Goodreads asked Wendy Orr:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Wendy Orr I’ve been getting letters from kids for years asking for a third Nim book, and of course that interest intensified after the release of the film Return to Nim’s Island last year. I’d always known that the third story would involve caves, and so I decided it was time to let that story seed grow. However there were challenges, because the film was dramatically different to the book it was based on, Nim at Sea. To satisfy the readers who’d come to it through the film instead of the book, this sequel would have to tie both of them in.

The writing process was also somewhat different from my usual ‘let’s dream it and write it and see where it ends up,’ as the film producers had already indicated that they hoped to film it, and suggested that we conference the story idea when I was ready to share. I often discuss a story idea with my editor once I’ve got it worked out, but it’s usually rather vague; this time I had to do a thorough plot summary before I started writing. It took a few attempts to work through this process; my initial attempts I think would have foundered during the writing, because of that conscious awareness of being filmic. Luckily for me, my editor and the film producers quickly pointed out, in the nicest way possible, that these plots didn’t sound like me, or like Nim. I had to go back to my usual more organic way of working out my story, playing with the ideas for several months and letting them germinate; finding odd facts – like the 1987 discovery of Eric the Pliosaur, an opalised dinosaur fossil – that lead me where the story wants to go. Once I really knew the story I wanted to tell, the film producers and I had a very lively phone conference, – and then I went off on my own and wrote for the next nine months.

As usual, it was during the writing that Nim really took over. In the previous two books, she’d existed only in my imagination (the writing of Nim at Sea was completed before the film Nim’s Island was cast). I wasn’t sure how I would feel writing about her now I’d seen her personified by two real girls, Abigail Breslin and Bindi Irwin. Would she still belong to me?

Well, what a resounding ‘yes!’ it was. Although I’d tended to picture Nim as Abbie during the years in between, by the time I started writing I’d been on the set of Return to Nim’s Island. Watching Bindi embody Nim in her own, equally convincing, way reminded me that a character belongs to whoever reads and creates it. Abigail Breslin told me recently, ‘There’ll always be a little piece of Nim in my heart,’ and I think that holds true not just for an actor who’s devoted months of her life to a part, but to all readers who become a character while they’re lost in the book.

And for me, watching Nim come to life again was liberating as well as inspiring: my Nim, my lovely, imperfect, hot-headed girl, was just waiting to take me through her adventure. Because even though I know that I did all that planning, once I started writing, it seemed as it always does, that the story was there, and I just needed the right words to find it.

One lovely incident was that a few days after handing in penultimate draft, my family and I went to Malaysia. As we were hiking through a rainforest one evening, the guide warned us to make sure that the vines we were stepping over weren’t snakes. It was nearly exactly what I had just written: Vines dangled down from the trees and across the ground, ghostly and shadowed in the bobbing light of Nim’s headlamp. It was hard to tell if they were vines or snakes.”
And then the next day, we visited a bat cave...

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