Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

Forget the boring old dictum, 'Write about what you know.' Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.

When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.