Alexander Master's writing space. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Alexander Masters

Saturday 6 June 2009

There's no pattern about the way I write, except it's always the first thing I do. I wake up anywhere between 4am and 10am, depending on the merriments of the night before or if a dream jolts me, then scribble, type or slash through yesterday's work till I start to feel a little sick from not eating. Breakfast is unhealthy; it makes me sleepy and stupid, so I put the nasty business off as long as possible. It was kedgeree today. (Zoom into plate and spoon, you'll see the yellow blobs. A spoon is the only safe way to cope with rice in bed.) When my girlfriend's here (that's her book, under the plastic flowers), I leave her sleeping and go to Haminados café up the road. That man never sleeps. Then once she's up I come home, close the curtains, leap back among the covers and, with any luck, don't use my legs again until about four.

The crocodile is my talisman. He was the first thing I drew for publication, was on the cover of the hardback of Stuart: A Life Backwards, and makes an appearance in my next book too. I bought him desiccated, rolled into a ball, and had to soak him in the bath for a week before he'd uncurl. Thrills - the book above the oil painting - is there because it's gorgeous.

The biography I'm working on at the moment is about a genius mathematician I know who tussles with something so large and mysterious that it's called "the Monster". So I have to learn mathematics and (to unravel what the contented character is babbling about) doodle cartoons, caricatures and comic strips, which merge in and out of the text. He thinks the Monster explains the symmetries of the universe. He says it is the voice of God.

My last place was a Suffolk shooting lodge by woodland. On the days I woke early there, I'd sit 15 feet up, in a deer-shooting perch strapped to a tree. That was the best study of all time: 5am, wrapped in blankets, with my gasman's clipboard, a thermos of coffee, and deer trotting below me through the mist.

THE GUARDIAN

Simon Callow's dressing room at the Haymarket Theatre where he writes between peformances of Waiting For Godot.
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

 

Writers' rooms: Simon Callow

Saturday 20 June 2009

As that odd portmanteau commodity, an actor-writer-director, I rarely have long in any one place for writing. I'm often on the road, or in a film studio, and I snatch my time wherever and whenever I can. I wrote a great deal of my first book about Orson Welles in my trailer in the middle of various fields while appearing in Four Weddings and a Funeral, heavily bearded and padded, in a kilt, with a small cigar clamped between my teeth. Most of the second book was written with a fancy hairdo and natty moustache in my functional dressing room at Shepperton while filming The Phantom of the Opera. And now I find myself at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, unquestionably the most beautiful theatre in the West End, with indubitably the best dressing rooms. I can write anywhere, as long as there's light and power for my plug, but Dressing Room 7 at the Haymarket is heaven for me. It's large enough for me to be able to carve a space for myself where I can write, I can look out of the window on to the Philippine embassy in Suffolk Street and I can import the things I need to sustain me: CD player, flowers in great quantities, tea-making facilities and, a recent recruit, the superb Russian Ganesha with a bell on his trunk, carved from wood by Eduard Bersudsky and until recently the star of Sharmanka, the extraordinary show created by Bersudsky and his wife Tatyana Jakovskaya. So here I sit, dressed as Pozzo in Waiting for Godot - moustached, riding-jacketed - pounding the keys, trying to explain what happened to Orson Welles. I can write only after the first act, when I have a 45-minute gap, but then I write happily and with great concentration. As it happens, I turned 60 this week, and so did the play - Pozzo and I are of an age. In the room with me is a large photograph of my family's Christmas in 1934, which contains the only surviving portrait of my great grandfather, who was first a clown, then a ringmaster, then an impresario, all of which Pozzo also seems to be, so the picture is there for direct inspiration.

THE GUARDIAN

 

Michael Murpurgo's writing room for Saturday Review. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Michael Morpurgo

Saturday 4 July 2009

I used to write longhand at a table in any room, anywhere so long as it was quiet. But I found that the more intensely I wrote, as the grip tightened on the pen, the smaller the writing became and the more my wrist and arm and shoulder began to ache.

One evening I asked my neighbour and friend Ted Hughes how he wrote. He said he'd had some trouble and now wrote standing up at a lectern. What's good enough for Ted Hughes, I thought ... so I tried it, but my feet hurt.

I was reading a biography of my great hero-writer Robert Louis Stevenson and discovered a photograph of him towards the end of his life, lying on his bed in Samoa, propped up on a pile of pillows, a writing book resting on his drawn-up knees. So that's how you write Treasure Island, I thought. I went up to my bedroom, piled up all the pillows I could find and began to write. Everything was supported and relaxed. It was wonderful for dreaming up a tale, weaving it inside my head, wonderful for scribbling in an exercise book. (I still don't use a word processor. I did try. I lost five chapters seven or eight years ago, probably the best chapters I ever wrote. They're still floating around up there in the ether.)

