The Kate Atkinson Method From Interview no. 27 • Before writing a book, you plan an imaginary one in your head – the feel of it, the tone, your characters – usually in the bath. By the time you get out, it’s all gone. You dream of having a chip like a notebook in your brain. It all goes in and then you download it… • You write best in the morning. You get up, down a swift cup of coffee and get stuck in. If you start thinking ‘Oh, I’ll just do that’, you’re done for. There’s always space once you’ve started to stop off and do things. You carry on until you peter out at 4 o’clock. • Writing is very organic. If you plan, it doesn’t go according to plan – so you don’t bother with that. You like to amuse yourself, to keep yourself interested; writing a novel is about finding out what happens. • When you get down to the actual writing, it’s laborious and tedious. You become very dull. You wear the same old clothes and try not to go out of the house. You want it to end, and wish you could sit down at the start and not get up until you’ve finished. • You re-write as you go along, and have never written a ‘draft’. At the beginning of a novel you rewrite over and over and over, trying different ways of setting off; this takes forever, but by the time you get to the end of a book it writes very quickly. • You trained as a typist and think through typing. You write directly on screen, and have evolved into a kind of cyber writer. You rarely print out as you go, so you don’t see hard copy. • As a rule you never give writing to people and say ‘what do you think?’. You don’t care what they may think, and to have the intrusion of someone else’s opinion at an early stage is very very destructive. • Having an outside eye can be useful, so keeping stuff to yourself is also a burden. You can be getting near the end of a really big book and think, ‘I wonder if this is rubbish’. You have no objectivity. You’re enmeshed in this little world of your own you’ve got deeper and deeper into. • In terms of the editing process, you are fine with logical copy editing and questions like ‘why does he do that?’, ‘what’s going on there?’. But anything more ‘creative’ you find hard to take. Editors seem to think they can make it better – but that’s not the point really. • You don’t get writers’ block because you don’t get ideas block. Occasionally you get a kind of mental exhaustion, a tiredness of the imagination. But there’s nothing you can do about this – you just get on with it. • Moaning is very therapeutic, it’s good, it’s creative. And you moan a lot. But you’re in a very privileged position as a writer – so you try to keep it within the confines of your immediate friends and family. Writing is very organic. If you plan, it doesn’t go according to plan – so you don’t bother with that.
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