Wednesday 16 November I've always been very grateful that enough people have enjoyed reading what I've written that I've been able to pursue writing professionally. I love telling stories and I love writing so the fact that I can do it professionally is something that I've always been very grateful for. It's hard to say what it's like to know that the book was famous, if you will, because I was never really exposed to that on a day-to-day basis for a long time because I was living in Montana and working at home and so I knew the book was popular but I wasn't really seeing that for the most part where I live.

Over the years that's changed, of course, and I've gotten to do some neat stuff because of the series but from day to day the series hasn't changed my life too much.

I spend a lot of my time writing but I still get to do what I want, where I live, for the most part, and that's nice. On the other hand, every now and then Random House will kick me out of the door and send me out to stand in front of thousands of people and talk and sign books and meet with the fans and that's always fun but, again, it's quite a change from sitting at home and writing.

So I think the biggest difference is the touring and the publicity and I do enjoy that part. Keith - Did you feel stressed as people were asking when the final part of the book was going to be ready?

I wanted the book done sooner than it was. There were certain challenges involved with writing it that made it take longer than I would have liked and, of course, you want to do a good job on the final book of a series so there was a little bit of pressure there as well.

So, a little bit of stress but I think that's just to be expected in this sort of a process. There were some personal challenges going on but then, of course, the last book definitely posed some creative challenges as well — just the characters change a lot in the last book.

There are some technical writing challenges in the last book and, of course, there's the sheer size of the novel. It's bigger than any of the previous books…which are substantial!

Inheritance is well over pages longer than the last book so that in and of itself was a challenge, just getting through that many pages and that many words. Keith - Was it easier writing when the story was known only to you, or later, when the public were coming up with their own ideas?

Some parts of the series were easier to write in the first book, and some parts have been easier in later books. It's always a give and take. You get better at one aspect of writing and then sometimes as a result of that improvement of your skill, another aspect of the writing will become harder.

Just as an example, if you become more skilled with wordplay, you may attempt more wordplay, more complicated wordplay, and then your writing actually gets harder as a result. So, yes, there were some parts of Eragon that were much easier to write, just because I didn't have a lot of awareness of how to edit or what other people might think of my writing or anything like that.

And then, conversely, there were parts of Eragon that were very difficult to write because I didn't have the technical skills to accomplish what I really wanted to accomplish and that's something I could now look at and say, oh, I could do that easily. I view writing as a job and so I sit down every day and work a certain amount every day whether or not I feel like it though if I am actually sick I will take time off. If you want to be a professional writer then you need to write consistently.

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Inspiration strikes about once every blue moon which, for me, is once every two and a half to three months, which is when I'll get really and truly inspired about something. That's not to say I don't love what I'm working on on a day-to-day basis, but I mean that sort of white hot fever of intensity of creation that sometimes strikes. That doesn't occur all the time so you need to be able to work even when that's not driving you forward.

A book is not a sprint, it's a marathon. Well, some books are a sprint. Some smaller books you can blow through in a fairly fast period of time. But, for the most part, books are marathons, especially books of the length that I write. So you have to prepare yourself mentally and physically to get through however many months of work it's going to take and that requires being disciplined and accepting that even if you don't feel like you're getting a lot of work done day to day, as long as you get something done then at the end of a year or two years you're going to have a lot of work finally piled up.

I have a whole bunch of stories I'd like to tackle next. Some are sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, thriller, horror…You name it, I'd like to try it.

Science fiction is going to be my next writing adventure but I can't say completely for certain yet, just because I need to survive the upcoming book tour which is going to take a couple of months and once that's finished I'll take a nice long breath and rest for a few months and then I'll choose one of the stories I'd like to write next and dive into it.

Hannah — how did you come up with the characters' names and where did you get the idea for the story?

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The idea for the story began with me reading all sorts of other fantasy and falling in love with the genre, and then I read one book in particular, called Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville and it's a young adult book about a young boy in this world who goes into this beat-up old curiosity shop and he finds this stone that he ends up buying and the stone hatches a dragon.

I loved that idea so much of a young boy finding a dragon egg that I started asking myself all sorts of questions — who might find a dragon egg out in the middle of nowhere, how did the dragon egg get there, who else might be looking for the dragon egg, and just by asking myself questions like that I was able to develop the world, the story, the characters.

As far as naming the characters? The names have all come from many different places. Some are invented using the rules of my invented languages, some are wordplay such as Saphira being a play on Sapphire or Eragon being Dragon with the first letter changed. And then others are historical names, I use a certain amount of old English, Germanic names for some of the humans, stuff like that and some of them are just little hidden in-jokes as well, which gives me a little bit of amusement when I'm writing.

You know, no one has caught all of them! I've mentioned a few of them in interviews but no one has caught all of them but maybe one day I'll write a little article or something for the fans and talk about all of those.

