What does the first sixty minutes of your day look like?

I'm not up at 6 am. I start listening to the incoming news at 6 am. I'm not up until 7. By then I've heard the agricultural news, the news and financial news and listening to radio. Lying in bed relaxing. Quite busy after one has got up. There's quite a lot to put away from the night before, last night's papers to finish off, getting up and seeing what I have for the day. And just getting my thoughts in order for the day. I have very little breakfast. It tends to be a rather busy time because there's a rather lot going on.

Writing before dawn began as a necessity—I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, “Mama”—and that was always around five in the morning. Many years later, after I stopped working at Random House, I just stayed at home for a couple of years. I discovered things about myself I had never thought about before.

I used to be a late starter, but now I get up in the dark like a medieval monk, commit unmediated scribble to a notebook, and go back to bed about six, hoping to sleep for another two hours and to wake slowly and in silence. Random noise, voices in other rooms, get me off to a savage, disorderly start, but if I am left in peace to reach for a pen, I feel through my fingertips what sort of day it is.

I begin each morning, I do every single morning exactly the same way, I begin each morning by doing my highest priority work first. I have a very clear priority list and I start from the highest priority work first. Before I even get to work, my day is already a success. I've already completed my most important work and can dedicate my day to helping others.

As many of you know, I observe specific protocols to open the creative mind – I sit at a desk in my office and write, working exclusively between 9am and 5pm. Within ‘office hours’ I find my mind becomes genuinely free, and I feel a creativity that is qualitatively richer than anything I may experience outside of this time, in the disorder and distraction of the ordinary world. For me, what must appear to some as forced labour is where all the imaginative mischief, beauty, and love are free to happen. Freedom finds itself in captivity.