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My Writing Life: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of a novel, a collection of short stories and several biographies including, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio (2013), which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Costa Biography Award and the Political Book Awards Biography of the Year, and The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham.

1. What book should every writer read?

There’s no one book. Writers should read all the time, picking up any book that appeals to them. You need to have a mind full of words and sentence structures and narrative devices. That’s your larder. It’s only when you start to cook that you find out which ingredient you might use.

2. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your writing career?

That I would eventually get the recognition I have now. It would have been good to know that. There were times when I felt I was just putting messages in bottles and sending them out to sea to sink unread.

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

The man whose name I’ve forgotten who snapped at me, when I was about twenty, that I should stop going on about wanting to be a writer, and to just sit down and write.

4. What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your writing?

I learned a lot about non-fiction writing from reading the Greek philosopher and essayist, Plutarch. He never pretends to be omniscient.

I’ve also learnt from music. About how you need to vary your key and your tempo to keep a piece of writing alive.

5. What was the proudest moment of your writing career?

The best moments come when I am alone at my desk and able to think, “Yes, this is working.”

6. What is your typical writing day like?

I write whenever I’m not busy doing something else. I’m cleverest in the morning. The hours between 4am and 7am are often fruitful.

7. What are you reading right now?

Lots of Dickens. I’m about to write something about his female characters. I just finished Our Mutual Friend, and it still seems as shocking and hallucinatory as I remembered it.

8. Bookmarker or page-folder?

I don’t do either of those things, but I often slice long paperbacks along the spine with the bread-knife, so that I can put a clump of pages in my pocket.

This article originally appeared on our Substack channel.

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