If we are what we eat, we must surely dream what we read. When I look back, I can identify each and every one of the moments of my life with the title of a book. I grew up warmed by books.

Born in Barcelona’s Eixample neighbourhood and the oldest of four children, I’ve been a compulsive reader for as far back as I can remember, a little girl who loved books more than toys, and who truly and passionately lived other lives in other worlds and places that seemed a lot more interesting than the grey reality of Franco’s Spain. At a time when travelling was a luxury, and television screens had only just begun to introduce us to papier mâché sets, the only spurs to the collective imagination of children were films, literature and comics.

My eyes were opened to the world by Richmal Crompton, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, Rider Haggard, Jack London, Charles Dickens, Louise May Alcott, Emma Orczy and many other writers. Humorous books, adventure stories and works that opened up wonderful worlds egged me on to imitate them with my first attempts at storytelling when I was still very small. My adolescence was marked by French and Russian authors: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Flaubert and Stendhal. Their dense, psychological and deeply moving books soon mingled with the new magic realism of Cortázar, García Márquez and Torrente Ballester, whose magical and comic offerings simply captivated me. I soon realised that there was no end to literary discovery. Reading was the equivalent of a private vice, writing a recurrent dream which I was slowly turning into reality with stories, drafts of impossible novels and personal diaries.

In 1986, by which time I was working as a language and literature teacher, I finally started off on the right foot when I moved into the world of children’s literature. I always say this happened by chance, but felicitous chance. I felt comfortable there and recognised the infinite possibilities I was being offered for exploring the realms of fiction. Voracious by nature, I made the most of this opportunity of sampling all kinds of genres, styles and resources for telling my own stories, this time for flesh-and-blood readers. Adventure, fantasy, realism, comedy, thriller…

I declare myself an inventor of stories and even a “scribe”, to use a term loaded with wisdom. Maybe that’s why, answering my true calling, I threw myself into scriptwriting for television – now deemed to be the modern form of narrative – and dived into that with the same passion as I had done with literature.

I changed my trade from that of teacher to that of scriptwriter and lecturer in scriptwriting, incorporating into my literary experience different kinds of knowledge without which I might not have been able to construct my more ambitious novels: the crucial importance of dramatic structures, the essence of conflicts and the complexity of creating characters, the body and soul of stories.

I’m eclectic, curious, playful, and I’ve had the luck, the immense good luck of being able to combine diversion and career, pleasure and professionalism. It’s not easy to survive in these domains but I can say with some pride that I had my dreams of a life where I could invent and write stories and, whether well or badly, I’ve made them come true. The game of communicating vessels which I’ve been playing for two decades has allowed me to transform scripts into stories, stories into novels and novels into films. I never know which tone I’m going to use when telling a story, or who it’s for, but I do know how to recognise good stories and I treasure them as I’ve always done with good books.

I think that life without the company of fiction would be utterly terrifying.

Copyright text © 2015 Maite Carranza