Diana Athill

Well I have to write in this tiny room because it’s the only room I’ve got, and I usually start by writing sitting in this chair, scribbling away on a lined pad of paper. That’s my first draft and then I move over to the desk and put it onto the laptop which I find to be a very good way of starting revision because between the scribble and the laptop one makes quite a lot of alteration.

I live in a state of complete chaos and I always have, however hard I try to keep thing orderly.  I suppose I must really need chaos on a way because when I was a publisher my desk was famous for the horror of it. The only thing I have on the desk always because I love it is a photograph, a child who is now quite grown up, but in the photograph she is just two and she’s being introduced to the sea for the first time.  I mean those paintings above my desk, the big portrait of a very plain girl, everyone says, why do you like that painting? And all I can say is that that very fierce looking girl struck me forcibly when I went to an exhibition. And then next to her there’s a very touching, I think, William Strang, woodcut it is, of a mother and child which I love simply because it’s a moving picture. The chair which I sort of sit in if I need to take a thought, is a Victorian copy of an Elizabethan chair for which I embroidered the upholstery. So I’m really rather proud of that. There’s really no sort of typical thing that makes me feel able to write – it does depend entirely on how I feel – and it’s nearly always… I’m a night person, not a morning person, it’s nearly always fairly late in the day and sometimes I go on, if I’m really, if I hit a vein, I suddenly look up and I find it’s three o’clock in the morning.

I start at the beginning and I go on til the end, and when the thing is finished it turns out to be perfectly well shaped as though a lot of thought had gone into it, and what I suspect is that for some minds anyway a lot of the work is done at night when one’s asleep, that one’s mind, subconscious mind is working away at it because actually all my books seem to come spontaneously. I have taken from two writers I’ve known, I’ve taken a sort of … one lesson about writing. Jean Reese used to always say the thing that matters is getting it like it really was, and Vidya Naipual once said if you get things right then people understand however remote from their own experience it is. And both those things went deep. I found that when I was writing myself I found myself thinking I must get it like it really was, and I think the kind of writing that I enjoy is rather plain, exact writing and that’s what I try to do myself.