Maggie O'Farrell shares insights into her own writing process at GH Live

Maggie O'Farrell has shared insights into her writing process and the one rule she never breaks during a talk at Good Housekeeping Live, in partnership with Dyson on Friday November 10.

Chatting to Good Housekeeping's Books Editor, Jo Finney, the award-winning author revealed that a lot of her process is instinctive but there is one rule she always sticks to when writing.

"I'm not a very organised person, generally, in life or in writing. But I do have a strict rule that I never break and it can be very annoying for my colleagues, but I never check my emails in the morning.

"I think it's really important, when you have got busy lives or family, to be really fierce with your writing time, to protect it so there is no distraction. My studio in the garden has no internet at all."

O'Farrell doesn't usually plan a lot of her books ahead, adding: "I have a vague idea of where the story is going to go, but I do believe in the kind of sense of the unconscious or the instinctive. You're relying on your instincts for quite a lot, especially things like grammar or tense, I will often leave the story find itself."

Anne Hathaway was the inspiration for O’Farrell’s most recent book, Hamnet, and another woman from history we know very little about, 16-year only Lucrezia de Medici, is the subject of her latest novel The Marriage Portrait, immortalised in the poem My Last Duchess by Robert Browning.

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O'Farrell, who is is married to a fellow writer, William Sutcliffe with whom she shares three children, revealed that writing the book during lockdown came with a few logistical challenges.

"The difficult thing was finding not only the headspace but the literal space. My husband and I would do the homeschooling in turns, but there was one day where he was looking after the kids and I was trying to write this but someone would burst in the room every five minutes.

"I thought 'I'm never never gonna be able to get the sustained concentration', so I went in the garden and hid in my daughter’s Wendy house, which is tiny, and I had my laptop on my knee but no one disturbed me for two hours, except the cats."