Jilly Cooper

I write in a gazebo which is 14th century and evidently a monk hanged himself or something, something terrible happened here because the dogs hate it, new dogs always hate it for about six months, then they get used to it because their love of me is slightly more than, sounds conceited, than it is of the frighteners and it’s a wonderful place because I can look all over the valley and the views are fantastic and it’s incredibly private and I don’t get interrupted by, nobody knows the telephone number and so I don’t get interrupted by anybody, so it’s, writers need peace.

When I come in here, however uptight I am, I usually calm down a bit and write a bit. I’m afraid I’m terribly, terribly slow. Practically every chapter’s about 15 drafts, so it’s really sort of like doing a jigsaw puzzle, it’s plug, plug, plug all the time.

I’ll show you a chapter. I’ll show you the last chapter I did, which is the Cheltenham Gold Cup section of the book. I mean, look at the rubbish of that, I mean scribbled all over. That’s a very, very tidy chapter, that one, so what I do is I do a hell of a lot of long hand and since I broke my wrist, I can’t read that back, which takes endless deciphering, and then I type a chapter and then I write all over it and then I type it again and then I write all over it and type it again so it’s a general sort of mess of long hand, very untidy long hand, and very bad typing.

When I worked on the ‘Sunday Times’, I had to go to the Tory party conference. […] it must have been the name of the secretary or something, it had ‘Monica’ on the side and I thought what a brilliant name for a typewriter that’s going to the Tory party conference, it’s just such a Tory name, and she’s never let me down, never, never, never. She’s typed all my books since, about 20 of them, and that’s my word processor thing, scissors, so when I want to change a chapter, I just cut it along and stick it on the top of the page and this is a nightmare, but in there is, embarrassingly, my files. It has all the characters in the book and bits about them, so if I want to bring them to life, but often at the end of the book I don’t even use it, it’s so embarrassing. That’s all the chapters in there. There’s a great file in there and each chapter, when I have a thought about a chapter, I shove them into this particular file and there’s the synopsis. I have a big synopsis which I add to, so it’s very chaotic.

I’ll do some work in the morning from about 6 to 8, perhaps, thoughts, and then I’ll walk my dogs and take last night’s chapter with me and correct it on the way and fall over bramble cables. I also take new stuff and, you know, think up ideas on the walks as well. I mean, walks are incredibly creative, I think.

Lots and lots of writers have animals round them because basically it’s terribly lonely, 12 hours or 6 hours or 5 hours a day. You’re all by yourself and you want something that doesn’t interrupt, except the odd squeak or purr, but you want something to stroke and comfort you and I think, for me, they’re incredible comfort. I put them in all the books. I mean, Feather, my greyhound, is now called Priceless and Ferrell, my cat, has changed sex and is called Gwennie in this.

And I’d love to do something simple, God, I’d love to do something simple. Just two characters and a dog, it would be heaven.