Joanne Harris talks to Hannah Stephenson about her “agent divorce”, a spell out of the limelight, and how the internet proved an unlikely cure for her writer’s block.

BESTSELLING author Joanne Harris is no stranger to writer’s block, but it took the best part of a year and some serious trawling of the internet in search of virtual friends for her creative juices to start flowing again.

After her last book, The Lollipop Shoes, was published, the former Leeds teacher – whose most famous book Chocolat was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp – fell out with her literary agent, a factor she believes exacerbated the writer’s block she so often has after completing books.

She said: “I was in a kind of rut and I was totally burnt out. I couldn’t think and I couldn’t read and I was so tired. I’d been involved in a messy agent divorce and that took up a lot of my emotional energy. I was put in a bad situation and could have gone to court but I don’t really want to go into it.

“A number of people who I thought were my friends turned out not to be and behaved in a very disloyal and ungentlemanly way, which was quite upsetting.”

The anxiety she suffered led to an inability to concentrate on anything for very long, she explains.

“I went creatively limp for a while and spent a year doing very little except being online, writing the occasional piece of Lost fanfic (fiction on blogging sites for the popular TV show) and talking to people.

“I spent far too much time online, hanging around various sites and searching out ever more ingenious ways of evading reality.”

Under a pseudonym, she began to take an increasing interest in the way people interact online, the communities they create and join and the way they choose to portray themselves.

Out of this trawling has come Blue Eyed Boy, a dark psychological thriller featuring characters on a blog site, one of whom, BB, is a 42-year-old hospital porter still living at home with his mother, whom he hates.

He spins murderous fantasies about her to his virtual friends and it becomes difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in this creepy tale.

Harris, 45, found the virtual world a fascinating backdrop for a novel.

“In a society which is increasingly fragmented and mistrustful of real life relationships, it can be quite tempting to take refuge in these little virtual worlds where people share your interest and where you can find people who you know are grouped together because of a common interest you have with them.”