Who: Andrew Roberts

Claim To Fame: Andrew Roberts is the bestselling author of The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941-1945, Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble and Napoleon: A Life, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and a finalist for the Plutarch Award. His latest book, Churchill: Walking With Destiny (released in November 2018) was an instant New York Times bestseller. It was also one of The Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Books of 2018, one of The Economist’s Best Books of 2018, and one of The New York Times’s Notable Books of 2018. He has won many other prizes, including the Wolfson History Prize and the Brit­ish Army Military Book of the Year, and frequently writes for The Wall Street Journal.

Where To Find Andrew: His Website, Amazon, Twitter

Praise For Andrew: “In a single volume, Roberts has captured the essence of one of the world’s most impactful, most memorable statesmen.  It is the crowning achievement of his career – and it will become the definitive biography of his subject.” — Henry Kissinger

When and where do you like to write? Are you regimented about your writing routine—the same-thing-every-day kind of guy?

I write in my study at my house in Belgravia in London, starting very early in the morning, usually around 4.30am, dressed in my pajamas, dressing-gown and slippers. That way no-one interrupts you for five hours, in which time you can get a huge amount of work done. (I averaged 5,500 words a day for 100 days straight writing Churchill: Walking with Destiny). I take an hour’s nap every afternoon and then work through until supper, using the caffeine drink Red Bull to keep me alert until I go to bed at 10pm. It’s a fairly weird routine, I know, but I’ve adhered to it for nearly forty years after going up to university, and it works for me.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals that help you get in the zone? Anything you do when the writing isn’t coming easy?

I play backgammon with myself on my phone. Once I’ve won three games in a row, I then have to start work. Historians don’t really get Writers’ Block because we have narrative to help us. We just have to say what happened next.

Multiple reviews – including those in both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – have called Walking With Destiny the greatest single-volume biography of Churchill.  First, of all, Congratulations.  With more than 1,000 Churchill biographies in print, how were you able to so clearly differentiate your work?

Thanks for your kind words. No idea; I really just had to trust it to the reviewers. It was nerve-wracking waiting for the reviews but now that eight or nine have declared it the best single-volume biography of him ever written, I feel I can exhale a bit.

Winston Churchill was also an author – and even won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Is there anything that you – or other authors – could learn from his approach to writing?

Huge amounts. Not least that he wrote standing up at a desk, which he found good for his back. I suspect it might have acted against over-lengthy passages too, as there’s a physical element involved. He wrote for money and squeezed every available penny out of publishers. He continually edited his writing and was an obsessive stickler for precisely the right word. He revered what he called ‘that noble thing – the English sentence.’ He believed that each paragraph should encapsulate a single thought – no more, no less. He could write under every condition, taught to him as a war correspondent. He used humour, especially self-deprecating humour, constantly. When one sees his technique and the 37 books that emanated from it, you realize he fully deserved his Nobel Prize.

For your biography of Napoleon, you visited 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battle sites. Why is it so important to visit the scenes that you write about. How different would Napoleon: A Life have been if you had done all of your research in archives and libraries?

A military historian who writes about battles without having been to the battlefields is as professionally negligent as a homicide detective who fails to visit the scene of a crime. In the seven years that I researched and wrote my biography of Napoleon – which, absurdly enough, is longer than the Emperor himself spent in exile on the islands of Elba and St Helena put together – I was shocked by the number of authors who have opined on Napoleon’s military ability without having themselves visited the actual places where it was displayed. Historians such as R.F. Delderfield, Theodore Dodge, J. Holland Rose and A.G. Macdonnell have felt perfectly at liberty to write about Napoleon’s campaigns in Israel and Russia, for example, without having been to his battlefields there.

For it is only when one stands on the ground that was fought over that a historian can gain that coup d’oeil, that special insight which any number of hours poring over contour maps, reading memoirs or looking at contemporary illustrations cannot give. In walking the ground of 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battlefields for that book, I was astounded how often the engagement becomes perfectly explicable once one sees the topography, plots the relative position of the forces and sees the fields of fire from the opposing commanders’ points of view. (The seven battlefields I missed were either so built over as to make a visit worthless, or were in the Gaza Strip, which as a founder member of the Friends of Israel Initiative I thought it politic to skip.)

All of your work is very research intensive. What is your method for researching and organizing material you might want to use for your future writing?

For Churchill, I wrote up about 5 million words of notes, divided chronologically and thematically, before I wrote a word of the book. Total immersion is the only way I know how to write. When visiting an archive, try to take notes on the books you think you might write in the future as well as the one you are writing at the time. You’ll almost certainly be able to use them somewhere sometime.

What books or writers have most influenced the way you think and the way you write?

Kenneth Rose’s biographies, Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand, Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs, John Brooke’s George III, Vincent Cronin’s Napoleon, Lord Salisbury’s Saturday Review journalism, Churchill’s My Early Life and Great Contemporaries, Solzhenitsyn, Burke’s Reflections. Not much since I left university though, as I’ve been too busy swotting.

What is your advice to aspiring writers?

Get an agent. Try to find an alternative form of income while you write your first couple of books. Pull every string to get publicity & reviews: it’s expected of you and never held against you. Beware multi-book contracts. Accept that pedantry, pessimism, and penury are the accepted lot of 90% of writers. Do as much of your own publicity as you can, and burnish your public speaking skills for literary festivals. Write for newspapers and don’t turn down opportunities to appear on radio and TV, as they reach far larger audiences than anything else. Remember that despite the disappointments that go with the profession of writing, it’s still easily the best job in the world and almost the only one that can offer immortality. Who knows or cares who was prime minister when Boswell or Gibbon or Burke or Goldsmith were writing?

____________

Ready to create a writing routine of your own?

Sign up now and receive our free guide “12 Essential Writing Routines To Help You To Craft Your Own.”

Learn from the routines of superstar authors Stephen King, Gertrude Stein, John Grisham, Ernest Hemingway, Neil Gaiman, and many more.

Get the free guide here!