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I know it dates me terribly to say so, but it is true nonetheless that, sometimes, when you are awakened suddenly from a dream, the images so recently fresh and vivid in your mind vanish as suddenly and completely as a shaken Etch A Sketch.

The writing of a book has much in common with this phenomenon – but in reverse. At the moment of creation, the words and pictures flow from some unseen inner source, forming a current that is sometimes a torrent which flows invisibly from the fingers and out onto the blank page.

This little miracle is a subject upon which, in spite of millions of words having been written about it, remains largely hidden in the nimbus of inspiration: that milky obscurity of the Magellanic Clouds which obscures the mysteries of our being and our creative processes.

When asked to explain this ethereal tightrope act, as an author is often required to do, the very mind that dreamed these dreams in the first place is often struck suddenly dumb and shrinks back to hide behind some dab excuse – some corny story that will extinguish the flame of embarrassment and take the heat off.

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Alan BradleyShirley Bradley/handout

I have often been asked: “How does an older man write an 11-year-old girl authentically?”

The answer varies.

As if I am a tarot deck, I must first sort out the querent’s intentions. There are those readers, for instance, who find it obscene for a man my age to be acting as amanuensis to the young female sleuth Flavia de Luce. Since I can’t even begin to imagine the contents of such a mind, I can, accordingly, offer no further enlightenment.

And then there are those who believe that female characters generally, authenticity-wise, are off-limits to male pretenders. To this, I can offer only the half-hearted – but two-pronged – excuse that (a) while I have never been an 11-year-old girl, I have been an 11-year-old boy, and that at that age, our thinking processes are identical; and that (b) boys, girls and elderly gentlemen are all human beings.

James Joyce created Molly Bloom, didn’t he? And that ought to be enough.

Looking a little deeper into the age issue, I have sometimes thought that an older author needs to maintain an extra spark of youth: an untainted supply of youthful idealism, of hope and belief in the general goodness of things. Young characters cannot be written from an inkwell of cynicism.

Or can they?

Anyone who has read even a single one of the Flavia de Luce mysteries knows that Flavia can be, to put it nicely, duplicitous: a word which the great Oxford English Dictionary defines as: “the character or practice of acting in two ways at different times, or openly and secretly; deceitfulness, double-dealing.”

In short, Flavia can be sneaky, but who of us wasn’t forced to be so at 11?

I rest my case.

Each of us can remember, without a doubt, insisting that it was Mortimer who knocked the bottle of jawbreakers off the counter of the candy store; that it was Lucinda B. who smashed the goldfish bowl; that it was the berserk Billy Caliban who hit the baseball through Mrs. Smiley’s plate-glass window. And who among us could suppress a smirk at the very thought of that unknown joker who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?

It isn’t easy being 11: One must develop mental calluses, and it is those toughened – or should I say, hardened? – parts of us that live on into old age.

Ten years ago, when the first Flavia book, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, was published, I was 69: what my mother would have called “a late bloomer” and others, less charitable, “a slow starter.”

Accordingly, I was treated with a respect and a deference that might have been denied a younger author.

I’ve had it easy, and I know that.

But has the articulation of Flavia’s words changed over the years? Is she a different person with a different voice than she was 10 books ago?

In “book time” she has aged scarcely a couple of years since first setting foot upon the page, while her author has progressed by a longer and much more circuitous path from 69 to 80.

And yet to me the process is the same, every bit as opaque and mysterious as ever it was. One simply learns not to ask questions.

One comes to understand that all of these characters, both major and minor, in jumping out of the inkpot, so to speak, have made a leap of faith into the unknown of our present, and probably alien, world. They must be welcomed and honoured. They must be treated as somehow holy.

There is a famous painting by one R.W. Buss called Dickens’s Dream, in which that author sits in an armchair, eyes closed, hands drooping idly, feet upon a cozy cushion, amid a milling throng of characters, all of whom have sprung from his fertile imagination. Buss was not the first, nor would he be the last, to cash in on that idea. More to the point is Luke Fildes’s painting, made after Dickens’s death, of the same chair empty: enough to give pause to any author.

Not that we are Charles Dickens, of course, or anywhere near.

But we realize that these little spirits from our pens have lives of their own: that they will live on after we are gone. And that even after our own departures, we will still be held responsible for them.

That fact, I suppose, is one of the revelations that the years have brought, and one which I certainly never foresaw when I first sat down at a crowded desk and allowed Flavia de Luce, who was almost 11, to take over my book, my thoughts and my life.

Has it been worth it?

That, oddly enough, is a question which I have never been asked, and so I must ask it myself.

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The answer is this: In the past 10 years I have had letters from people who read aloud from the Flavia books to dying parents and to children in hospital. I have met a four-year-old girl who insists on having each new Flavia book read to her aloud and then demands the book be acted out, with herself (of course) as Flavia, her father as Dogger and her mother as Mrs. Mullet. I have met a girl whose first thought, upon finding a dead body in an alley, was “What would Flavia do?” I have received e-mails from a trucker in the American Midwest who listens to the Flavia audiobooks to pass the prairie miles; from a 95-year-old lady in Australia who, against her better judgment, has acquired an e-book reader especially to download a Flavia short story which is otherwise unavailable. I have heard from friends I haven’t seen since my own school days.

And the word I hear most is “love.”

I have been vouchsafed (as Mark Twain said) the affection of my readers. “Praise is well,” he went on to say, “compliment is well, but affection – that is the last and final and most precious reward that any man can win.”

And I am able to say that without duplicity.

Just don’t shake me from my dream.

Alan Bradley’s latest Flavia de Luce novel, The Golden Tresses of the Dead, is published by Random House Canada.

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