You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.
It is possible to live well with dementia and write best-sellers 'like wot I do.
I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
When people say "How do you write a book, how does it all happen?" I say, you line things up, and you line them up as actually as you possibly can, but sooner or later the book has got momentum and it's moving along under that momentum. It's like a sculpture, if you're working with the grain of the wood, the wood will start defining what shape it's going to become.
There are times when the best writing you can do is to go for a walk or drive, a long drive is ideal.
I used to like reading and you read enough books and you overflow and then you start writing.
What I've always said was, hang in there, let me write what I want to write, and you'll probably like it.
By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.
I know loads of coppers and dealt with them a lot when I was a journalist - coppers are easy to write for; they tend to run on rails.
Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.
