Authors Reveal the Secrets of their Craft

Several well-known authors on the Guardian discuss writing.

From the piece...

Do you have a routine? What tools do you use?

Michael Frayn: It's very difficult when each day you start with a sort of cold brain and nothing happens. In my case I look back over what I was doing the day before and make a few small corrections, often to typing errors, then maybe a few grammatical errors, and then I see a better way of putting something, and gradually you get drawn into the world you've created and you start rewriting what you did the day before and gradually coming up to the point where you left it the day before and going on. And certainly at the end of each day's work I try – when my brain is hot and stuff is happening, but when I'm really too tired to go on – to make hasty notes and write down bits and pieces of what's going to come, anything that's already in one's head, sort of scatter it down on the page so that when you start the next day you've got some stuff there to work on.

Ian Rankin: You get these writers who say: "I go to my office at nine and I write from nine till 12 and then I revise from two till four and that's my day, and I do 2,000 words a day and when I've done my 2,000 words a day that's me," and you go: "What?" I have days when I do fuck all. I sit down at a computer, nothing's coming, I'm having to tear each word out, it's like digging for coal, and I'll go: "No, this isn't working," and I'll just walk away.

Anne Fine: The first bit usually is in pencil, and then later in the day or whenever I will often type that up, and from then on I will be correcting and then I'll work on it in pencil again – over and over and over and over and over – and some pages come fairly easily and don't take much correcting, especially if it's a book for very young children where you're keeping the prose extremely simple. The older the intended reader of the book is, the more complicated it becomes, so you might end up printing certain pages out 20, 30 times. I have novels where, out of sheer interest, I've kept every version of it and I can fill a box two, three feet off the floor with drafts.