I Dream of Djinni

How did you come up with the idea for a trilogy about a smart-alecky djinni and a young magician?

I was walking home from a particularly boring and tedious shopping trip in my hometown, and I was turning things over in my mind. I suddenly decided I would create a hero who was a djinni and have as his enemy a young magician who was a politician. A contemporary England that was run by magicians really appealed to me.

I raced home and began writing down some notes. And within a few days I wrote the first four chapters of The Amulet of Samarkand, pretty much exactly as they are right now. The whole voice of Bartimaeus just came out. I had no idea what the story was going to be, but his voice was living in a way I’ve never experienced before. It was with his voice that the whole trilogy began.

If I were to interview Bartimaeus, what would he say about you?

He’d probably patronize me, and say I was a hard worker, who devoted many hours of my time to doing the very best that I could. He would certainly imply that my effort was fairly middling to poor compared to something he could have done in five minutes. He would certainly emphasize the fact that after a couple days of inspiration, when I wrote the first four chapters, everything slowed up immensely and it took me a month to work out the actual plot of the three books and then three years of solid work. He would find that all a little bit amusing.

I heard that you were a children’s book editor before you became a full-time writer.

Pretty much within the month I had the idea for Bartimaeus, I handed in my notice as an editor. That was actually a coincidence. I had another book that I was writing, a book called The Last Siege. I couldn’t finish it because I was working four days a week as an editor. I finally got so fed up, I said I would give up my job and give myself a year to write and see if I could make it work financially.

Coincidentally, within that very same time span, I had the beginning of this idea for the series about Bartimaeus. All I had was those first four chapters actually of The Amulet of Samarkand. I was excited by it, but my agent kept it quiet. I gave up my job and finished the other book and then I began working on Bartimaeus. Halfway through the following year, I had written about 100 pages and that was when I showed it to publishers for the first time in the U.K. and U.S.

Variety reported that Miramax paid close to $3 million for the book and film rights. Were you shocked?

Totally. It was the most remarkable and bizarre month of my life. I spent the first half of that year essentially in seclusion, just finishing one book and writing the beginning of The Amulet. When I finally sent it out to various publishers, there was suddenly a massive amount of interest—more interest than I ever had had for any of my other books by a factor of 10. Jonathan Burnham of Miramax Books in the States heard about it and he came motoring over to try and get the publishing rights for the States. Meanwhile, [Miramax chief] Harvey Weinstein read it and was interested in buying the film rights. So over a period of a month, I went from this little, private project to suddenly selling the movie and book rights. It was just the strangest sensation. I remember wandering around for days with a silly grin on my face. Nothing was real; it was kind of like a dream world I suddenly entered. Then again, what actually kept me going was the realization I now had to write the book. I couldn’t go out and party.