Susan Hill, novelist
When my first daughter was five, I asked a friend’s daughter, who was a medical student, to look after her in the summer holiday so I might get something written. I had limited time before my daughter went back to school and having that deadline was a very good thing.
I’d always liked ghost stories – MR James and so on – but they were always short. Many are unsatisfactory because they have a buildup, then scramble to an end, and that’s it. I thought there ought to be more than that. But it is hard to sustain tension and fear over a longer book. You can’t just have somebody being terrified every chapter.
