When I’m on a writing roll my days are seemingly very boring, I just sit and write ALL day!
The Bomb Girl Brides
Through the day I’ll vary between writing long hand (scrawl, which only I can read) to working at the computer. After two hours of banging out chapters whilst staring at the screen my energy levels will suddenly drop and I feel limp and exhausted. After a cup of coffee, when what I really want is a big bag of chips with lashings of salt and vinegar, I continue working, this time writing long-hand away from my desk, in my attic study in Cambridge.
When I’m really on a roll I often get up at dawn, not because I’m worrying about the deadline though there is that too, but because I simply can’t sleep when the characters who I thought I’d put to bed the previous night are driving the narrative forwards. When this happens I have to get up and sit at my computer where the story comes pouring out, surprising and exciting me with it’s complex twists and turns that I certainly didn’t write and never expected. Though I’m the one that’s furiously tip-tapping the keys, my sub-conscious has done all my work for me overnight.
When it’s time to start a new book I am vacant to the point of stupidity. I mooch about missing my characters who abandoned me when they went off to press. The rhythm of work is vastly different in this research period; I do loads of dog walking and work-out in the gym coming up with plot lines which I impatiently ditch as I push on hoping for something better. In the end, no matter how much you Google and read up on your genre you’ve just got to physically go to the place where you want to set your story and breathe in the air.
I recently did this in Grange-Over-Sands, the location for my next book, which opens in 1939 just before the onset of WW2. I wanted my mother and baby home to be by the sea and in the Lake District. Grange-Over-Sands is on the extreme edge of the breath-taking Morecambe bay, which rolls away into the Irish Sea. It seemed to be a perfect compromise as it also (just about if you squint!) backs onto some of the lower fells of the South Lakes. So there I was, only a few weeks ago, on the train that goes across the bay to Arnside and Silverdale giving stupendous views of the tidal creeks beside which sheep and their scampering lambs grazed at low tide. As I gazed out at the shimmering expanse of silvery marsh that merged with the hot blue sky and distant sea I knew for sure, this was where I’d write my story. Now my work begins!