Philippa Gregory

I’m Philippa Gregory. I live in North Yorkshire in a small hill farm on the edge of the moors. It’s an incredibly beautiful place. It’s also quite a hard place to live because the weather is always quite extreme. It’s always windy. It’s very often raining. But it is incredibly beautiful.

On an average writing day I get up reasonably early, about seven. We always walk the dog first and I have a flock of ducks that I’m ridiculously fond of. When its springtime there is always a box of orphan ducks in the study assisting me with my concentration. They're the most diverting thing. They cheep in the most darling way and I pick them up and pet them when I should be writing.

So we walk the dog. Feed the ducks. Sometimes I ride my horse. And then I come in and get down to work. It’s a very little room. It faces south over the North York Moors and one of the glories of it is when I’m daydreaming I can look out the window to this beautiful view which is always changing. The weather comes and goes very, very fast and the seasons make such a difference to the colours of the landscape.

Inside the room I’ve got a big map of England because I’m now working on the Wars of the Roses and it’s essential that I understand where things are happening.

Around me is a substantial library of books on the Plantagenets and on the Tudors and on Mary Stewart who I've worked on and I’m increasingly gathering stuff on social history and background history to the period.

At the moment I’m getting quite a nice collection of alchemy books but I do not yet have a forge or a still or any method of making gold in this very little room.

On the walls I’ve got some family pictures. I’ve got some pictures of my family skiing. On my trophy shelf I’ve got my Celebrity Mastermind trophy which I’m extremely proud of and an award for travel writing and my award commemorating my alumnae of the year at Edinburgh University where I was a PhD student.

I work on a laptop and I can work in here or I can work anywhere in the house. My husband absolutely revels in telling people that I write during the football season while he watches football games and it doesn’t trouble me at all unless there's a particularly exciting goal where I’m writing and I’m sort of absorbed in the court of whoever and all of a sudden I hear "Yes!" because someone has scored and then I do kind of jump back.

When I get stuck, this lovely little study becomes the place I’m stuck in so all of a sudden it stops being a resource and a refuge and starts becoming an absolute prison in which I am stuck with whatever it is.

I always take my dog, who is extremely helpful in these matters, and I walk. I do the dialogue in my head so my neighbours are accustomed to seeing me going alone talking animatedly pretending to be a queen of England. I carry on walking until I discovered what was wrong and then I turn round and come home and rewrite.

My view of how to write a historical novel, which is not everybody’s view, but the way I like to do it is to really have a sense of being very, very familiar and being very comfortable with the historical material. Lots of odd little sideline research into things that I maybe didn’t think I needed to know when I started but find I get interested in. Much of that won't even appear in the story or if it does it appears in the story as the lightest background because I genuinely believe that historical fiction should be exactly what it says.

It should be historically based and it should be fiction. It’s got to work as a novel. It shouldn't feel that you’ve bought a novel and someone has given you a history lesson.  It’s got to be absolutely seamless. It’s got to be easy. It’s got to be enjoyable.