A Writer's Room
Mick Herron:

Mick Herron: A Writer's Room

The Guardian runs a feature called Writers' Rooms, where we're invited to admire the desk ornaments, fluffy mascots and novelty pencil sharpeners of famous authors; the stuff that comforts them while they work. I suspect, though, that for most writers, their immediate surroundings are less important than those they're bringing to life on paper. My new novel, Reconstruction, was written in a variety of locations, but largely takes place in one room – a nursery in Oxford, where a gunman has taken six hostages – and for the year and a half I spent writing it, I rarely seemed to leave that room myself. Eighteen months is a long time to spend in one place, negotiating a path through a single difficult morning. I escaped when I could, to mix with the crowd gathered outside – the police and the parents; the media and the spooks – but I was on a short leash, and until the siege was over, couldn't wander much further than my hostages. Perhaps this is why time became one of the major themes of the novel – the way it expands and contracts depending on what's happening. Perhaps, too, it's why several reviewers have suggested that the book be read in one sitting, to replicate the characters' experience. Sitting, I think, is the key word here. Nobody should try this while standing against a wall.

Since Reconstruction was published, I've completed my fifth novel, Smoke & Whispers. This is set in Newcastle, and covers a lot of ground – from the bars and shipyards of Walker, to the now-derelict fleapit where I once watched cartoons on Saturday mornings, to the glitzy new riverside of the Sage and the Baltic – and my memories of writing it are mostly about the research: tramping round Newcastle with family members, finding out how much has changed, and how much hasn't, since I lived there. All of which I enjoyed. But the eighteen months spent with the hostages in Reconstruction remain the keenest memory of my writing life, because instead of having a whole city to explore, I was mostly locked inside that room, doing my best to write myself out of it again, at the speed of an hour every couple of months ... The Guardian's unlikely to come knocking, but if I ever need to construct a writer's den, I'll get hold of one of those nursery clockfaces to hang above my desk. You can make them tell whatever time you like, but you have to move the hands yourself.

Reconstruction is published by Constable Robinson