Bestselling squillionaire author Ken Follett wanted to be a doctor not a writer. But he started his working life as a newspaper reporter.
‘I had a financial crisis. My car broke down and it was going to cost a lot of money to fix, £200, a fortune in 1973. My daughter was just born. We had moved house, so we had just taken on a huge mortgage. I went to the bank to ask them to lend me some money. They said no. Hell, I was fried.”
At the time he was working at London’s Evening News. The newsroom was abuzz. A colleague had written a thriller and it had been published. The best thing about it was that he got a £200 advance for the book.
‘I said to my wife, my first wife, I know how to get money for the car. I’ll write a thriller. Her reaction, of course, was ‘Oh yeah?’. Anyhow, that’s what I did. I wrote a thriller. I wrote it very fast. It wasn’t very good. But it was published by the same guy who published my colleague’s book. I got a £200 advance — and I got my car fixed.”
Follett has come some way since those days. At 58 he has written 30 books, 18 of which have been bestsellers. Five of his books have been made into films or TV movies. He is a multibillionaire. He lives in a rambling rectory in Stevenage, about 50km outside London, with his second wife, Barbara, and two Labrador retrievers called Custard and Bess. He has an 18th-century town house in London and a holiday home in Antigua.
He was in South Africa to promote his latest novel, World Without End (Macmillan), the long-awaited sequel to The Pillars of the Earth. It’s taken him 18 years to produce the sequel, though he has written a number of thrillers in between.
Follett has an air of confidence about him. When I meet him he wears a light beige suit with a mellow yellow shirt; neat as a pin. His silver hair is coiffed. He is perfectly at home in a plush lounge at The Saxon in Sandhurst where he and Barbara are staying.
Follett is best known for his spy thrillers. He was 27 when his first bestseller, Eye of the Needle, was published in 1978.
In 1989 The Pillars of the Earth, a novel about building a cathedral in the Middle Ages, took his readers by surprise. It was a radical shift, but there were rave reviews and it sold millions.
‘Until now, until World Without End, I regarded Pillars as my greatest accomplishment. I knew as I was writing it that it was my best work. I found something special in Pillars. I knew it was better than anything else I had done. I realised that by the way readers talked; they said it was the best book they had ever read. They would ask, ‘When are you going to write another book like Pillars?’.
‘I was somewhat apprehensive about writing a sequel. I didn’t know if I could do it. I was anxious.”
But Follett is delighted with World: ‘I am very happy. Fortunately, readers have said it is as good as Pillars.”
Pillars centres on the construction of a Gothic cathedral in England from 1135 to 1174. World is set in the same place, ‘Kingsbridge”, and features the descendants of the Pillars characters 200 years later.
At the heart of the story is a plague, the Black Death, which killed almost half the population of Europe in the 14th century. Survivors of the Middle Ages battled the pestilence and, in doing so, laid the foundations of modern medicine.
The cathedral and the priory are the centre of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge. The reader is plunged into feudal life and it’s all about survival, vindication or redemption.
Although Follett makes it sound easy, he works hard to produce the finished product. Both Pillars and World took about three years each to complete.
‘My books start with an idea; a dramatic situation that generates 50 to 100 scenes. A novel is a story told in a number of scenes. It’s easy to think of an idea that will give you three or four scenes. But in the end you need something interesting and intriguing enough to create 50 to 100 scenes.”
The first time he writes down the idea it might be just three paragraphs long. ‘Then I think of what happened before, what will happen after. I write down the idea again and this time it might be a page long. I begin a process of elaborating the drama again and again; I finish up three months later with a 40-page outline. That’s just the first draft of the outline.”
Follett says it is then that his agent and ‘almost collaborator”, Al Zuckerman, looks at it. Also Barbara and the children — he has two from his first marriage and three stepchildren, all now adults. He likes to get as much input as possible and easily takes criticism and suggestions. ‘I’m not secretive at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
It is at this stage too that he consults experts, whom he hires specifically for each book. For Pillars and World he hired three historians, Sam Cohn, Marilyn Livingstone and Geoffrey Hindley, to check facts and point out errors.
‘For a normal-size book it takes about six months for the first draft and six months to rewrite it. But for Pillars and World — each about 1 000 pages long — it took about a year for the first draft and a year to rewrite.”
Follett works set hours — ‘I don’t know any writers who don’t.” He wakes up about 7am, pulls on a bathrobe, makes a cup of tea and likes to be at his desk five minutes after he wakes. ‘I am at my most creative first thing in the morning.”
He works for an hour or two before breakfast: ‘By the time I take a break, the story must be completely in my head so that I can continue thinking about it while doing the daily things you don’t really have to think about, like shaving.”
He takes a 20-minute break for lunch, then writes until about 4pm: ‘That’s been my habit for many years.” He doesn’t mind interruptions from his family. ‘And the dogs regularly check up on me to make sure I’m working.”
But there is strictly no business during working hours: ‘If an agent or lawyer phones with some problem, I find myself thinking about that instead of the imaginary problems of my characters. So I shut them up.” At 4pm he checks emails — ‘it used to be faxes and before that the post” — and deals with any business calls.
Follett likes to be warm when he writes. ‘I can’t stand cold.” His normal working attire is a pair of flannel trousers, a shirt and a cashmere jersey.
The hours are what count for Follett, not the environment, though each of his houses has a library where he likes to write, surrounded by books. ‘I have lots of reference books, though I use them less and less now that there is the internet.”
At Stevenage he gazes out to a big garden with a 200-year-old tree just outside his window. In London he faces on to a busy Soho street — ‘that’s in the red-light district” — with lots of people, not cars. There’s an Indian restaurant and a fashionable tailor opposite and a pub at the end of the street. In Antigua he overlooks the beach.
When he’s not working, Follett plays bass guitar in a band called Damn Right I’ve Got The Blues. ‘It started out as a blues band, but is more rock now.” The group meets every Monday night to practise. ‘We rent a sound-proof studio, so we can play as loud as we like. We play for about four hours and have a break in the middle. If we were a real blues band we would have bourbon and smoke marijuana, but we have tea and biscuits.”
Follett, who is Welsh, sings in the band and in the bath. Loudly. Before the band, he played guitar and sang to his children; now it’s his grandchildren. He also plays bass balalaika in a folk group called ClogIron.
One of the many perks of being a multibillionaire author is that the world is your oyster. And Follett really enjoys good food and wine. Especially champagne: ‘My favourite is Salon and we find lots of things to celebrate. There’s always a good reason to crack open a bottle.”
He likes mostly French wine, but has recently got into Spanish wine. He is not too familiar with South African wines, but says he has enjoyed ‘lots” of it and intends to drink more.
‘My favourite food is French cuisine, but what I really enjoy most is when I cook, which is every weekend. Most Saturday nights the family comes over and we have at least half a dozen people for dinner. Last Saturday I made crusted tuna with coriander, parsley and chilli, served with boiled potatoes and garlic cream. It was delicious.”
Follett says he will write another medieval story, ‘if I live long enough. But it is time for a change and I need to keep things fresh. I’m sure I’ll write more thrillers because I like them so much.”
And his final word on World: ‘I think it’s good. You be the judge —”.