At the Sharpe end

THE time is 8.30am in Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Bestselling author and creator of the Sharpe book Bernard Cornwell is up and about. Days off from writing don’t seem to have a place in his calendar. “Every day is a writing day,” he says down the line from his home in the US, where he relocated after marrying an American.

“I think I’m lazy. But I do have a routine. It’s a job like any other. I don’t romanticise it by saying I am waiting for inspiration. That’s the only way I know to write. It’s better than working. I get paid for telling stories. It’s great.”

Cornwell is either very modest or merely reluctant to boast of his considerable literary achievements. When we speak his first non-fiction book Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles is top of the book charts and his latest fictional book The Empty Throne is also newly arrived on bookshelves. His best-known fictional books feature the adventures of Richard Sharpe, an English soldier during the Napoleonic Wars, which were translated into a hit TV series featuring Sean Bean as the hero. But Cornwell is also author of a number of other series of novels – The Warlord Chronicles, The Grail Quest novels, The Saxon Stories and The Starbuck Chronicles.

He’s the author of more than 50 novels that has sold 20 million copies worldwide. No-one, apart from himself, would call him lazy. He’s hard on himself, as when he talks of the creation of Sharpe. “Sharpe is just Hornblower on dry land. Nothing original about him at all except he’s not such a nice man,” he says.

He was a fan of C S Forrester’s Hornblower novels as a child, just as he’s always been interested in history. That’s the subject that finds him travelling from his US home to Yorkshire for the Harrogate History Festival this month (October). The organisers should be careful how they announce him. “I go out of my way to say I am not a historical novel writer. I am a storyteller,” he insists. If you want to know about the Peninsular War, then get a factual book. I change history to suit the story,” he says.

Doesn’t that get him into trouble with historians? “No, because you confess your sin,” he replies.

The exception is his Waterloo book. “I always wanted to write that book. It’s a fascinating story in itself and it’s an extraordinary battle. In the back of my mind was the intention to do one non-fiction book. I yielded to the idea 18 months ago,” he explains.

History has always been an interest and his favourite subject at school. He was adopted and raised by a family who were members of the Peculiar People, a strict sect who were pacifists and banned frivolity of all kinds. “Curiously when I met my real mother for the first time when I was 58 years old, I went to her flat and it was full of historical novels,” he says.

He has no idea where his fascination with history originates. “How do you explain why some people are interested in trains and some in history? I actually have no idea why I was interested,” he says.

His historical research is “lifelong”. As a teenager he became obsessed by the Napoleonic wars. “I’m sure I was an anorak. I was boring about it. My whole life is history,” admits Cornwell. He didn’t write his first book until his mid-thirties after working as a teacher and in television news and current affairs. Newly-moved to the US, he couldn’t get a green card to work. The only thing he could do was write novels and the result was the first adventure featuring his 19th century hero Sharpe’s Eagle.

He says that 95 per cent of writing a novel is finding a plot. Once you’ve done that “the rest is like falling off a log”. Some writers plot everything out from the beginning before they even start writing. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen in the next chapter until he writes it. He remembers beginning to write the last chapter of The Empty Throne and not know how it was going to end.

“History is just the story of people like you and me – and people are fascinating,” he says although that fascination doesn’t extend to the Victorian period, which he has no interest in writing about. “Britain used to be a nation of piratical people. We suddenly got respectable, and respectability is dull. I’d rather go back to where the life is already in it.

“You write what you want to write. You write what you want to read, I guess. It’s a totally capricious process, not organised at all. It’s an indulgence. You really have to get 125 or 140 thousand words down but it’s a pleasure to do it. I absolutely do not believe in the concept of writer’s block. Put it this way: do nurses say I can’t come because I have nurse’s block?

“Why the hell should writers have this excuse? There are only two excuses for not writing. One is drinking – and some writers manage very well on alcohol – and two, when you have no confidence. Even that comes once you are up and running.”

He doesn’t see himself moving out of the history genre. “No, absolutely no. I am 70 years old and this isn’t the time to start writing science fiction and I don’t have the temperament to become a writer of crime.”

Living in the US hasn’t affected his writing because it doesn’t matter where you do it, he says. During the interview he’s been keeping one eye on his research computer in his office where an English cricket is on screen. He used to think the worst thing about living in the States was you couldn’t get rugby or cricket on television, but all that has changed now.

It’s well known he’s a keen sailor, less well known that he’s a member of the summer stock theatre at Cape Cod. “I fell among actors eight years ago,” he says. “I act and work backstage. I’ve played Sir Toby Belch, sung a solo in Man Of La Mancha and danced with lissom 20-year-olds. It’s an extraordinary experience because you find yourself among the same cast, most in their twenties. The interesting thing is that being on your own most of the time writing is a solitary voice but in theatre you are working with these wonderful people.”

Do they recognise him as a bestselling author? “They have no knowledge of anything outside the theatre. “If the third world war started, the first question would be, ‘have they hit Broadway?’. Although one of them did say to me, ‘You write books, I didn’t know’.”

Bernard Cornwell appears at the Harrogate History Festival on October 24 at the Old Swan Hotel, 9am. Box office 01423-562303 or visit harrogateinternationalfestivals.com

He’ll be signing books at Waterstones in Coney Street, York, between 1-2pm the same day.

Waterloo and The Empty Throne are both published by HarperCollins