I think my favourite character is either Angela the Herbalist, who is based on my sister Angela, or the dragon Saphira. I think her relationship with Eragon is really the heart of the series. I'm very fond of her character so I think any of the scenes with her or from her point of view rank at the top of my list in terms of favourite parts of the series. I'm always going to be fond of Eragon, just because it is the first book of the series and the first book that I wrote.

But I think that the last book I wrote is usually my favourite book, just because I continually try to improve myself as a writer and push myself as a writer and I like to think that I am improving and so I definitely think that Inheritance is the best book of the series and it's certainly my favourite one at the moment. Why are humans different colours? I think dragons are different colours because, one, it would be kind of boring if they were all the same colour and, two, because the dragons want to be different colours.

In my world, the dragons get to do what the dragons want to do and so no one's going to tell a dragon it can't be purple or pink or rainbow coloured so I think it's just because the dragons want to be different colours.

It would definitely be blue but I'm partially colour blind and so the blue I'm thinking of is probably actually purple. But that, to me, is my favourite colour and that's why Saphira is blue as well. Catherine - do you make up all the characters before you start a book or do you add characters as you go along? Some of my characters I invented before I started writing the series.

All of the main characters, I'd say, were invented before I started writing the series and they have to be because if you're going to figure out where the story's going, which you really need to do if you're creating a large, multi-volume story, in an imaginary world, it's best to put together a framework or roadmap to know where you're going before you dive into it. In that case, you really need to have a feel for who all the main characters are before you start so, for example, I outlined the whole series before I began Eragon and then I outlined Eragon specifically in pretty extensive detail before getting into it and I've done that with each of the books of the series.

So, for Brisingr for example, I did a fourteen or fifteen page outline, single spaced and each paragraph dealt with one main story point.

So, one paragraph would be Eragon goes to such and such a city, this this this happens, and then the next paragraph will say meanwhile, Roran does this this and this — things like that. I think it's important to do that because if you think about it in terms of music, first you compose a piece of music and then you can concentrate on performing it as beautifully as possible. But t is very hard to compose while perform.

Some people can do it — I don't want to say it's impossible and some people prefer to work that way — but for me, and very many other authors, our brains just don't work that way. The rest of my characters evolved out of the needs of the rest of the story as I was writing the rest of the books.

In the case of Angela the Herbalist, I didn't plan to put her in the story at all and she just ended up popping up as a bit of a surprise and taking over her scenes. Did anything surprise you about the story as you were writing, despite having it all planned out?

Even if you plan things out you have to be open to realising that your characters are no longer who you thought they were or who you thought they would become and you have to be able to let the story change to accommodate those changes in the characters. If you don't, you end up trying to force them to do things that just don't feel right and then your story will ring false. I've had that happen a couple of times where I'll start writing a scene and it just doesn't work, doesn't work, doesn't work and I'll get through it and then look back on it and think "you know what, that's not whose these people are anymore".

I'm misreading the situation or I'm not thinking about them the way I ought to and so I'll go back and rewrite it and change it sometimes dramatically and then think, yes, that now feels right. So, for example, in Inheritance, the ultimate fates of several of the main characters changed from what I originally imagined — there are some dramatic differences.

The relationship between Eragon and Arya does not resolve the way I originally intended it to. The character of Roran, where he ends up is also different, so those were things where what I was going to do no longer felt appropriate once I was there actually writing the scenes. I'm very grateful that a film adaptation was made because very few books are ever adapted as films and also the movie interested many new readers to the series which I think is a good thing.

I gave as much input as possible on the film as it was being made but, ultimately, the film represented the film-maker's vision of the story — as it should, of course — and the books represent my vision of the story and people are free to enjoy both of them on their own terms. I always get more questions about the home-schooling outside of the United States than I do inside. In the US, home-schooling is not the norm but enough people do it that it's…pretty much everyone knows someone who is home-schooled, or knows of someone who knows of someone who is home-schooled.

But it's not as common elsewhere in the world, I don't think. Personally, I had a great education. My mum was a trained teacher, a Montessori teacher, and I know that I could not have written Eragon if I had gone into a public school system because I would have just been too busy attending classes and doing homework — I wouldn't have had the time to write.

So, for me, it worked out great. Now, I have certainly seen it where, depending on the involvement of the parents, you can get a horrible, horrible, horrible education if you're being home-schooled, and that's the risk you run.

That said, I think people ought to be able to have the freedom to choose to home-school and it makes for a more interesting and varied society. I would certainly home-school my children if I have the chance. I think it gives people the opportunity to actually enjoy learning in a more unstructured environment and to pursue their own interests. By doing that, I learned how to teach myself which I consider the most valuable lesson I learnt. I basically put myself through high school.

