In the summer of 1987, Robert Harris was on a beach in Sicily when the idea for Fatherland came 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.
Since then, Harris has written fifteen novels, including Enigma, Pompeii, An Officer and a Spy, and the Cicero trilogy. His work blends political history with narrative propulsion: thrillers built on power, corruption, and paranoia. If there’s a constant in Harris’s fiction, it’s the idea of men in enclosed rooms, making decisions that reverberate through history. “Group dynamics, power, men in rooms going crazy,” he told Esquire. “That’s what I’m drawn to.”
The son of a printer, Harris grew up on a Nottingham council estate. By the age of nine, he knew he wanted to be a writer. “I remember sitting in a classroom… and thinking, ‘This is what I want to do,’” he said on This Cultural Life. As a boy, he was obsessed with history—especially World War II—and spent his time drawing maps of imaginary countries and making newspapers of imagined events. After studying English at Cambridge, he became a political editor at The Observer and later a BBC reporter. His first book was non-fiction: Selling Hitler, a narrative investigation of the forged Hitler diaries scandal, published in 1986.
That book, he’s said, contained everything he’d write about since: “power, groupthink, institutional delusion, people getting locked in rooms and going mad” (Esquire). But fiction offered him something non-fiction could not. “I thought, ‘I can make anything up here!’” he told This Cultural Life. “It was so thrilling. I wrote the first few paragraphs [of Fatherland] and I was dizzy with it.”
Despite his reputation as a writer of historical fiction, Harris bristles at being boxed in. “Historical fiction is, in a way, the lazy option,” he admitted to This Cultural Life. “I don’t travel much, so I visit eras.” His novels span millennia—from Ancient Rome (Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator) to the Cold War (Archangel), the 1930s (Munich), and the Catholic Church in the 21st century (Conclave). The genre doesn’t matter as much as the underlying theme. “Most of my characters are peripheral—ghostwriters, secretaries, observers of power,” he told The Guardian. “But the same quest for power is always there.”
After writing four difficult novels, it wasn’t until Pompeii that Harris felt he had truly figured it out. “It was the one where I thought, ‘OK, I can do this now,’” he told Esquire. “I was happy, happier in the misery of novel-writing than I would have been successfully writing some piece of journalism. It was like solving a chess puzzle, finding pleasure in the pain of it.”
Robert Harris’s daily writing routine
Even after fifteen novels, Harris follows the same disciplined schedule. “My method is usually to start on January 15 and finish on June 15,” he told The Guardian. “I believe in deadlines. I believe in fear. I believe adrenaline helps.”
He wakes early—often by 7 or 8 a.m.—and begins writing almost immediately, while his mind is still in what he calls a “sleepy, half-dreamy state.” Drawing on a quote from Stephen King, Harris credits his subconscious with much of the heavy lifting. “Stephen King calls them ‘the boys in the basement,’” Harris said in the Kobo ReWriting Life podcast. “They do the real work on a book. Very often I find problems get solved that way—while I’ve been asleep, or walking the dog, or doing something else entirely.”
Harris tends to write until around 12:30 p.m., putting in about four or five hours of focused work each morning. “I don’t understand writers who work through the night,” he told Kobo. “I’m utterly exhausted by then. I think one can do about four hours or so of real hard creative work and then it’s best to just leave it.”
Each writing day begins with a review of the previous day’s work. Then, ideally, he adds another 800 to 1,000 words—a steady pace that allows him to complete a 120,000-word novel in roughly six months. “If you can write a thousand words a day,” he said, “then you can write a book in theoretically 120 days.”
He doesn’t write in the afternoons. Instead, he sees friends, takes long walks, reads history, or simply lets the book sit. That time away from the screen, he believes, is essential to solving the novel’s bigger puzzles. “To stimulate the subconscious you need to relax,” he said in The Guardian. “You need to go out, see friends, go to the theatre. When you can’t do that, the mind becomes a very strange place.”
That’s what happened during the pandemic, when he was writing V2. “The boys in the basement weren’t there to call on,” he said. “I couldn’t work for more than three or four hours a day. I had to stop at noon. It gave the book a particular flavour—it’s a very tight book, airless to some degree.”
Harris is methodical in both writing and research. When working on Conclave, he wrote to the Vatican and requested access to locations not open to the public. To his surprise, he was invited for a private tour. “I saw everything I needed: the Sistine Chapel, the Casa Santa Marta, the Room of Tears,” he told Kobo. “It was overwhelming.” He supplements that kind of first-hand research with online sleuthing—especially archival documents and street views from Google Earth. For his Dreyfus novel, An Officer and a Spy, he never left his desk.
The consistency of his process—research, write, revise—has been key to his longevity. “You have to know pretty well how your story’s going to end,” he told This Cultural Life. “Otherwise it’s like embarking on telling a joke without knowing the punchline.” But he also allows for surprises. “You hope, broadly speaking, you’ll be able to put the glider down,” he said. “But you’re not necessarily certain what field you’ll be landing in.”
Harris doesn’t believe in throwing material away. “Never throw anything away,” he told Esquire. “I’ve learned that material can come back and be used years later.” That’s what happened with The Ghost, a novel that began as an idea for a play but resurfaced years later in a new political context. “It was the easiest of all my books to write,” he said. “Took me three months. But it had been in the back of my mind for a long time.”
At this point in his career, Harris describes himself as an “existential writer.” “I can’t imagine an existence in which I didn’t, for a chunk of the day, write,” he said on This Cultural Life. “I don’t have any hobbies—a terrible thing to admit. So what would I do otherwise? Gardening? Golf? What an appalling idea. It’s this or nothing.”
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