I was lucky enough to catch up with author Pippa Goodhart. Pippa has written lots of picture books, early readers and novels and she also writes the Winnie the Witch series as Laura Owen!

	Have you always been a writer?
	No. I was a baby to begin with, and not many babies write (hmm, there’s an idea for a new story!). But I wasn’t much of a writer when I was a child either. I wasn’t good at reading or writing. As a grown-up I worked in a book shop that sold nothing but children’s books. It was brilliant! After that I had a go at writing a book myself, and I’ve kept on having a go for about twenty years now.
	Where do you get your ideas from for your books?
	From just about anything and everything. If you want a way to find ideas of your own, just look at something ordinary, then think, ‘what if there was something extraordinary about it?’ So, for example, what if that clock went backwards, and time went backwards too? What if the legs of the chair you’re sitting on suddenly turned into real legs, and ran off with you?!
	What is a typical day for you?
	A typical day would always be different from yesterday and from tomorrow; they’re all different, and that’s part of the fun of this job. But the most regular bit of most days is that they start with walking my dog (called Winnie – guess why?).
	Do you have a favourite place where you work on your books?
	Aha! Well I am about to have a lovely new place for writing my books. I do it in an odd corner of the house by a basin that drips at the moment, but my clever husband, who is an architect, is just building us a brand new house, and that will have a beautiful work room upstairs that will look out onto the garden.
	Which of your own books/characters do you like best and why?
	If I really have to choose a favourite, I choose my picture book, ‘You Choose’! I thought it was a good idea for a book, but nine publishers didn’t like it before somebody finally did like it enough to turn it into a book. Having Nick Sharratt doing the pictures was such a wonderful treat. And now ‘You Choose’ has won an award and sold over a million copies, so I have a nicely smug feeling that ‘I was right’ about that idea after all! As treat upon a treat, Nick is just finishing the artwork for another book like that one: ‘Just Imagine’ which will be published in September.
	Who was your favourite author when you were a child?
	The first author I read and read because I wanted to was Laura Ingalls Wilder who wrote the true stories about her childhood, growing-up in the Wild West of America. I still love those stories, partly because they are real.
	Are you working on any new material now?
	I’m just writing eight more stories about Winnie the Witch and her cat Wilbur. I’ve already written forty-eight stories about them (there are four in each book), so I’m running low on ideas, but the story I’ve been writing today is about Winnie And A Burglar. Shsh! Don’t tell anybody else, but I write the Winnie stories in disguise! The author name on the books is Laura Owen, but she doesn’t really exist; it’s me writing them. That makes me a ‘ghost writer’. If you read a particular one of my stories in the ‘Mini Winnie’ book, you’ll see that I sneaked my real initials along with a clue that I’m the real writer into that story. I don’t know if anybody has ever noticed that.
	Do you have any advice for would-be authors?
	Yes. Enjoy stories in all their forms – on stage and telly, talking to your friends, pictures on walls, dances, thoughts in your heads, as well as stories written in books. With the book stories, always have a think about why the really good ones are good, and why the boring ones are boring. That way you’ll learn how to write the powerful kind of stories that make people laugh or cry or feel excited or full of wonder.

If you are a Winnie the Witch fan check out these fab activities:

Winnie the Witch colouring sheet
Winnie the Witch wordsearch