Cathy Kelly

I’m Cathy Kelly and we’re in my study in my home in Wicklow. And it’s not very far from the centre of Dublin.

In the morning I come in here and I do emails, which really are fatal actually, because you you know you get in, you say I’ll do half an hour of emails and you do an hour and then you’re angry with yourself for for wasting writing time. And then I just sit down and I start writing.

I read what I’ve written you know the previous few days and I mean, I think one of the hardest things about writing is your own criticism and I’m very very hard on myself. So you know I get stuck in thinking this is horrendous and no-one’s ever gonna want to read it and I don’t want to read it. You can get really locked in in that cycle.

So it’s quite hard getting beyond that and making yourself write anyway. So I go over what I’ve done and I tweak that endlessly, I edit myself endlessly and then I would attempt to write 1000 words a day. And sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. I mean all of those people who say they write 5000 words a day, I’d love to be able to do that but I just, I just can’t.

For me the hardest part of a novel, and I’m writing a novel probably every year, is the beginning, the first 30 or 40,000 words takes me forever and it’s very hard going because I’m building up the characters and I just can’t progress until I feel I’ve got them right in my head. When it takes off it is pure relief because I think, 'thank god, it’s working'.

This room it’s full of books and normally full of bits of paper, although I have marginally tidied it up or we’d never be able to get into it. I’m a great one for ripping out clippings, so I have all these clippings I think 'oh that’d be an interesting story' and I rip a clipping out of a newspaper or a magazine. So I’ve always got piles of clippings.

I’ve got huge numbers of note books for the the book I’m working on, because I love note books, I love coloured note books with pretty paper in and cute covers. I always have millions of them and then I forget which one I’ve written things in. So there’s loads of note books.

There’s also there’s my desk which has pictures of my children and normally things they’ve drawn me stuck on it. Beside my desk I’ve got foreign editions, which which is lovely actually because I’ve written, I’m writing my 12th novel, and I’m published in lots of different languages. It’s just so exciting seeing it to be honest with you and looking at the covers and going 'that’s so pretty'.

There’s something very safe actually about being in your own house surrounded by your own stuff and your own kitchen that you can pad into in your tracksuit bottoms. I have to say it is very important to be here, it’s the family, the home, you know there is something special about your home and your things around you.