Salley Vickers

I write in my office which I keep especially for writing. It looks east just as the back room looks west. So I’m often very lucky I come into an amazing sunrise, it’s a really beautiful sunrise and the room I write in has a view that looks right out across London, right across to Canary Wharf which I can see on a good day, churches, cranes.

I’m very, very often strange people balancing on rooftops which provide a wonderful distraction for me when I’m trying to think of what to write about.

I always write in my nightdress, so I get straight out of bed and get to work and I don’t stop until sometime in the afternoon usually and then I get dressed. So I can’t write when I’m wearing my outdoor clothes. And I think that keeps in the realm of the unconscious. If I get conscious then I generally feel it’s time to stop.

I never write by hand, I take a lot of notes by hand but I write straight onto the computer and there’s something about the way it seems to sort of come down my arms from somewhere around here, not somewhere up here because I feel it’s got to have filtered through from here to somewhere around here and I’m sort of including my heart and my belly.

I don’t want to sound too mystical but it’s the sort of semi almost trance like state in which your precisely not thinking and I am one of those writers who doesn’t plan. I don’t plan I don’t structure. I start with a scene and with characters and I let the characters take me there.

There are so many different things in this room that matter to me. I have toys belonging to my beloved granddaughter Rowan, particularly a seal who is very important in our imaginative story telling life together because she’s the only other person allowed to come to this office. So some of the things around are not actually mine, they’re some of them are her toys.

I have photographs of my sons. I have a little silver goat that is an offering from a Greek church. Sometimes they will be artefacts, pictures, whatever drawn from the materials I’m writing about. So if I’m writing about Venice say or I’m writing about Delphi say I will often bring back pictures and paintings and artefacts that remind me of that particular place and so they tend to get stored here. So more and more this room is like a kind of personal museum which contains reminders of places I’ve been to.

I think the one object that I would take with me if a gun was put to my head and I could only take one, is the photograph of my father with my granddaughter. My father died last year and it’s a beautiful photograph of him with her as a baby and my father was very important to me and my granddaughters very important to me and he loved her very much. So I think there’s that sense of the generations.

People sometimes say where do you get your characters from? You know is it from your family is it from people you’ve met? Sometimes they say is it patients you used to see in the days when you were working as a psychotherapist. And the answer is no it’s none of those things, they always come from inside me.

So it’s finding that element of the self, the unlived self that you can evolve and develop when you’re writing and that is why I think finishing a book is so traumatic because you’ve been living with these internal figures over a long period of time and then suddenly they sort of are taken away from you in this thing called the book you’ve written which strangely enough or strangely enough for people who are not writers is not a happy moment.

It’s a rather tragic moment actually cos you don’t really want to let them go.