I was first introduced to The Hobbit and Lord of The Rings over 25 years ago at a writing and reading group that used to meet in an Islington pub. I deferred reading the latter work because of the sheer size of the novel – to my eyes it was more breeze block than a work of fiction. I gave up my Tolkien embargo when I discovered we shared the same birthday – 3rd January. When I finally turned the first few pages, I wasn’t only stunned by the vastness of imagination, the never-ending cast of characters and the rich, intricate description of a different world, I was mesmerised by Tolkien’s inventiveness of language. He created new words, new phrases and indeed, two or three different languages. He even wrote songs and poetry – something I used to do. It is that force of Tolkien’s innovation that has long remained with me.

Since the publication of my first two novels, Brixton Rock and East of Acre Lane, critics have always been kind about the dialogue in my books. I believe writing good dialogue is just as hard to master as penning beautiful prose. In those South London morality tales I tried to catch the word as it was spoken in real life and place it on the page. If you manage to do it correctly, you have defined half of your characters already.

When I sat down to write Liccle Bit and Crongton Knights, I wanted to challenge myself and be ground-breaking. I needed to leap out of my South London comfort zone and like Tolkien, stretch and bend the English language. First of all, I had to create a fictional town – Crongton. At my age I’m hardly down with the kids anymore and I feared that if I attempted to mimic a fast-talking, smart-ass South London kid, I’m only putting myself up for failure. In my head I could hear that kid yelling at me, “we don’t say it like that!”

I didn’t reject the South London vernacular completely but what I did do was to add aspects of it to elements of US Hip-Hop, Jamaican dancehall, old school reggae and every other sub-culture I thought could supplement my concoction. With my own stirred-up brew of words and phrases I hoped to offer something unique, fresh and entertaining to the reader. Of course I have taken huge risks – conversation is so easy to get wrong and can be quickly dismissed as unauthentic. I’m not sure if dialogue has been written in such form in YA fiction before but I believe language only changes when brave authors attempt something different.

We’ll be marking the 400 years since William Shakespeare passed and I’m sure there are some children here in the UK who has never heard of him but in their everyday language speak words that he invented. English is the most fluid language in the world and the slang of today will be included in future editions of the Oxford English Dictionary. Who knows? Maybe one day, one of my creations in Liccle Bit and Crongton Knights, might make it into those pages. That would be quite something.

• Alex Wheatle’s Crongton Knights, sequel to the highly acclaimed and Carnegie longlisted Liccle Bit, is out now.