A good part of what we call writing happens when you're not, in fact, at your desk - when you're walking or chopping vegetables or reading someone else or pulling weeds or, yes, even making desultory dinner-party conversation. A character, an atmosphere, a scene or an idea will take hold of you. If it stays with you long enough, gathers heft, then it will probably find its way into writing.
I write both fiction and non-fiction and the process is rather different for each. I like doing research - which may involve reading, or travelling and interviewing people. For fiction, on the whole, you have to forget your research in order to make the novel live. For non-fiction, you have to remember it.
Losing the Dead, my family memoir, which recounts my parents' war-time experience and the ways in which it haunted my early childhood, began many years before it was written. It started with the sound of my father's voice in his dying delirium. I couldn't shake off the voice, so realised I'd probably have to do something about it. The doing involved travelling to Poland and, a little like a detective, investigating a collective past to see where it merged or not with family myth and memory.
Sanctuary, my new novel, started in two quite different places. I was worrying over the fact that if one lived and worked alone, it was so easy to disappear, just vanish from view, perhaps in order to create a wholly new identity, perhaps out of some driving necessity. This collided with a notion that had long tickled my fancy. What would happen if one brought an invented personality to a psychoanalyst, those beings who are "supposed to know"? Somewhere along the line, the characters who inhabit Sanctuary were born.
As for the everyday business of writing, I get up at around 7 a.m., drink a pot of coffee, say goodbye to the daughter and partner, then stir myself into those endless activities which need to be put in the way of getting to the desk. I'm usually in front of the screen by 9 a.m. Then I'll check the e-mail and write my letters, another little delaying tactic, but a warm-up, too. And finally, the writing will be there on the screen.
I usually start by re-reading the chapter I'm working on, editing, moving things about. As I do that, ideas will usually come for subsequent scenes, so I jot down handwritten notes which can prove incredibly difficult to decipher. And then the new work begins. I normally work through until about 5 p.m., when the house begins to fill up again. If I'm stuck or just need to move, I'll have a stroll round the garden or make yet another pot of coffee while I listen to the radio. If things are going well and I'm not too bleary and coffeed out, I may sneak back to the desk after dinner and start again.
I like long stretches at the desk, and if I'm doing something else - like journalism or broadcasting - then I'll probably forget about the book for that day. I find it difficult to mix the worlds.
It's a strange old business, this writing life, but having lived others, I enjoy it, even though the excitements are all largely invisible - until the reader finds them again, of course.
Sanctuary by Lisa Appignanesi is published by Bantam at £9.99 in UK. Losing the Dead is published by Vintage at £7.99 in UK.