Nobody should become a novelist who is not a gambler or obsessed with words, Margaret Atwood told an audience at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival.

The Canadian author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, which won the Booker Prize in 2000, said that it was now much harder for aspiring writers to break through and establish themselves than it was when she began her career in the 1960s.

“Writing is not a job description,” she said. “A great deal of it is luck. Don’t do it if you are not a gambler because a lot of people devote many years of their lives to it [for little reward]. I think people become writers because they are compulsive wordsmiths.”

Atwood is famously just that. Although best known for her novels, which tend to feature strong, enigmatic female characters and are often left partially unresolved, she is also a writer of poems, short stories, critical studies, screenplays, radio scripts and children’s books. Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages.

More recently she added a new line to her CV: inventor. An idea that Atwood, who was born in 1939, had several years ago led to the creation of a device called the LongPen, which enables authors to appear virtually at book signings by using technology that can reproduce what they write in real time through the internet.

Atwood was in Toronto on Thursday night, but with the help of the LongPen she was also present on a big screen in the town hall in Cheltenham. Although the picture occasionally crackled with broken pixels and Atwood’s silver curls merged with the bright wallpaper behind her head, her characteristic warmth and caustic wit made the journey across the Atlantic comfortably. Asked how she had changed as a writer, she said: “I got older and I prefer that to the alternative, which is death.”

She said that her early years as an aspiring poet had been difficult: “When I started in Canada it was very hard to be a writer. At that time few Canadian writers were published, even in Canada.

“If you wrote a novel you were told that there weren’t enough readers in Canada so you have to get a British or American publisher.”

Then, after years of being told that there was nothing unique about Canada, “you were told that your novel was too Canadian for Britain or the US”.

At the same time “the immediate postwar years were probably the most male-dominated decade in the history of literature in the past 150 years”.

However, Atwood now recognises that because there were so few writers like her “once you did break through you could rise to visibility a lot quicker”.

“Now that there’s so many people writing there’s a great struggle to find an agent and a publisher.

“Sometimes [new authors] are flavour of the month when their book comes out but if it doesn’t then sell a trillion copies they struggle again,” she added.

Her own fiction has developed with age, she said. “If you are young you can imagine what it’s like to be old but you haven’t lived it. If you are older you have not only experienced what it’s like to be older but you can remember every stage in between.”

She added that her books had become more structurally adventurous because she had used up most of the simpler narrative devices in her earlier works.

“To stop yourself falling asleep you need to become more inventive. So The Blind Assassin covers pretty much the entire 20th century but it’s also able to draw on a lot of levels of experience which the 25-year-old me did not have access to,” Atwood said.

Asked how she might be remembered, she said that it was impossible to predict because “we don’t know if there will be a human race in 100 years or if there will be reading”.

However, Atwood was relieved that expectations of writers had changed.

“In the 1970s when Sylvia Plath was all the rage, people would ask me not if I was going to commit suicide but when I was going to commit suicide. You weren’t thought of as a really serious female writer unless you died.

“It makes the journals a lot more interesting if you have an ending like that,” she said.

Today

12pm: Ian McEwan and the psychologist Steven Pinker look at how language shapes who we are

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