📝 Robert Harris’ Writing Routine

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In the summer of 1987, Robert Harris was on a beach in Sicily when the idea for Fatherlandcame to him. At the time, he was a BBC journalist working on a story about Germany for Panorama. He came up for air while swimming and heard the sound of German tourists chatting on the sand. “Quite suddenly I thought, ‘This is exactly what the world would have been like if Germany had won the war,’” he recalled in an interview with Esquire UK. “Efficient Lufthansa flights everywhere. German voices on every beach…” The premise hit him all at once: a detective story set in 1960s Berlin, in a world where Hitler had won. “I wallowed about in the water for another 20 minutes, then I swam in and tried to find a pen and paper.”

It would take him three years to finish the book. “There were moments when I was absolutely certain I would never manage it,” he said. After a promising start, the manuscript stalled—he had characters in a room but didn’t know why they were there. It wasn’t until his agent sent him an essay by John Irving—arguing that a novelist should always know the ending before beginning—that Harris was able to restructure the material and move forward. “That transformed my material. From that point on I was on my way.”

When Fatherland was released in 1992, it became a phenomenon. The U.S. hardcover alone, Harris later said, made more money than he had earned in his entire journalism career. “It would have been insane not to give up journalism and try to write another novel,” he told the BBC. He was 34.

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