Alexander McCall Smith

“Sometimes I get up at four in the morning and work for a couple of hours and then go back to bed and then get up a bit later, but I always start the day by going into my office at about nine o’clock. This is where I work on my four books a year. They’ve been translated into 42 languages and published all over the world, so I need some help, which is where my assistants, Jan and Lesley come in. They organise my travelling – I usually go to the US for two or three weeks a year, for example, and we also get a lot of letters. We respond to them all. And then there’s Augustus Basil, my cat. He takes a close interest in my affairs…

I actually write in my study. My office is the room where I keep all my books, and also where I keep the various things that I’ve picked up from all over the world: an African sculpture of two mythological creatures; this here is a bust of Hamish MacCunn, the Scottish writer and composer of Land of the Mountain and the Flood; and then there’s a pencil drawing of a lion in a kilt, which is a great favourite of mine – it’s by Ian Macintosh, who’s a friend of mine and the illustrator of my ’44 Scotland Street’ books. Next to that is an embroidery of a crocodile which comes from the cover of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which was sent in by a reader who kindly did it for me.

When I actually wan to write, then I go next door to my study. When I’m writing a book, I write about 3,000 to 4,000 words a day; I don’t really have to think about what’s going to happen in the books: it just seems to come from my subconscious mind. I write for two to three hours and then I come out of the ‘trance’, as it were. I’ve got a number of notebooks that I take with me all over the place and I write down ideas, snatches of dialogue, descriptions and so on. Sometimes I write two books at the same time. Over there on those shelves are the novels, in all their different languages. That’s the end of it all…”