Colm Tóibín

But what I love is sitting in the evening under the stairs.

The maid has a little room with a little TV.

And we both sit there and we eat food from our lap, you know, from plates on our lap.

And we watch the little TV.

We close the door.

It's very cozy in there.

I thought, what an extraordinary idea.

And I put that straight into the Catalan girls.

Often you take little things from elsewhere, things you remember, or sometimes just things you imagine, and you throw them in and see if they'll stick.

If they don't stick, you take them back out again.

But I love the idea of this very tall, aristocratic Argentine woman with lots of money and a big house deciding in the evening what she really wanted to do was go in with her maid and watch stupid programs on the TV late at night.

No, I don't write notes.

What I do is when it occurs to me, I would write the first paragraph.

But with the first paragraph, the intention would be that that was to stay.

It wasn't a note to myself as much as the beginning of the story.

I write in longhand, so I could rewrite that a good number of times.

Just cross it out and rewrite and write it again and cross it out.

Just wait until you see if it's right.

But the notion of writing down woman under stairs made television, I would forget what was that television?

Well, it's only if it's worth remembering, then it's useful.