Tony Parsons

So this is my room. If I’m working on a book, then my routine would be get up at 7, walk my 6 year old daughter to school, get back about 9 and then come up here and start working and usually I would expect to write a thousand words a day which can come quickly or can come slowly, but by about early afternoon that should be done, and this is a tiny little room. It’s probably the smallest room I’ve ever worked in. You know, I’m surrounded by things that inspire me close at hand every day. I’ve got the medal that my father won in World War II, it’s his Distinguished Service medal, he was a Royal Naval Commander and inside I’ve also got my mother’s wedding ring, engagement ring and eternity ring, very cheap little rings from 1944, 1945 when they got married and they’re very precious and very inspiring to me, so I’m surrounded by images of my family, memories of my family – my parents are both dead but their memory’s still very much alive in this room. Some people don’t like to read other fiction when they’re working on their own fiction. Norman Mailer described it as being on your knees in a garage and surrounded by bits of metal and covered in oil and then someone drives past in a Ferrari and so Mailer would never read fiction when he was writing fiction, but I find it quite inspiring to see someone drive by in a Ferrari when I’m down on the floor of the garage with bits everywhere. I find it helps me.

My daughter brings me her own work and it never fails to make me smile. At the moment her big thing are commercials, she’s working on a lot of advertising projects, and I’ve got one here which is you know the pretty ones? To make them even more pretty use Bye Bye Ugliness. Use it! So I think she’s got a job waiting for her at Saatchi and Saatchi when she grows up.

I’ve written 6 books over the last 10 years and that’s a lot of sitting down and that’s a lot of being alone and so this room is also a little bit of a gym, it’s a little bit of a home made gym. I box, I study boxing with a guy called Fred Kindle, so that’s what these very old 16 ounce Lonsdale gloves are, and I’ve got this elliptical trainer which I jump on a few times a week and to me, I couldn't do it if I didn’t try to stay healthy and try to stay fit. I couldn't spend the thousands of hours that a book takes, so I’m pretty self sufficient in this room, you know, I’ve got my cable television, I’ve got my DVDs and I’ve got my music and I’ve got pictures of my family and I’ve got books that inspire me so everything about it encourages me to do the one thing that this room exists for, which is to write.