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The Writing Show (WS): This is Paula B. Welcome to The Writing Show’s Christmas show for 2006. Today my very special guest is Charles Dickens.

Charles John Huffam Dickens is the author of such classics as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and the beloved A Christmas Carol. Some of his characters are the most famous in all of literature: Ebenezer Scrooge, Miss Havisham, Fagin, Little Nell, Madame DeFarge, Uriah Heep. Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, England.

Welcome to The Writing Show, Mr. Dickens. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that you’re joining us for Christmas this year.

Charles Dickens (CD): I am delighted to be here on this most felicitous occasion, my dear lady.

WS: Let’s start with a little background about you as a writer. How and where do you work?

CD: I am very much a creature of habit and prefer my routine to be orderly and regular. That is not to say that I never depart from my own rules, but I do prefer to be governed by them. When I am keeping to my schedule, I must preserve the routine of my entire day. Should invitations threaten to disturb me, they are summarily rejected.

I write between breakfast and luncheon, although occasionally in the afternoons. I go to work at half-past eight and am commonly free by one o’clock or so. My invariable habit of working involves writing at my desk from ten precisely until two or, if particularly in the vein, until four in the afternoon. So rigid is my conformity to this method of work that my family say I am a monomaniac on the subject. In the early years, I sometimes wrote at night. When composing Oliver Twist, I often wrote till quite late, something I never did later on.

Occasionally I work long hours, but not often. When I was writing David Copperfield in 1850, I sometimes worked nine hours at a stretch. That was unusual.

Ordinarily I write two to four manuscript pages a day, although sometimes significantly less. When planning Barnaby Rudge in 1841, I sat and thought all day; not writing a line…I imaged forth a good deal of Barnaby by keeping my mind steadily upon him. Sometimes, especially at the beginning of novels, I write but a single page in a day. Nevertheless, I am generally prolific. I wrote exactly 72 words of Hard Times in five days, but completed the entire 100,000-word novel in less than six months.

When I was young, I wrote many more pages a day than in my later years, but the pages had fewer words on them. That is because my handwriting has grown smaller and smaller over the years. One of my monthly 32-page installments required more than 90 pages in my early years but a mere 27 later on.

As a young man I was a fluent writer, able to work all day. You can see if you look at the surviving manuscripts of my earliest novels that my hand was attempting to keep up with my racing thoughts. I am by nature a restless and frenetic man.

When I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it all to me…and I don’t invent it—really do not—but see it, and write it down. I distinctly hear every word said by my characters. Nevertheless I do plan, and I do revise. Harumph! Thinking otherwise encourages the public to believe in the impossibility that books are produced in a very sudden and cavalier manner.

Nevertheless, there are times when I have to coax the muse to visit me. Sometimes I do little else than draw figures or make dots on the paper, and plan and dream till perhaps my time is nearly up. But I always sit here, for that certain time…