keeping promises.

The two new characters in Wolf Notes, the fairy boy Lee and the wolf-girl Sylvie, seem more ambiguous.

They are, and they did not start out like that but they changed inside my head as the story developed. It’s so exciting for me as a writer when characters do that. In First Aid for Fairies everyone was on the same quest, but in Wolf Notes it became clear as I was writing that Lee and Sylvie’s motivations were much less straightforward. They are also characters that modern readers will relate too: Lee is one of those vain and charming boys who uses his charm as a tool and is rather in love with himself. There is a lot of tension between Helen and Sylvie although they occasionally arrive at mutual respect. It’s uncertain for most of the story whether these two are going to be good or bad for Helen and her friends. If the reader has no idea which way it could go at some points, that’s because I didn’t either.

It’s that sort of excitement that keeps me going at midnight, which is when I get a lot of writing done because there are no distractions. I also write on trains travelling to school events (I do two or three most weeks) and while I’m travelling new locations and ideas leap out at me. I like a certain amount of interaction with the real world.

Where does Helen’s love of music come from?

Not from me: I learned to play the piano as a child but I gave it up as soon as I could and I can’t sing. Yet music is important in all my children’s books (the devil plays the pipes in Tam O’Shanter). I wanted to give Helen a passionate interest that would not be shared by her mother, who is a vet and very practical, and which could be useful to her in the fabled beasts’ world. Music is important in a lot of folklore. There are almost as many stories about faeries stealing musicians as there are about them stealing children. I didn’t realise at first that music would be so important in the story of the first book and absolutely central to the second book. Helen’s music both puts her in danger and saves her. I did a lot of research because a lot of my readers will be learning to play a musical instrument and I want the world of the book to be believable for them. Despite not being able to play the violin, as Helen can, I have had the experience of listening to seals sing on Orkney which was beautiful: they make very dark and eerie sounds and you do have a sense of there being a musical intention behind them.

Will you write more books about the same characters?

I have another two stories in mind, set at the autumn and spring equinoxes since First Aid for Fairies is set at the winter solstice and Wolf Notes at the summer solstice. But first I am playing with a few ideas for other projects. I’d like to stretch myself and write for other age groups.

Thank you Lari Don for talking to Write Away.

Geraldine Brennan is a journalist and editorial consultant specialising in children's books. Former books editor of The Times Educational Supplement, she has reviewed teen fiction for the Observer and judged several literary awards, most recently the Frances Lincoln Diverse Voices Children's Book Award

2009-08-12