We got an accredited distance learning high school and that's how I did it and my sister too. Learning how to teach yourself is great preparation for tackling a project like Eragon and then, of course, the later books as well.

I consider education incredibly important too, I have tried to keep learning new things since I graduated, I listen to a lot of college courses on tape when I am drawing or exercising and that I think has influenced and enriched my writing as well.

No, that was pretty much it! We never took summers off because if we wanted to take days off we could do that whenever we wanted and so we didn't take months off and that allowed us to get ahead of where we normally would have been in school.

And then when I graduated I was just reading and reading everything I could get my hands on and I just loved stories and I'd pretty much read all of the fantasy books in our local library, which was very, very small at the time, so in one way I almost felt as if I'd read all the fantasy books that were out there.

I hadn't, but that's what it felt like. So it was the perfect situation where I loved the reading, I loved these types of stories, I didn't have a job, I didn't have school, I didn't have to do anything and writing is what I chose to do in that time and I think that everybody should have that opportunity of some period in your life where you do not have to do anything and whatever it is you choose to do in that time is probably what you ought to be pursuing as a career — even if it's playing video games.

But I never thought that my hobby, if you will, would ever end up becoming my profession. I would have been either an artist or a film-maker. And I may still be a film-maker one day but I loved art, I started with art before writing.

In fact, I have done all the interior illustrations for the books and there are some deluxe editions floating around with some additional art I've done as well. So I would have pursued the art professionally, and the funny thing is that by becoming a writer, my art has probably been seen by more people than would have seen it if I'd just been an artist. The reason I didn't pursue the art was because during high school I read all these history of art books which were talking about all these starving artists throughout the ages and I thought "I don't want to be a starving artist!

Not realising how many starving writers there are! But things worked out for the best on that front so I've been very fortunate. Your fans are going to read the last book in the series and be distraught that that's it. What do you suggest that they should read next? Read Magician by Raymond E Feist, read Dune by Frank Herbert, read A Wizard of Earthsea and the two sequels by Ursula K Le Guin.

Read the MabinogionTetralogy by Evangeline Walton. Read The Lord of the Rings if you haven't read it, and the Hobbit. Read the Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake, which is extremely gothic and not to everyone's taste but I recommend it. Read the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy by Tad Williams — it's step up from Lord of the Rings in terms of size and complexity.

Read the George R Martin series Game of Thrones, or A Song of Ice and Fire, it's called, if that's your sort of thing. I actually haven't read it myself but I've heard good things about it. Read The Name of the Wind and the sequels by Patrick Rothfuss, amazing books, and then if you're really, really up for something incredibly fantastical and fun with the language and very hard to read then I recommend the Worm Ouroboros by ER Eddison which most people have not heard about.

It's pre-Tolkien, it's written in faux-Jacobian language, although modified for his own personal use and is one of the top four classic fantasy books in my opinion.

The top picks for me would be Tolkien, Dune, the Mabinogion Tetralogy, Gormenghast, the Worm Ouroboros and the Wizard of Earthsea. If you read those, you'll have a really great education in fantasy.

I'd also recommend Wild Seed by Octavia Butler. I'd say she's the Toni Morrison of science fiction and it's an awesome book. Oh, and it's a little bit younger than my work but David Eddings's fantasy books are the books that I started reading — they got me into fantasy.

So the way I'd rank it is that you start with David Eddings, you go to Feist and then Eragon is in that age group as well. Then you read Lord of the Rings, then Ted Williams, then Mervyn Peake, then ER Eddison. And for heaven's sake read Harry Potter if you haven't already! That goes without saying at this point! International edition switch to the UK edition switch to the US edition switch to the Australia edition.

The Guardian - Back to home. Christopher Paolini started writing Eragon when he was 15, self-publishing it at 19 before landing a major publishing deal. Eragon and the following two books in the series, Eldest and Brisingr, have sold 25m copies around the world.

Last week he published the fourth and last book in the series, Inheritance , and took some time to answer questions from Guardian children's books site members about his life and work. He also provides his definitive fantasy reading list. Keith - How did it feel to be such a famous author at such a young age?

What kind of challenges?

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Keith - How do you write? A little everyday or big chunks every so often? Does anybody else pick up on those? Hannah - Do you have a favourite character to write about? Hannah - Do you have a favourite book in the series?

Hannah - Why are the dragons different colours? Molly — if you could have a dragon, what colour would it be and why? In the case of Angela the Herbalist, I didn't plan to put her in the story at all and she just ended up popping up as a bit of a surprise and taking over her scenes Did anything surprise you about the story as you were writing, despite having it all planned out?

What impact do you feel that has had on your writing? So you didn't spend years just buried in storybooks? So, if you hadn't become a writer, what do you think you might have been? Topics Children's books Children's books: The Guardian back to top.