How did I start to write?

Many writers' autobiographies tell us that the author started to write at the age of seven, or or ten, or whenever, and certanly knew their vocation at a very early age. I cannot claim that distinction. I did not have any conscious idea of a vocation for a very long time. All I did know from the age of eleven was that I desperately wanted to be in the school play. My school put on a Shakespearean production every autumn and from my first term there I was determined to be part of that. There was an indefinable and irresistible glamour about the stage that had me in its grasp. Even as late as twenty two, though, I had no idea of going on the stage. It was only when I took my first full-time paid employment, which hit me like a very cold shower, that I found my theatrical vocation. Anything must be better than sitting in an office, I reasoned, and for the next fifteen years I managed to earn my living in the theatre.

Even then I did not consciously think about writing. I did write all the same, though, as I have said elesewhere, it was rather out of the corner of my eye, while I was concentrating on something else. I wrote television scripts; none was ever produced, so I do not think I can have taken myself very seriously.

In fact I was forty nine before I consciously sat down to write a story. I don't call myself a novelist normally because I think of novels as something grander and more serious than the things I write. Novels are written by people like Tolstoy, Dickens, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. What I write are stories and I have no other ambition than to create something that the reader cannot put down. 

Where do I get the ideas from?

Frankly, there are stories and to spare every day in the newspaper. Jane Austen was able to make up all the stories she needed, as she said, from two families, and usually in one village. As for the writing, I remember once thinking that it is a bit like seeing a play on television, and the next morning sitting down to write it all out from memory. In that way writing seems to me to be a branch of memory. And thinking about it, it must be a part of memory, since when we write we are only setting down things we already know - even if we have forgotten we knew them.

Ireland

In my job as a tour guide I have travelled in Ireland many times and I fell in love with the country in a big way, especially what I imagined to have been Victorian Ireland. There was so much I wanted to put in the books, a sort of Charles Lever-esque, picturesque, rollicking sort of Ireland. Ireland seemed to have it all: huge disparities of income (essential to drama), starving peasants, hunting squires, corrupt elections, dashing soldiers, revolutionaries, ancient dispossessed families, and a crazy sense of humour. But most of all, splendid, witty heroines. My books when they finally emerged, seem to me tame affairs compared with what I had originally dreamed of.

What about sex in novels?

I wrestled quite a bit with this one when the situation first presented itself. What to do? In the end I reasoned that since sex plays an important part in life, and sometimes a very important part indeed - if not 'earth-moving', certainly it can change the course of your life - I decided it must play some part in the story. What part depends entirely on the dramatic context. Sometimes indeed a row of dots is appropriate; at other times nothing will do but the full-frontal. Such is life.

Right Brain / Left Brain

The business of writing out of the corner of my eye, which I mentioned above may be the same as this famous 'Right brain/Left brain' phenomenon that so many writers speak of. In other words, staring at the problem, wrestling with it, trying to work out some aspect of the plot consciously and logically can often bring one to a dead standstill, and it is only by standing back, or in some strange way, by creeping up on the problem, looking at it out of the corner of your eye that you can take it - and yourself by surprise - and get on the with the story. It is very frustrating.

Regular Hours

Every writer is at pains to emphasis how important it is to put in the hours, to be at your desk every morning, and so forth, and I was as keen as any to think of myself as a craftsman, to be there every day turning out the stories regularly. If only. To be frank, when I sit down at the desk in the morning it is to clasp my hands together and pray. Where do the stories come from? I don't know. Will I ever finish this one? The Lord only knows. I cannot honestly take any credit for my books. I can only claim what I said above, that I was at my desk while they were written. 

Anxiety

If I could bequeath one thing to an aspiring writer it would be anxiety. How do I get the end of a story? By worrying about it. It haunts me, it is the despair of my family. I lie in bed thinking about it, I walk the streets at night turning it over in my mind, I tap the desk impatiently. And then, when it is finished, I'm blessed if I can remember where it came from. It is very frustrating. After the story is completed it seems so  logical, so obvious, so simple, that I am quite astonished sometimes to come across a stray page of notes I had scribbled out while I was still working on it, and to read some of the wild ideas that I had seriously contemplated while I was working on it.