Skip to Content

'It's therapeutic, it's cathartic, it's exciting, it's engaging.'

20 February 2012

'In November I'll start to think about the next book. In January I'll begin writing it, deliver it in June, in July it'll be edited, August is the holidays. September I'll start doing pre-publication interviews, it'll come out in October and I'll' go on the road again. It's like working on a production line, there's not an awful lot of time to sit around chewing the fat with Salman Rushdie, even if he wanted to...

But it's a really nice treadmill. It's only a treadmill in that you'd be letting down the fans, who want a fix every year. Even John Grisham and James Patterson still punt out at least a book every year. Why are they writing with all that money in the bank? They're writing because that's how they make sense of the world, it's what they've always done...

It's a very pleasurable way to spend your time. It's therapeutic, it's cathartic, it's exciting, it's engaging. In real life writers tend to be quite boring, but in our books we're having exciting adventures all the time. I can't think of anything better than that, and it keeps you well balanced because all the shit inside your head goes on paper. I think we'd be troublesome individuals if we didn't get all that shit out of our systems.'

Ian Rankin, author of The Impossible Dead in the Independent on Sunday