I start with a character, somebody who strikes me very forcibly, and I think to myself, ‘This is it, this is the one’. Then I allow life to grow up around that person. I don’t question them. I see how it is with them in life, as you would if you were studying a tree and its background and its ecology. That’s kind of a job. And then the drama that arises, arises from them and their relations with their friends, their backgrounds. By the time I’m finished, it isn’t just one person, naturally, it’s a whole sector, group of people. But in one sense there’s a hero but sometimes it’s what they call, I think very foolishly, an anti-hero. But I don’t like that expression.
When I’m fairly advanced with conceiving the character and I’m beginning to see the lines of force and so forth round the character, I do in fact make many, perhaps five, and perhaps even 20 plans, schemes of all kinds of things, of relations, of deeds and so forth. This is just to organise my mind; I never use them. As I say, I’m struck by somebody in real life, and this is where I get my characters, in real life. And also it’s not possible to get them anywhere else.
The important thing to me in writing is writing. I love writing, and I used to find myself as a child and a young girl, trying out words, ‘That’s not really blue, the sky, it’s something else’ and ‘How would I say that about the leaf?’ and so on. These were just trial runs, of course. I wasn’t intending to write when I did this.
This sounds rather a strange thing to say – but I think what inspires me in writing is perfection. I like to get the perfection of an idea or an expression. Naturally one falls short, but that’s the idea.
I begin with a person who impresses me very much and in quite an animal way, because it begins at once like a love at first sight, it’s exactly like that. And when you love a person at first sight you know nothing about them, you don’t know their intellectual standing. You may vaguely see their personal characteristics, but you really don’t know.