For many years, I wrote on our bed in the house. But there were complaints about ink on the sheets, dirty feet on the bed, and we felt we should try to create somewhere else, a storyteller's house. Clare, my wife designed it - it's based on the Anglo-Saxon chapel of St Peter-Ad-Murum at Bradwell-juxta-Mare in Essex, where I grew up, but it has a Devon thatched roof, a Japanese garden and an uninterrupted view of the countryside, looking towards Dartmoor.

So there I have made my writing bed. With flowers in the window - these a gift for our 46th wedding anniversary last weekend - and with Clare sitting at the computer, trying to make sense of my scribbly script as she types it up, it has become a perfect writer's hideaway.

THE GUARDIAN

Photo byu Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Michael Frayn

Michael Frayn
Friday 5 January 2007 14.08 GMT

I envy people who have the ability to surround themselves with interesting things - beautiful little whichwhats that a burglar might want to steal, or amusingly whimsical doodahs, or thingummies full of secret personal significance. But it's not something that I can do, and it's no use pretending.

So it's all rather impersonal, I suppose. Wrap-around office desk. A horrible chair that tilts you forward, which is supposed to be good for you if you have a bad back. Word-processor (with an upright screen, the same shape as the page that the text will end up on) and various other necessary gadgets (though fewer than I used to have in the days when one interviewer described them as enough to furnish the control-tower of a small airport).

The box of paper-clips in front of the letter-rack was painted with a pattern of clouds as a birthday present by one of my grandchildren (a reference to a play of mine). The only personal touch apart from this is provided by the family photographs on the wall. The one in pride of place in the centre is of my mother. She died when I was a boy, and I didn't have many pictures of her. So when my aunt told me that as a young woman my mother had occasionally modelled for the London stores where she was employed as a saleswoman, I went to the Newspaper Library at Colindale and searched through the old society magazines of the period, until suddenly, in an advertisement for Harrods in the Bystander for March 18 1925, I came face to face with her, looking very beautiful, in a cloche hat and the kind of outfit she could never have afforded herself. That's her again to the right, with my father, both of them looking wonderfully happy, enlarged from a couple of snaps I've come across since, also dating from the twenties.

Somerset Maugham said that writers should sit with their back to the window. I sit sideways on most of the time. Moderation in this, as in all things.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms /  Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard 
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn

Photo by Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Esther Freud

Esther Freud
Friday 11 May 2007 10.29 BST

When I moved into this room, not very long ago, I imagined I'd put a long desk against the wall, as the previous owner had. But as I don't have a long desk and there was nowhere to put this round table, I decided to try writing at it. For the last few years I've worked in a rented room. There was nothing in it except a table and a bed - I vowed I'd never lie on the bed and once fell asleep on the floor - but I worked really well there, facing a blank wall, so I felt superstitious about being in a room full of objects and with such a beautiful view of the garden. But I like it.

The etching on the wall is by my father, Lucian Freud. It has a wise, serene feeling about it. Below it is a photo of my husband David and our children on the set of a film he was making in the Louisiana swamp, and beside that a photo he took of the Suffolk marshes. The green cupboard and the shelf behind my desk I bought in Golborne Road, the scruffy end of Portobello Road market. I used to live near there, and on the shelf are old notebooks from before I really started to write. There are also some translated copies of my books. I like seeing the Chinese and Hebrew writing.

The red chair is from Golborne Road too. I bought it for my daughter's bedroom, but it's ended up in here. On my desk is a calendar I use as a diary and lots of sheets of paper I scribble on when I'm writing - notes about the book I'm working on, or a reminder to call the dentist. There's an in-tray which I bought recently. Once something goes in, it never seems to come out, so mostly I spread things around the table if they really need to get done. I'm amused to see my running shoes, which make it look as if I spring from my desk and start jogging, which is only very occasionally true.

I don't need any of these things, just my green chair and my laptop. which is raised up on an old copy of Spotlight.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms /  Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard 
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn

Photograph by Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Jane Austen

Clare Tomalin

Saturday 12 July 2008 15.43 BST

Not long before her death, Jane Austen described her writing as being done with a fine brush on a "little bit (not two inches wide) of ivory". Her novels are not miniatures, but she did work on a surface not so much bigger than those two imagined inches of ivory. This fragile 12-sided piece of walnut on a single tripod must be the smallest table ever used by a writer, and it is where she established herself as a writer after a long period of silence. Her early novels had been written upstairs in her father's Hampshire rectory, and remained unpublished when the family moved to Bath in 1800, where writing became almost impossible for her. Only in 1809, when she returned to Hampshire and settled in the cottage on the Chawton estate of her brother Edward, could she devote herself to her work again.

