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.

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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.

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Frances Spalding's writing room. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Frances Spalding

Saturday

27 June 2009

Apart from its central chimney and platform base, this house is entirely made out of wood. And very sympathetic it is too. It was built for the artist Elisabeth Vellacott in 1959. She had very little money and so the architect, Peter Boston, insisted it had to be all roof. An A-frame building well suits an artist, for it permits a double-height window beneath the apex. But for a writer, it is less good, limiting opportunities for bookshelves as well as walls on which to hang pictures. I have, therefore, yet to achieve a library-room and still live with books and papers squeezed in wherever space allows.

But what I gained with this house was an enormous desk. It is an artist's working bench, with slots on one side where canvases can be stored. In Vellacott's day it was thick with oil paint and the grime of charcoal. Without my asking, the builders, while renovating the house, one day sanded the surface of the desk, to great effect. As a biographer and art historian, I often work with images and text. Recently, while coping with the last stages of my new book - John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art - the entire desk was covered with page proofs, making it possible to check illustrations against lists, sources and textual references.

With light coming in on all sides, the room absorbs the mood outside. Grey days here remind me of Stevie Smith and her "loamish landscapes". Despite having written her life, only now do I understand why an empty park, in the winter rain, had, for her, a "staunch and inviolate melancholy that is refreshing". Then, too, on sunny days, this room fills with light that quivers and slowly slides round the walls, sometimes forming diamond shapes. The novelist Rebecca Stott noticed this when viewing the house, after Vellacott's death. She eventually pulled out as its buyer, but recreated it and the surroundings in her novel Ghostwalk. So now, having been semi-derelict, the house lives on, in wood and words.

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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.

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Justin Cartwright's writing room Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Justin Cartwright

Saturday 11 July 2009

This strange long room was once the entrance to a builder's yard. It was derelict when I bought it four years ago. From here I can go out of the yard into the street and straight into my front door. It's only about three metres, but the separation of home and work is crucial. There are some reminders of South Africa here: the table is a very traditional Cape table of yellow-wood and stink-wood. The Cameroonian figures, the Coca-Cola radio, the biplane - all come from South Africa. There is a statuette, which was a Jewish cultural award for my last book. Just visible is a picture of Nadine Gordimer, which I took in her house in Johannesburg a few years ago. Books are everywhere, and creeping from the Ikea shelves into the garage which leads off this room. The sofas were about to be thrown out by a photographer's agent - very 60s - when I acquired them years ago. They are fantastically comfortable and way too seductive: I often snooze here. Long ago I convinced myself that an afternoon snooze is a good thing, and I was relieved to read a few years ago that doctors now agree. The wooden chair is from my wife's family house in Lancashire.

I think the secret with writing is to do it every day. I have in this room more or less everything I need, from reference books to Post-it notes, so that I have no excuse for pencil sharpening. There is a small kitchen, where each day starts with an elaborate coffee ritual.

The computer on the table is an iBook. I agree with John Updike that writing on a computer produces a particular tone and texture. All my novels are written longhand; I revise them by hand and then type them on the iBook. Somewhere in this computer three full-length novels are sheltering. I use Jstor and Google constantly, so that sitting here, surrounded by my knick-knacks and fetish objects, I am both at peace and fully connected to the world outside. I don't mind being on my own in this little world for hours on end.

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Illustrators' rooms / Anthony Browne

Anthony Browne's studio.
Photograph by Eamonn McCabe

Writers' rooms: Anthoy Browne

Illustrators' rooms: Anthony Browne

Saturday 13 June 2009 00.01 BST

This is my wonderfully light-filled studio, the conservatory at the back of my house in Kent. It's where I do all my illustration work - the words can come to me anywhere. I work fairly normal office hours, starting at 9.30am and usually finishing late afternoon/early evening. Although I have two good Anglepoise lights, I much prefer to work by daylight.

The painted papier mâché Frida Kahlo was made by my daughter, Ellen, and the portrait of me was made by Ellen and my son Joe to celebrate my 50th birthday. They, like me, have been influenced by the colours and images of Mexico. The Willy acrobat on the window-sill was given to me by a young fan in Colombia. The stuffed toy of Willy with a hand-knitted sweater was made by an old, beautiful Indian woman also in Bogotá. The calendar with the image of a rose was painted by my girlfriend, Hanne, a children's illustrator who lives in wonderful Copenhagen, and the cushion with the chimpanzee's face is from an exhibition of my work in Venezuela.

Most of the day I work standing up, as I once read somewhere that it's the best position for the back. The laptop I use mostly to play music as I work - an eclectic mixture of jazz, classical and pop. I'm impressed by the way some illustrators develop their images on computers, but it's too late for me to start and I'm still in love with paper and paint and pencils.

The artwork on the desk is from my next book, Me and You, a reworking of the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I always thought that Goldilocks got a rough deal in the original and I'm trying to redress the balance. How do we know that she was a greedy, selfish little girl? Perhaps there was a reason for her to enter the bears' house? I'm trying to tell the story from two different points of view: the baby bear's story shown in warm, reassuring coloured pencils, and Goldilock's harsher existence painted like a graphic novel, in sepia tones.

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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

Writer´s rooms / Anthony Browne

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