The Joanna Trollope Method From Interview no. 28 • The narrative grows out of a situation – often an emotional relationship complication. You like to defend an unpopular social category. • Anxious to make the novels as accurate a reflection of contemporary life as you can, you always do a ton of research. You set off, often for months, to talk to people who are in the situation you have set your heart on exploring – rectors’ wives, widows, mistresses, adults adopted as children… • From the initial idea you create a cast list and establish a location. You then plot five or six chapters quite minutely, and decide on an end. The author William Boyd says no-one should embark upon a novel unless they know how it’s going to end – most wise advice, you agree. • You start to write, in longhand, using a Papermate pen, medium point, blue ink. The computer is a useful tool, but you regard it as an inhuman, inflexible, intractable thing and simply can’t use it for creative work. • You begin on the right hand side of a narrow-ruled A4 pad with a margin, leaving the left hand side blank for corrections and redrafting. • Getting going each day is the hardest part, and you recall the words of V S Pritchett who said it was like trying to start a very cold, old car on a hill on a winter morning. • You read four days’ worth of work to think yourself back down into the writing each day, tinkering as you go along. You retrace your steps to remind yourself of the voices you have given everybody. • When it’s going well, you can write like the wind – 1,000 words an hour. A novel takes, usually, between nine and 12 months. • Because you leave three-quarters of a novel, not unplotted, but unfocused, the book is free to develop organically the way relationships in life can do. • The power of the unconscious mind is, you find, more and more crucial in the process. You know more than you think you know, you’ve remembered more than you think you do, you have noticed more than you think you’ve observed. The physical process of writing seems to unlock all this perception. • The most exciting part is the penultimate chapter – the end is in sight, but the activity of the race isn’t yet over... • A great friend who has typed every book but one then transforms your large childish handwriting. The manuscript comes looking completely impersonal; it has stopped being, as it were, your baby. You can then be quite fierce about lapses, the gaps, the inconsistencies. You now tend to take things out than put in – less is more. • By the time the manuscript is delivered to your editor she’s probably seeing a fourth draft. The computer is a useful tool, but you regard it as an inhuman, inflexible, intractable thing and simply can’t use it for creative work
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