Chawton Cottage was a household of ladies - Mrs Austen, her daughters and their friend Martha Lloyd - all taking part in the work of the house and garden. But Jane was allowed private time. Having no room of her own, she established herself near the little-used front door, and here "she wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper". A creaking swing door gave her warning when anyone was coming, and she refused to have the creak remedied.

From this table the revised manuscripts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice went to London to be published in 1811 and 1813. From this table too came Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. Here she noted down the encouraging comments of neighbours - Mrs Bramston of Oakley Hall, who thought S&S and P&P "downright nonsense", and "dear Mrs Digweed" who volunteered that "if she had not known the author, she could hardly have got through Emma".

Austen died in 1817, and after Cassandra's death in 1845 the table was given to a manservant. Today, back in its old home, it speaks to every visitor of the modesty of genius.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms /  Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard 
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn

Photo by Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt / El cuarto del escritor

Friday 26 October 2007 16.59 BST

A room to write in isn't like other rooms, because most of the time the person in it doesn't see it. My attention is on the page in front of me, on what the people in the book are doing or saying, and my awareness of the things near me is muted, part of the vague sensual information that comes and goes as I mull over the next sentence. I do feel the light in my room, however. My study is on the top floor of our house, which has four storeys, and the windows face south, so the sunshine streams through the panes, and even on a bleak winter day my workplace is luminous.

I usually sit down at my desk around eight o'clock in the morning and write until my brain begins to dim - around two o'clock. My morning mind is far better than the blearier one that arrives in the afternoon so I take advantage of the early hours. I have lots of reference books near me, various kinds of dictionaries - bilingual, medical and psychiatric, 34 volumes of the Grove Dictionary of Art, style manuals and handbooks, the Bible, Gray's Anatomy, some poetry anthologies, and when I'm deep in a project there are often piles of books on the floor to which I refer when needed.

Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster

I have an eclectic mix of photographs and objects tacked up on the bulletin board behind my desk and placed on the shelves above it. Aside from images of my husband, daughter, sisters and parents, my favorite things are: a picture of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's most photogenic hysteric, Augustine, from the Salpetrière hospital archives in Paris given to me by my sister, Asti; seven keys I found in my father's study after he died, which he had labelled "Unknown Keys"; his last passport, that expired six months after his death; a wind-up toy monkey I've had since my childhood; and a rubber brain that sits on a little stand and which can be taken apart. Even though I don't spend much time looking at these odd treasures, I like knowing they are there.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms /  Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard 
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn

Writers' rooms / David Hare

Photo by Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: David Hare

David Hare

Friday 19 January 2007 17.41 GMT

I work in what was once Mark Gertler's studio. It was originally built to house the furnace for a Victorian sculptor next door. Gertler lived and worked here from 1915 to 1932. He painted The Merry Go Round in here - it's now in the Tate - and tried to seduce Carrington in the bed immediately above my head. Occasionally the odd art student comes round and knocks on the door.

The big pine desk was a wedding present from my future mother-in-law, Jean Matheson, in 1970. My first play had just been produced. The desk cost £50, and I've worked on it ever since. The gifted designer who built it was killed hang-gliding a year or two later.

The problem for writers in the performing arts is that your work- place too easily becomes an office rather than a study. You end up administering plays, not writing them. So when I need to concentrate hardest, I go away. I associate particular plays with the places where significant parts of them were written - Plenty and Licking Hitler in a peeling shack in Brighton, The Secret Rapture in a cottage near Montgomery, Racing Demon in a huge cheerless hotel during a very wet winter in Llandudno. The Permanent Way, about British rail privatisation, was written beachside in Santa Monica. Afterwards, I like to eat alone in restaurants - that way you think about the play all day.

I write things out in longhand, then later put everything on the computer. The most precious object on my desk is a small self-portrait by my wife Nicole Farhi which she sculpted just after we met. It's one of her best pieces. Opposite my desk is a wonderful photograph by Ivan Kyncl of a production I directed at the Almeida of Shaw's Heartbreak House. Emma Fielding is sitting alone, waiting for Richard Griffiths and Penelope Wilton to come on and act with her. For me, it expresses theatrical potential. Looking at the photo you know something good is about to happen. And it did - every night.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms /  Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard 
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn

Photo by Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters
Friday 26 January 2007 17.45 GMT

I spend more or less all day at my desk, so I'm always resolving to lavish loads of money to make it the absolutely perfect work-station. But the truth is, I think all I need in a study is a flat surface, a computer, and a closable door; a large wardrobe would probably do. So my desk is a bit of a mish-mash. The glass-topped table looked sexy in the shop, but is only really interesting when you're underneath, gazing up at the wonderful Rachel Whiteread-style silhouettes of everything that's on it. The phone's a bit nasty, but has a panel showing who's calling, so I can choose when to pick up. The chair is a proper ergonomic one: I don't really like it - it's so big, it feels like an extra person in the room - but it's keeping at bay some awful back problems I developed last year. The hideous spongy wrist supports also help with that. When aspiring writers ask me for advice, I always want to say: "Make sure your desk and chair are set up properly! Don't get RSI!"

