I've hung out in the writer's room a few times, but the fact is we've got such a good writing staff, I don't want to get my peanut butter fingerprints on anything.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.
I'm the sort of person who doesn't write in ink. I only write in pencil, so it can be rubbed out.
Ever since I was a girl, I have written about one to five pages every day - on napkins, on scrap paper, in notebooks and tablets, on the walls in my room as a teenager, and in orange paint on the cheap white plastic blinds in my room.
I don't remember ever having writer's block. If I sit in there for four hours, I'll usually have something.
The first thing you have to understand is that I was not desperate to be a writer. I was never a closet writer filing away notes in a cupboard.
My attitude to writing is like when you do wallpapering, you remember where all the little bits are that don't meet. And then your friends say: It's terrific!
Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.
I've always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil - especially for corrections.
I always write my first draft in longhand, in lined notebooks. I move around the house, sitting where I like, and watch the words spool out in front of me, actually taking a lot of pleasure in the way they look in my strange handwriting on the page.
We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.