My writing day: Jacqueline Wilson

I once wrote in a Lett’s School-Girl’s Diary “It would be so wonderful to be a proper writer when I’m grown up. Imagine what bliss it would be to stay at home all day and just write!” Well, I’m a writer now, proper or improper, but sadly I don’t often get to stay at home all day and write. I meet journalists, I go to endless meetings, I do charity work, I talk at festivals, I take part in conferences, I lecture at universities, I visit ill children, I open libraries, I talk on panels, I give interviews on radio and television, and I judge all kinds of competitions. It’s all very interesting and enjoyable, if a bit nerve-racking at times, but it’s ultra time-consuming. It’s difficult managing to produce two full-length books each year. I cope by writing early every morning – even Christmas morning.

I don’t get up that early. I feel exhausted simply thinking about a writer like Anthony Trollope, starting to write at 5.30 am every day, completing 3,000 words in three hours before marching off to do a full day’s work at the Post Office. I don’t even set my alarm, but my cat and my dog are very good at waking me up. I sort them out, make a cup of coffee, go back to bed, prop myself on my pillows and start typing on my laptop.

I don’t reread yesterday’s work, I just get stuck into the story straight away. The first couple of sentences are a struggle. I’m still tense when I’ve done a paragraph. But then somehow my imagination takes over and I’m in a different world. I become my main character, scarcely aware that my own fingers are tapping away as I experience everything through her eyes.

If I’ve got a lot on during the day I let myself off after a mere 500 words, roughly half an hour’s work. If I’ve got time or there’s a deadline looming I write for an hour and am happy with a thousand words. It’s a very modest amount. When I was in my 20s I’d then go on to write at least another couple of thousand words of a magazine story, simply to pay the bills. (They paid by the word in those long-ago days, so my stories were always very long.) However, come to think of it, I probably write that much answering emails and letters in the evenings nowadays, before the magic time when I relax with a good box set and a glass of wine.

I might not write much during the day, but I’m always thinking about my current book while walking the dog, sitting on trains, trailing round shops, and waiting to perform. I always go to sleep thinking about my characters – and they’re there in my head when I wake up, ready to write again.