A 20-Year Romance With Writing

Barbara Taylor Bradford’s first novel, “A Woman of Substance,” was released 20 years ago. Last month, novel No. 15, “A Sudden Change of Heart” (Doubleday), came out. This meant another fabulous piece of jewelry for Bradford, whose film-producer husband of 35 years, Robert, gives her jewels when she completes a manuscript.

The author, who dedicates all her books to her husband, is originally from Leeds, England, and was expected to attend the University of Leeds. She told her parents that she did not want to go.

Question: That took a lot of courage for a 16-year-old. How did you do that?

Answer: I think I just did it because I was hellbent to go work on a newspaper, which I managed through the help of my typing teacher.

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Q: How did your typing teacher get you a job?

A: Dorothy Smith knew the woman who ran the typist pool at the Yorkshire Evening Post and arranged for me to get an interview. That’s how I entered newspapers, as a typist--and really a not very good one, either.

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Q: By the time you were 18, you were the women’s page editor.

A: Correct, of the Yorkshire Evening Post. I don’t often talk about this because it’s so long ago now, but I guess I must have had a lot of guts and a tremendous determination to do what I wanted, to become a journalist. I really wanted to write novels, but I was smart enough to know that you actually can’t do that when you’re 16, at least not sell them. You can write them, but they might not be very good, you know.

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Q: You must have been writing when you were a young girl.

A: I started writing when I was a little girl, and I sold my first short story when I was 10 and got money for it. Not that I cared about the money, to tell you the truth. . . . It was the byline, you know. It was Barbara Taylor.

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Q: Weren’t you writing a column on interior design while working on your first novel?

A: That’s right. I had it for 12 or 13 years, and I was writing three columns a week. I wrote those columns right through the writing of “A Woman of Substance,” which took me from about 1976 till ’78 to write. I handed the book in in ’78. It came out in ’79.

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Q: Is it true that you handed over that manuscript in two big shopping bags?

A: 16 1/2 pounds.

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Q: 16 1/2 pounds.

A: It was heavy. It was about 1,520 pages. When I took those two shopping bags to my editor at Doubleday, she said, “It’s two copies, I hope, or three copies.” I said, “No, it is only one copy.” She said, “How long is it?” looking at me, having gone white. I said, “It’s 1,500 pages and weighs 16 1/2 pounds.” She said, “My God, it’s heavier than a small child.”

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Q: Well, it was a delivery of sorts.

A: Truthfully it was. She cut about 300 pages very quickly.

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Q: Just so she could lift it.

A: Touche. Yes.

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Q: You must remember what she cut out.

A: She cut out my favorite chapter. . . . Actually it was a chapter that could be cut out. It was about Blackie and Joe going off to war. That chapter that was taken out in the beginning is now in the book.

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Q: Your mom and dad, Freda and Winston--what kind of work did they do?

A: Part of the time, my mother worked as a nurse because, you see, I was growing up during the war. I was born in 1933, so when the war [WWII] broke out in 1939, I was 6, and she’d gone back to nursing in a hospital in Leeds. My father was in the Royal Navy in the First World War, and he lost a leg, and, basically, he was in engineering. When I say “engineer,” I mean the building of things, you know, machinery. He was very clever with mathematics and with his hands and all that.

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Q: When do you write? What’s your work schedule like?

A: I’m usually up at 6, but when I get further into a book, I get up at 5, and I’ve been known to get up at 4 because I’ve been panic-stricken about getting it finished. And I prefer to finish at 4:30-5 o’clock. I really like to have a rest, a bath or a shower, put on a bit of makeup, be ready when Bob gets home from the office, have a drink and dinner or go out. I need a couple of hours to shed it, if you know what I mean.

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Q: Does your writing ever intrude on that time, say, after 5:30?

A: Well, it doesn’t happen to me during the night because when I go to bed, I usually fall fast asleep, but it might suddenly, and if it’s just me and Bob, I say, “Oh, excuse me a minute,” and I just rush and write it down quickly--”Check so-and-so” or “Solve that problem this way.”

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