During term time when the children are at school I go to a little room at the top of the stairs, where I can hear what’s going on, where I can put my head round the door when I have to. There are my dictionaries and reference books and my Apple iBook, which is unobtrusive. I get fed up when rooms are dominated by computers. The first draft is longhand on A4 ruled sheets with a fountain pen. I have had various pens along the way, then at my fortieth I got given a Mont Blanc. I distrust labels generally, but it has a lovely velvety feel. I use black ink. They say you have to use a special ink or the inside will rot — they threaten you with that. It’s £8 a bottle.
I also write when I’m out and about — maybe on park benches or on the bus. I use a 5in by 8in notebook. It used to be any old thing, but ten years ago I was comparing notebooks with the playwright Nicholas Wright. He had an Alwych Book with an all-weather cover, produced by J. R. Reid in Glasgow. I sent off for a dozen of them. I always carry one because if I have an idea it goes in seconds: the things someone says, or the way a tree looks. I’m not sure how useful they are. I hardly look at them afterwards. Perhaps I will one day.
Simon Armitage
I have an office just outside the house above the garage. I have a commute of about four yards. It’s also a den, I suppose. There is a Russian icon that I bought in Poland. There’s a lot of bird feathers poking out of books and there’s an unfortunate number of books at the moment, because I have been judging the Booker. I have some very old toys and games like my Subbuteo set, and a kettle. Coffee till eleven, tea thereafter, too many cups a day. Our little girl is at school and my wife works regular hours so I do too. I was more nocturnal but life’s a bit more traditional now.
I listen to music on my computer when I’m writing prose or dialogue — anything since the Undertones. I write the poems longhand. I take them with me in notebooks when I’m travelling around. I used to pretend to myself that I was superstitious about certain pens, but I’m not. As long as it doesn’t smudge or bleed. As for my computer, I have no affection for it whatsoever. I am awestruck by what it does, and when it’s working we’re great friends.
But when it doesn’t we’re terrible enemies and I have to get on the phone and talk to a three-year-old.
Fay Weldon
I have a study which looks out through windows on to a street which is not too busy, but there is just signs of life so you don’t feel isolated. And you have all this company on the page. You can control them too, which is more than you can do with real people.
I try to get up early. Half six. If you can get two-and-a-half hours in before the proper day starts then you are lucky. The editing you can do better in the day, when reason has reappeared. I wrote by pen until about four years ago when I noticed that the entire world read computer-written works. You follow your readers where they lead.
I have regretted it ever since, but you can’t go back. All the muscles in your hand change, and instead of good bold stuff you start writing little stuff with lots of scratchings-out. You used to be able to write anywhere, too. You could sit on the stairs and write, which I did a lot, with a felt pen. Pens used to be perfectly simple. Black pens that lasted for a week. You can’t get them now. They are too fast or too hard.
I have a brand new laptop but I prefer to use my old PC. You do get fond of them. You have a kind of relationship, which is more intense than most people have with their cars, I imagine. I feel a sort of duty to it, like an old dog.
Michael Morpurgo
I had problems some years ago sitting at a desk. I got pains in my wrist and shoulder. I live in Devon and nearby was Ted Hughes. He said he wrote standing up sometimes. I tried that. My feet hurt.
Then I saw a photograph of Robert Louis Stevenson, my great writing hero and the person I most want to be. He was on the island of Samoa, not long before he died, and he was sitting on a bed propped up with pillows, a pad balanced on his knees. I thought: “I will do what Robert Louis does.” The only problem is from time to time you are wont to fall asleep.
I walk the lanes of Devon dreaming stories in my head. I wait till the moment I think they are ready to hatch. Then I go to my bed, I get out my little exercise book and get on with it. The exercise books I get given in the primary schools I visit. They have small pages so you feel that you have done a lot.
When I have written a chapter I read it through out loud and then give it to my wife, Clare. She taps away on the machine, gives me back a clean copy, which I then read through and correct, and she decides what we might miss, if I have got a bit flowery or gone on a bit, until it feels like a proper manuscript.
