Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.
What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don't know which bits are true.
My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me.
Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.
Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this.
Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?
I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.
I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
Sometimes people ask, 'Does writing make you happy?' But I think that's beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you're off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled.
Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.
I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened.
Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
