📝 Hilary Mantel’s Writing Routine

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Hilary Mantel never expected to become a writer. She didn’t grow up in a literary household. Books were present, but writing wasn’t seen as a possible job. Her childhood in Derbyshire was shaped by a turbulent family life and a persistent sense of otherness. Her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, captures those early years: the confusing domestic arrangement when her mother’s lover moved in with the family, her estrangement from her biological father, and a mysterious illness that doctors misdiagnosed for years.

It wasn’t until Mantel was in her twenties, living in Botswana with her husband, that she began writing seriously. She was frustrated by the historical novels she was reading—too focused on royalty, too shallow in their depiction of events. She decided to write her own, centered on the French Revolution. That book, A Place of Greater Safety, would take years to complete and even longer to publish.

Mantel eventually diagnosed herself with severe endometriosis, after being dismissed by doctors and mistakenly prescribed antipsychotics. The illness, and its complications, shaped both her life and her work. She wrote in hospital beds and through long recoveries. The physical pain never fully went away, but writing gave her structure and control. “I really felt as long as I could keep writing I wasn’t going to die,” she once said.

Over time, Mantel built a steady career. She wrote contemporary novels like Eight Months on Ghazzah Street and Beyond Black, historical novels like The Giant, O’Brien, and a memoir. She became a regular reviewer and critic. But her breakout success came with Wolf Hall, the first novel in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister. Mantel wasn’t interested in the well-worn narratives of Anne Boleyn or Henry’s wives. She wanted to reframe the story from Cromwell’s perspective—a man who had climbed from a brutal working-class childhood to the center of English power.

Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize in 2009. Its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, won again in 2012. Mantel became the first woman to win the Booker twice for a series. The third book, The Mirror & the Light, was delayed but eventually published in 2020 to critical acclaim and commercial success. It marked the culmination of more than 15 years of work.

Her Cromwell novels are detailed and dense, yet vivid and accessible. They resist the neat arcs of historical fiction, preferring ambiguity, contradiction, and emotional realism. Mantel insisted on fidelity to history—not in the sense of following every known fact, but in working with what the record offers, including its gaps. “You find a shape, rather than impose one,” she said.

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Hilary Mantel’s daily writing routine

Mantel didn’t follow a rigid daily schedule, but she was disciplined. For years, she woke before dawn and wrote in a notebook while still half-asleep. Those early pages were unfiltered—dream fragments, bits of dialogue, stray ideas. “The first thing I do when I wake up is write,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what nonsense it is. You break the resistance before you’re fully conscious.”

She would often go back to sleep after that first stretch, then wake slowly and resume work in silence. Noise or interruptions in the morning disrupted the whole day. If left alone, she could ease into a kind of flow.

Mantel didn’t write in sequence. Scenes were drafted out of order, and she might have a dozen versions of the same passage. Her novels came together gradually. “Fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end,” she said. “At the end, I see what the plan was.”

Some days, the words came in a rush. She might work across several projects, generate thousands of words, and write until two or three in the morning. Other days were slower, with long stretches of revision or research. Mantel didn’t set word counts. She judged progress in retrospect.

She wrote both by hand and on a keyboard, though typing for too long made her tense up. When she got stuck, she took hot showers. “I am the cleanest person I know,” she joked. Reading and editing were done on printed pages. Her husband, Gerald, often read her drafts—not to critique the prose, but to make sure they made sense. She didn’t need literary feedback. She needed someone to listen.

The Wolf Hall author wrote most of the year, but the rest was consumed by travel, interviews, and public obligations. When she was in the thick of a book, she narrowed her focus. Friends and fun were put on hold. Her energy was limited, and she spent it on the work.

Mantel didn’t believe in inspiration as a mystical force. She believed in vigilance. You had to stay alert to your material—awake or asleep, on a walk or in a dream. “Writing is a long game,” she said. “You have to trust yourself, and trust the process.”

After The Mirror & the Light, Mantel was exhausted. She spoke about trying to crawl out from under the weight of the trilogy. But she also had over a hundred notebooks and unfinished drafts waiting for her. She didn’t rush to name a next project. The work would come. It always had.