I get up at about 7 a.m. and make tea for myself and my wife. We spend about half an hour drinking it and then somewhere between 7.30 and 8 I start work. Mid-morning my wife will make something to eat and bring it into me. I am at my best in the mornings - I don't know whether it's a question of metabolism or a body clock but I am wakeful and alert, or as alert as I ever get.
I have some ritual observances about the way I write. For a start, I do every- thing longhand, as technology has passed me by completely. I use pencil for the first draft, a good black-ink pen for the fair copy and make corrections in red ink. I've done that for about 30 years and it's a routine now. If I can contrive to leave off at a promising point at the end of a day, I find I can get launched into good work quite quickly the next. Still, there is inevitably a period of warming-up - in any four- or five-hour session, the best work probably comes in the middle two hours. I take it as it comes - 400 to 500 words would be a good day's work for me.
I never feel like I can't work - unless I have a hangover, of course. I make a practice of working every day because there is usually something good that comes once some marks are made. I believe in regular day-by-day work; I don't know if I believe in inspiration. My desk is the only area of order in my life. Everything is in exactly the right place. It is the one limited area where I can impose complete order on the material universe. There is a very good view of the foothills of the Apennine mountains across the broad valley where we live in Italy, but my desk is placed side-on to it. If I want to, I can glance up and look at it but I don't see it immediately, which might be too distracting. I do a lot of re-writes. My whole method of writing is all about waste, as the first words I put down are just some sort of approximation of meaning. I tend to do about four or five drafts. The first is a very hasty one written in pencil, which doesn't seem to matter so much, and then each successive draft is a refinement of meaning. I don't tend to show my work to any- body as I'm writing it. I discuss it and complain about it to my wife, who tells me it's not all that bad and generally reassures me, but she doesn't read it. However, as she is the one who puts it on to the computer, she is involved at that stage of the process. We discuss it and she makes suggestions and I listen. She is a good critic of my work.
If I start at 8 a.m., by 1 p.m. I will have done as much writing as I can, al- though I will be preoccupied with it all day. There is a lot of land around where we live, much of it covered with rough grass, so I spend the afternoon doing physical work of a fairly mindless kind. It helps me to think about the book - stray thoughts just enter my mind, it's not very methodical. When a book is done it's still alive in my mind in the immediate aftermath. One wonders how it will be received and reviewed and how it will sell and so on. I have written about 13 or 14 novels and they're all there in my mind somewhere like a shadowy gallery of figures half- seen. While I'm writing a book I'm the living expert on it, but three or four months later I can't remember a single thing about it.
Here in Italy I usually end the day with a glass of wine at about 7 p.m. and that is the boundary on my working day. Of course I'm quite capable of boring people about my work at length during the evening, but at that stage I am unwinding. The gap in between writing books gets longer as I get older. When I was younger I would start writing again almost immediately as a way of warding off the looming disappointment. Now I take three to four months after finishing a book, and I am quite content.
In conversation with Louise East
Losing Nelson, by Barry Unsworth, is published by Hamish Hamilton on August 5th, priced £15.99 in UK