Marina Lewycka
I write in bed. Partly because it’s the most comfortable and private place, and partly because I like to write either at the beginning or the end of the day. I write from the early morning when I wake up till about lunch time. It’s to do with the business of being in a separate world. Not engaging with the real world. Once you do that everything in your head disappears.
Often I feel embarrassed answering the door at midday in my dressing gown, when in fact I have been working quite a few hours. Its probably not very good for my back. I don’t see it as a permanent solution but I have very noisy students next door and six till noon is the only time they are quiet. I have to have total silence.
I drink an enormous amount of tea. I usually have a pot in bed with me, and my lovely husband brings me porridge: he works at home too, though not in bed. I write on a laptop — and this is my hint: I have one of those trays on a beanbag that people use for TV suppers. It protects you from the heat, and the computer doesn’t get too hot either. I got it from Oxfam for £4.
John Mortimer
I live in a house my father built in the Chiltern Hills. I’ve lived here since I was a child. I write in a room that used to be the garage. It’s converted and full of books and photographs.
I write with a rather soft pen. I don’t know what you would call it: it’s softer than a Biro, soft and red. I have hundreds of them, a huge supply. I write on the pads which court barristers write on. My supply of those is probably running out. They have rather long pages. You get them in a book, which I tear off. Each page is almost exactly 300 words. Then somebody has to type out what I have written. I can’t read it really, but that wonderful woman can.
If I write a film script, people are changing it the whole time. If I write a book I don’t change it much: Rumpole and the Reign of Terror was published on October 5 and I’m working on the next Rumpole after that, which should be finished by spring. I write in the morning. I used to get up at six — four even — but I don’t so much any more. Now I get up at seven or eight, and try and write till lunch time. I don’t write after lunch.
Malorie Blackman
I write in my attic. It’s a big room, it’s quiet and I’m staring out at the next door’s chimney stack. The room stores all our books on shelves, back to back. It’s nice to be surrounded by books. I write during the day mostly, while my daughter’s at school, but if I have a deadline and I’m not too tired, once she’s in bed then I’ll go back to it.
I used to be a computer programmer so I’m not afraid of them. Sometimes I use a program that allows me to dictate, but my ear microphone’s gone missing. I don’t want to use a handheld mike — I’d feel self-conscious — so I’m back on the keyboard. The Qwerty keyboard was originally designed to slow you down when it was on a typewriter, and I do think that as voice recognition gets better and processors get faster there will be no reason why writers won’t just dictate. Barbara Cartland, I believe, used to dictate to her secretary. It’s always a good test to read things out loud.
When I do dictate I write down what I want to say first, in a spiral-bound reporter’s notebook, using one of those pencils that you turn the bottom and the lead comes out. When I’m typing it comes straight out.
William Boyd
I write in the London Library on St James’s Square and in my house in southwest France, but 75 per cent of my writing I do in my study at home in Chelsea, a medium-sized room, book-lined on two sides, floor to ceiling. The desk is in front of a large window that looks over Radnor Walk, where John Betjeman used to live. Mark Twain was round the corner, and George Eliot, and I can see the spire of the church that Dickens was married in. I used to write in pencil but after years of searching I found the killer writing implement: a Rotring, a German make, with a 0.2mm nylon nib. I write on A4 spiral-backed notebooks. Then I type it on to my computer.
I tend to write in the afternoons, between lunch and cocktail hour. I used to feel terrified about the house burning down and my manuscript being destroyed, so I kept it in the fridge. A fridge will protect anything, even an atomic bomb blast apparently.
I belong to that pre-computer generation, and a lot of my contemporaries still write in longhand — Julian Barnes, Martin Amis. I think there is something special about the brain-hand interface, certain cadences. I do notice a difference in prose style from stuff typed on to a screen. There is something about preserving that old connection. I am sure I will never let it go.
Appearing at the festival
Simon Armitage: 2pm, tomorrow
Malorie Blackman: 11am, Saturday October 14
Bookings: 01242 227979, or via www.cheltenhamfestivals.com
John Mortimer’s play, A Voyage Round My Father, has just transferred to the Wyndham’s Theatre (0870 0606633).
What Makes Women Happy, by Fay Weldon, is published this month by 4th Estate
Join the debate: What are your favourite particulars when you settle down to write?