The map of the world is to improve my sense of geography; it came in handy at World Cup time, too. The map of London I could pore over for hours, and it was especially useful when I was writing The Night Watch, when I needed to plot my characters' movements through the city during the war. At the moment I'm working on a book set in 1940's Warwickshire, and I've got some old Ordnance Survey maps of the Midlands which I frequently spread out on the floor. Really I'd like a room full of maps, preferably with little pins and movable flags - something like the Cabinet War Rooms.

I'm rather a fretful writer - there's a bottle of Rescue Remedy under the pile of papers on the right - and the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster is something I focus on in moments of crisis. They're such wise words, and so soothing. I'm thinking of having them done as a tattoo.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms /  Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard 
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn

Photo by  Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: JG Ballard

Friday 9 March 2007 10.03 GMT

My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of The Violation by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women. Sometimes I think I have gone to live inside it and each morning I emerge refreshed. It's a male dream.

There are photos of my four grandchildren (one, along with a picture of my girlfriend Claire, is just out of shot). The postcard is Dali's Persistence of Memory, the greatest painting of the 20th century, and next to it is a painting by my daughter, which is the greatest painting of the 21st century. On the desk is my old manual typewriter, which I recently found in my stair cupboard. I was inspired by a letter from Will Self, who wrote to me on his manual typewriter. So far I have just stared at the old machine, without daring to touch it, but who knows? The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.

I have worked at this desk for the past 47 years. All my novels have been written on it, and old papers of every kind have accumulated like a great reef. The chair is an old dining-room chair that my mother brought back from China and probably one I sat on as a child, so it has known me for a very long time. A Paolozzi screen-print is resting against the door, which now serves as a cat barrier during the summer months. My neighbour's cats are enormously affectionate, and in the summer leap up on to my desk and then churn up all my papers into a huge whirlwind. They are my fiercest critics.

I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms /  Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard 
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn

Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser

Photo by Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Antonia Fraser

Friday 16 March 2007 10.07 GMT

I work on the fourth floor of our house, looking west over London and, winter and summer, I work with the window wide open. It's a beautiful urban view often enhanced by sunsets which cannot be seen anywhere else in the house, so I believe them to be created especially for me (the picture's angle only shows the neighbouring houses, which I try to ignore when sitting at my desk). I've lived in this house since 1959 and this was my six children's nursery. The instant my youngest son moved out, I had the builders in, installing numerous bookcases. I then redecorated the room as I imagined an old-fashioned country house bedroom, blue bows, chintz and roses. I like the contrast with the black chair and metal filing cabinets. The same goes for the white amaryllis (Mont Blanc), which I grew myself. It's all rather untidy, but that gives me a sense of security. I want my mind to be the only orderly thing in the room.

My typewriter is electric and so ancient that other typewriters have to be cannibalised when it needs mending. (The computer leads a separate existence downstairs.) I also use scissors and Sellotape to make corrections and insertions: it's a tactile thing. On the desk there is a red glass paperweight given to me for my 10th birthday by my great-uncle, the Irish poet Lord Dunsany, and a set of miniature dictionaries given to me by Tom Stoppard 60 years later. Other necessary adjuncts of the scholar include perfume (Miss Dior), nail polish (frosty pink, called Melon of Troy) and a scented candle (Manuel Canovas: Bois de Lune). Then there are the patterned notebooks in which I note my researches by hand. I must have filled over 200. You can see three of them on the desk, to do with my current project, Queen Elizabeth I, and, on the shelf on the left, many more to do with Marie Antoinette. Originally they came from Florence, but now I order them from blessed Compton Marbling of Wiltshire. The variegated bindings are so pretty they cheer me up when work is dire.

THE GUARDIAN

Writers' rooms / Roald Dahl

Writers' rooms /  Geoff Dyer
Writers' rooms / Antonia Fraser
Writers' rooms / JG Ballard 
Writers´rooms / Sarah Waters
Writers' rooms / Siri Husteved
Writers' roms / Jane Austen
Writers' rooms / Esther Freud
Writers' rooms / Michael Frayn