FUN is a word writer Malcolm Gladwell uses a lot. Writing is fun. Working for the Washington Post was fun. Doing a theatre tour is fun. And his evening of storytelling, which arrives in the North-East next week, makes him feel “like I am in a very minor rock band”.

English-born, raised in rural Ontario and now living in New York, he’s been a staff writer with the New Yorker magazine since 1996, after working as a reporter and New York city bureau chief on the Washington Post.

In 2005, he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People.

He’s the author of four books, with the latest, What The Dog Saw, a collection of his New York essays, topping the New York Times bestsellers’ list, as the previous three did.

His stage storytelling appearance follows sellout shows in London and four UK cities. It came about because his publisher was keen for him to come over here and a theatre promoter specialising in putting writers on stage did the rest.

In a way, it’s an extension of the public speaking, to charities and other organisations, he does when not writing. “I started to do a little bit and found I enjoyed it,” he tells me over the phone from New York.

“In the past couple of years, I’ve got interested in just straight storytelling. I belong to this little storytelling group in New York where everyone has a couple of drinks and we tell tall stories.

“I’ve grown quite a fascination with that particular art, the pre-20th Century way of getting up and telling a story.

What’s funny to me is how the story has to be told and how it’s naturally different from the written version.

“The craft is different in interesting ways. There’s a lot of overlapping, obviously.

The more you do it, the more you understand. It’s hard to explain.

“Things like the rhythm of the story matters so much more when you’re speaking it. If something bores you, you can skip ahead if you’re reading. That doesn’t happen telling a story.”

He became a writer by default after failing to settle in doing anything else. “I always enjoyed writing as a child, but never imagined it would be a career,” he says.

“I just stumbled into it. It proved to be such fun that I never stumbled out of it.”

The obvious question is “where do you get your ideas?”. I hesitate to put it to him because he’s said that often-posed inquiry is an impossible one to answer. I ask anyway and he attempts a reply. “The answer is you get them in an infinite number of ways,” he explains.

‘SOMETIMES, I read things in books, sometimes people tell you things, sometimes you have an obsession. Mostly you just discover there is so much beneath the surface. You only have to start looking at something to discover more. It’s the iceberg thing, you see the tip and there’s much more underneath.”

He gets out of the office to research his topics before writing. “If I didn’t go out in the world I’d run out of ideas in five minutes,”

he says.

Story-telling on stage elicits a different reaction from his audience than his written work. “I probably get more reaction from books. Because someone has invested so much more time in reading you, they’re more likely to want to respond,”

he says.

“England has always seemed to me a much more literate, literary culture. I’ve always had wonderful luck with English audiences. If anything, I am less nervous doing shows in England.”

Although he loves London (“because I’m always jetlagged I find myself walking in the early hours of the morning – it’s such a wonderful walking city”) he welcomes the chance to get outside the capital to places like Newcastle.

At first, he was bringing American biased stories over here. Now, he’s realised that’s not the way to do it. He will not, he says with a warning that it was inevitable he’d say it, be bringing coals to Newcastle.

■ Malcolm Gladwell appears at the Journal Tyne Theatre, Newcastle, on Wednesday. Box office 0844-493-9999.

■ What The Dog Saw And Other Adventures is published by Penguin, £9.99