The simple answer is that I thought of the expression that war and death are like best friends, so who better to tell a story set during World War II? After all, Death was everywhere during that time…

The truth, though, is that I stumbled across it, which is usually what happens with our best ideas; the trick is to recognise them as they stare you in the face and not ignore them…This time around I was working in a high school with some kids and we wrote about colour. I wrote about three deaths in that story and realised I’d used Death as the narrator. I immediately thought, ‘Maybe I should use this idea for that book set in Nazi Germany…’ I didn’t ask myself why.

I’ve often said that even in the parts of The Book Thief that embarrass me now, it’s the voice of Death that holds it all together. But it wasn’t as easy as that sounds. There were many problems, like I wrote 200 pages with Death narrating till I realised he was too macabre – he was enjoying his work too much and operated with a sense of sadistic pleasure…So I changed everything so that Liesel herself would narrate – which also didn’t work because it gave me new problems. (Despite my having the experience of a German-Austrian background, Liesel was the most Australian-sounding German girl in the history of all books everywhere)…but that’s the great thing about being writer:

EVERYONE THINKS YOU HAVE A GREAT IMAGINATION – BUT THE TRUTH IS, YOU JUST HAVE A LOT OF PROBLEMS.

The beauty of it is that just as necessity is the mother of all invention, your purest imagination is in solving your problems – to find a way to get it all to work. In the case of Death? I went to a simple 3rd person narration (which was everything I’d been trying to avoid in the first place) until it hit me. I heard the last line of the book in my head and thought, ‘That’s it. Death is haunted by us. He is all powerful but for the fact that he’s tired, and due to seeing humans mostly at their worst, he tells Liesel’s story to remind him that humans can be beautiful and selfless and worthwhile’ – and once I had that voice, I started the book all over again, borrowing from all the so-called failed drafts, and got there, somehow, in the end.

*Photo Credit: Quantity Postcards (www.QPFANS.com)