'The desk is a chaos of notebooks and a mug that says, “What would Karen Pirie do?”': how Val McDermid writes

I have an office in my home which looks out on my steeply terraced garden, so all I see when I turn my head is a green space. The bookshelves that line the walls contain part of my archive, as well as reference books and the To Be Read wall. The desk is a chaos of notebooks, books, scribbled notes and a coffee mug that says, “What would Karen Pirie do?” I have a slight obsession with Blackwing pencils, so I also have a couple of pencil jars with an assortment of them. There’s a print of a Stephen Conroy painting, The Healing of a Lunatic Boy, which I’ve had on my office walls since 1987.

McDermid's 'chaotic' desk

Describe your working day

I write my books between January and March/April. I’m usually at my desk around 10, with my second cup of coffee. I write in roughly 20-minute bursts, interspersing those frenzies with email, Twitter, a walk round the block, a bit of gaming or cooking. I finish for the day around 7pm, though when the deadline looms, I occasionally go back for a couple of hours after dinner.

Any rituals?

I always have music on when I’m working. Anything without comprehensible lyrics. It blocks out anything disruptive.

Do the techniques you learned as a newspaper journalist serve you as a novelist?

I took two things from journalism. One is not to be precious about waiting for the muse to strike – writing is a job. I may not have written great prose today, but I can go back and make it better. If I’ve written nothing, there’s nothing to improve. The other is the huge database of people I encountered in the course of my work, from the Prince of Wales to the bereft and homeless. I have a library of their faces, their mannerisms and their speech that I can still draw on.

Do you pre-plan?

I used to plan in great detail because I thought plotting was my weakest skill. That stopped working for me, very suddenly and scarily. But I discovered that I didn’t need to work everything out in advance. Now, I know the basic story arc and two or three crucial turning points. Then I just start at the beginning and get stuck in.

Have your working methods changed over the years?

Only in a practical sense. I wrote my first novel with a fountain pen on foolscap because I thought that’s what novelists were supposed to do. By the second, I’d graduated to an Amstrad word processor. Now I use a Mac …

Resistance was co-authored with Kathryn Briggs. How did that work?

This is the first time I’ve worked with an illustrator on a graphic novel. With my publisher, we chose Kathryn because we liked the range of her sample work. The two of us met up in Dundee, where she was living, and talked about the possible styles of illustration she might use. Then she sent me some sample pages and I loved how she’d adopted various graphic styles to carry particular elements of the story. Because she was working from a radio script, without all the descriptive elements of a novel, I think it gave her more freedom to be expressive and imaginative. In essence, she used the dialogue of the script for the speech and captions of the adaptation.

A frame from Resistance, co-authored with Kathryn Briggs

How did having researched and written the radio serial affect you living through the Covid-19 pandemic?

I knew enough from my research to be very afraid. And to find myself frequently enraged at the cavalier attitudes of Westminster politicians, with their tendency to put their friends’ interests ahead of the science.

Did lockdown affect your writing life?

There’s no doubt I wrote more slowly in lockdown. Maybe about three-quarters of my usual speed? Probably because I spent a lot more time surfing the web to see what the latest news was. Shifting to online events was challenging too. It takes a lot more energy to do an event when there is no audience feeding their reactions back to you. The first time I paused for the laugh and nothing happened was terrifying. I was also very conscious that, since more people could see my events online, I was very quickly going to run out of fresh things to say. But I pivoted very quickly to digital platforms. The launch event of Imagine a Country, the book of hope and imagination I co-edited with Jo Sharp, was one of the first casualties of lockdown. [The launch was programmed during Aye Write 2020, which was cancelled after day one due to the pandemic.] We very quickly put together a YouTube version of the Aye Write event we’d been planning and managed to get it online at the time it would have gone ahead. We became more proficient with the form, even branching out into a series of mad cookery videos – Cooking the Books, recipes from the fiction kitchen. They’re still out there on YouTube and thousands of people have enjoyed them, so the online option has provided us with interesting new opportunities.

When do you clock off?

When I’m working on a book, weekends cease to exist. I suppose I clock off around the end of April …

Do you take a break after finishing a book?

When I finish a novel, I’m usually already well on the way to the next book. So, I’ll be doing background reading, a lot of walking and thinking (some of it out loud), maybe visiting locations I want to use, and getting to know the characters whose story it will be. I’ll be catching up on my leisure reading too, doing some gaming, making music. The loosening of restrictions to allow us to meet up with friends has been an absolute joy. Now I’m looking forward to sitting round the kitchen table, eating and drinking and talking the night away.

What are you working on now?

I’ve just finished this year’s novel, 1979, which will be out in August. I’m doing the research for the next one, 1989. And I’m following the production of two TV series – Traces 2, and Karen Pirie, so I’m reading a lot of scripts. And there are a few other bits and pieces to keep me out of trouble.

Resistance: A Graphic Novel by Val McDermid and Kathryn Briggs, is published by Wellcome Collection, £18.99