After writing 17 novels, do you feel as inspired now as you did 20 or 30 years ago?

Yes, I do actually. Funnily enough, I feel in the last three of four years a new surge of energy. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m getting older, but I actually feel I’m working harder than I’ve worked ever before in my life. I seem to have so many things on. It’s not by any great intent, it’s just the way things have panned out.  I can’t write for as long as I used to. I used to write for five hours a day and now I’m down to about three. But I do feel very creatively energised as I approach my 60th birthday, which is reassuring. It’s strange how these things happen. It’s not just new novels, I’m also writing short stories and for film and television. I feel very busy and I enjoy that. I don’t feel under any pressure so obviously the brain is still working well.

Creatively, have your interests broadened in terms of the things you want to do?

Because I’ve done more things, I now seem to be able to initiate a TV project or a film project whereas before I would have had to be asked. That’s the difference. Because I have already written lots of films, I am more empowered in a way and I know a lot of directors and producers. My experience has opened more doors for me and I seem to be working more.

I’m a great believer in having as many irons in the fire as possible, particularly in the world of film and television because it’s so fickle. With novels and short stores, I know that if I write it will be published. Whereas in the world of films, everybody can love it but nothing happens. So my modus operandi is to have seven, eight or nine projects ticking over in the hope that one of them might heat up. Some of these projects I’ve been nurturing for ages, for years and years – decades in some cases. It’s a combination of old, much cherished projects still there, and new work that might enable them to be made. It’s strategic in a way.

Do you need to go out and search for inspiration?

I’m not an autobiographical writer in an obvious sense. I’m always inventing stories and characters and plots. Something doesn’t need to happen to me in order for me to write about it. I can sit in my study and dream up an entire plot just because my brain works that way. It’s the type of writer I am – I’m an imaginative writer rather than autobiographical. I got an idea for a novel yesterday and I just jotted it down in a notebook. I don’t know where it came from. What you recognise is your mind is still working well. It’s seizing on things, developing them and seeing the potential in them. I write it down and store it away for a rainy day or see if it matures. There’s no sense that I’m running out of steam. If anything it’s the opposite.

One of the characteristics of two of your chosen authors – Updike and Chekhov – was their work ethic. They were both extremely hard working and incredibly productive. Is that a characteristic you share with them?

Nobody could probably match Updike in terms of productivity. But I think it’s a very British phenomenon. When I was starting out as a young writer, it seemed to me that what you did was write as much as possible, whether that was a novel, short story, radio play, television play, restaurant review or book review. What you did was write. In two other literary worlds I know quite well, America and France, that doesn’t seem to be quite the case, with the exception of Updike. Somehow you can have a career as a writer lasting decades by writing five novels. Whereas the British example – which is probably Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope – is that you work hard.

So when I’m writing a novel, I write seven days a week until it’s finished. I’m currently waiting for my new novel to come out, and I’m very involved in the films we are making of Restless for the BBC. We are making two 90-minute films. That seems to me the way to be a professional writer, not just sitting around twiddling my thumbs, congratulating myself. You just keep working – Dickens being the great exemplar. I do think this is a very British phenomenon. I don’t think other writing cultures have quite the same role models as we do.

Many writers hate the idea of their books being adapted for the screen, let alone adapting them themselves.

The two art forms are completely different. Film, compared to novels, is quite a simple art form and also it’s collaborative. I don’t see the two writerly aspects of it as being that connected. It takes me three years to write a novel but I can write a screenplay in two weeks if necessary. I enjoy working in film and television precisely because it’s a collaboration. But it’s two different bits of your brain that are engaged, two different sets of gears. There’s not much overlap to be honest. From my experience, having written novels and films and directed a film, the two forms are very distinct and all sorts of different talents and energies have to be applied. I make the shift quite happily and easily. I don’t feel I’m repeating myself.

I’ve read your novel Any Human Heart and also watched the television adaptation. Luck is a recurrent theme in the novel and it is expressed quite subtly. But in the TV adaptation, you have a character telling the viewer directly in the first episode: “It’s just luck in the end. That’s what life is.” Is film a far less subtle medium?

It is a simpler art form. Any Human Heart is a 500-page novel, and although we had more than five hours of screen time there was hell of a lot that was left out. Film is photography. It’s so objective. And yet Any Human Heart is probably the most subjective of novels you could write, because it’s a man’s intimate journal. Making the shift from the novel to the film version created massive difficulties of presentation. If you play to film’s strengths, you play to its simple, broad strokes. You just can’t be that subtle because you don’t have all the tools at your disposal that you have as a novelist. Again, you have a very limited time, problems with the budget, and the problems of photography on the outside looking on. All these decisions affect the way you present the material. I think that theme of luck which runs through the novel, as it does in the film, is buried in the hundreds of thousands of words of the novel. Even a long mini-series like Any Human Heart is one tenth of the length in terms of writing as a novel. So a lot of your themes inevitably become more bluntly stated so that the point is made.

Your new novel Waiting for Sunrise is published in the coming months. What have we got to look forward to?

It starts in Vienna in 1913, a year before the start of the First World War. The central character is a young Englishman, an actor, who has a particularly troublesome sexual dysfunction. He’s about to get married, so he decides to try out this new-fangled psychoanalysis lark to see if he can sort himself out. He goes to Vienna and spends some months there being psychoanalysed, not by Freud but by a disciple of his. Because it’s one of my novels, everything then goes wrong. The embroilments that ensue in Vienna in 1913 trammel up his life in such a way that when war begins and he travels back to London, he’s still living out the consequences of what’s happened to him in Vienna in 1913.

It’s a sort of – I say slightly facetiously – John Buchan or Somerset Maugham adventure but with sex. It’s a young man abroad who gets trapped in an affair in every sense of the word, and spends the rest of the novel trying to disentangle himself. But more seriously, it’s also about becoming modern. I think that our world – the 20th and 21st century world – began in 1914 not in 1900. The journey that my central character goes on is a journey from Victorian and Edwardian certainty to modern uncertainty, paranoia, lack of trust and lack of clear vision – the way we all function today. There was a paradigm shift from the old certitudes to the uncertainties we live with today. So there is a very serious theme under the adventure this man is on.