Mr. Cornwell, Right now I am in the process of reading your book, Sharpe's Company, for a school project. My project is on genre fiction and I have chosen the adventure genre. I was wondering if you could maybe answer a few questions for me. First of all, I was just wondering what attracted you to writing adventure stories. Also, I was curious as to how the limits of the adventure genre have helped to work for or against you in writing Sharpe's Company. Well, if you could answer my questions it would be wonderful! thank you so much! Cammie
I guess we all write the books we want to read! So what drew me to military-history adventure was a love of the Hornblower novels and a wish to read something like them, but set against a land background instead of the sea! There was also the realisation that I was neither talented nor clever enough to write literature, whatever that is, and, to be honest, a desperate need to make some money (I'd fallen in love with an American and the US government refused me a green card). Now, beyond that, I'm not sure . . . I never analysed the genre, but right from the start I knew I wanted to do something in the Hornblower vein . . . so maybe the answer is imitation? The limits of the adventure genre? I'm not sure it has limits, other than the obvious one not to bore people. The limits are the constraints of real history . . . . Company was the third book I wrote, and I decided to break the real history constraint and have Sharpe get through the breach (an error I confessed in the Historical Note), and that reflects the truth that I have to be a story-teller before an historian. I should imagine that the limits are the bounds of the writer's imagination? I always feel inadequate answering queries like this, because I don't think much about the theories of writing . . . . I think a lot about plot and character, but not about the big picture, which means that I shall look forward to your conclusions.