Nicola Davies: where I write

http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/sep/10/nicola-davies-where-i-write

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Two things are important to me when I'm actually at the stage of putting words onto a page or into a computer: a view and silence.

Mostly I write in my study at the top of my house because it gives me both. The view is over the top of a Victorian mental hospital, to the Blorenge – the mountain that stands above Abergavenny, where I live. The light over :"my mountain" changes through the day offering different kinds of distraction and comfort when I need them. The resident hospital pigeons provide light relief – the ludicrous displays of the males to the largely indifferent females are visible in animated silhouette along the roofline. 

This is the quietest study I've ever had. My previous home on a small-holding in Devon was noisy with baa-ing, moo-ing and tractors. I spent most of my time at my desk wearing chainsaw-grade ear defenders. Here I have double glazing and no domestic or farm animals. All the movement outside my window – wind buffeting trees, kids playing football – happens without a soundtrack I can hear and is therefore not distracting. I wish I could work and listen to music but I can't multi-task. If I play music, I start singing and that isn't writing.

Sometimes, when I'm in the early stages of a picture book, or writing poems - as I am at the moment – I take a notebook into my garden, or up a hill. But for anything beyond a first draft I need the validation of something in print on a screen. My handwriting doesn't have enough authority on its own. Often I need my library of zoology references books, or the internet, or a poem and they live in my study.

The output side, the actual-words-in-sentences stage, is only one half of writing. The other is the input, the research. I write about nature, so being in nature, in the places, with the animals and the people I'm writing about, is where I have to do that research. In the last four years I've written in a dugout canoe on the Amazon, studying sperm whales in Dominica, interviewing ex-bear keepers in a Bhopal shanty town, following elephant trails in Mowgli's Garo Hills and picking up Ibex poo from an Armenian mountainside.

When I'm in input mode I have to be a combination of open and focused, so I'm able to spot a ready-made story lying about and able to ask the right questions to piece one together from a patchwork of reality, if I need to. Real experience of a place, its texture, its details, is the fuel of my writing. I bring it back in notebooks, poly bags of plants (and poo) and photographs, so when I'm writing in my study, where I really am is a Colombian riverside, an Indian jungle or a Dominican fishing boat – with a few moments of Welsh pigeon watching, as a break. 

Nicola Davies's latest book The Promise (illustrated by Laura Carlin) is available from the Guardian bookshop.

Nicola will be treating young bookworms in Argyll & Bute to a series of free events in September as part of the Scottish Friendly Children's Book Tour. For more information visit www.scottishbooktrust.com or follow @booksontour.