From an attic to the library... something to Bragg about

FOR those who haven't discovered the gift of being able to write novels or create music or art, there are often mysterious questions we'd like those more creatively blessed to answer, such as where they get their ideas from, how and where they work, and what hours they keep.

Those magazine items about writers' rooms set the beholder searching for visual clues as to what there is in the immediate surroundings that helps to stimulate creative juices. Would-be novelists shift their desks to a south-facing window, position paintings or clusters of potted plants just so, and maybe even buy a different chair after studying the writing environment of one of their favourite names.

With Melvyn Bragg a couple of the rather prosaic answers are that he writes in the kitchen or office at his north London home. He favours (difficult to decipher) longhand in ink on foolscap, and his flowing style is interrupted infrequently by crossings out or corrections.

Unlike Raymond Carver, he doesn't resort to sitting in his car to get away from household noise; he doesn't stare at a blank wall for inspiration, as Barbara Taylor Bradford does; nor does he have the habit of lying down to write as did Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, and he doesn't tend to write in the bath, as Benjamin Franklin and Vladimir Nabokov reportedly did.

The hallmark of Melvyn Bragg's 50-year-long writing habit seems to have been "just get on with it". The working class grammar school boy from Wigton in Cumbria who went on to read history at Oxford then win a coveted BBC scholarship knew from an early age that he meant to spend his life as a writer. But paying the rent was the immediate imperative, and he quickly began to make a name for himself in arts broadcasting.

The ambition might originally have been to become known for writing, but Bragg has successfully run parallel careers in fiction (20 novels so far), non-fiction and screenplays, producing and presenting arts programmes for TV and many decades of editing and fronting talk shows on the radio including In Our Time on Radio 4 where he gathers academics to discuss various fields of interest from particle physics to Renaissance painting.

He's also chancellor of Leeds University and puts in regular hours at the House of Lords since he was made a life peer in 1998. Other activities in his awesomely full life include the presidency of both the National Campaign for the Arts, and mental health

charity Mind.

It was in his capacity as chancellor of Leeds University that he first heard about the special collections held in the Brotherton Library, named for the Yorkshire industrialist and philanthropist Lord Brotherton, whose collection of 30,000 rare and special books was given to the university in the 1930s and include a Shakespeare First Folio.

Kept under lock and key but available (under supervision) to anyone who wants to inspect them are original manuscripts by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde, John Braine, Stan Barstow and leading contemporary poets Tony Harrison and Geoffrey Hill among a host of other writers across all subjects and eras.

Having ignored an attic full of paperwork relating to his work for five decades, last year Melvyn Bragg decided to take the bull by the horns and give the lot to Leeds University – although it's known that other archives, including some in the US, had made inquiries. The archive, which includes manuscripts of unpublished as well as published work, notes, ideas, drafts, scripts of novels, non-fiction and and short stories as well as letters had been stored loose or in folders in random bags and boxes.

In all, there was half a tonne of material, kept in no particular order. Part of the mountain of paperwork had been sealed off by new plumbing in the attic. Even Bragg himself had half-forgotten how much there was. One day before Christmas, the head of the Brotherton's special collections, Chris Sheppard, took a van to London and, with the writer's help, decanted the documents into 60 boxes for the journey to Leeds.

"I had been thinking about it for years," says Lord Bragg. "I'm from the North and wanted the archive to go to a northern university, and I have a terrifically close association with Leeds, where I've been chancellor for 10 years. My wife Cate (the writer Cate Haste) is from Leeds, so we have that association, I know what a great library the Brotherton is and I really like Chris, so all-in-all, it made sense."

The volume of work and omnivorousness of Bragg's intellectual curiosity and creative projects are matched by his work ethic, drive and passion, says Chris Sheppard. "And although he was keen to have these documents preserved as an important part of the work, and in a library that has other such collections, the disorganised way in which he stored his papers suggests a certain modesty. It certainly isn't self-conscious or saying 'Posterity here I come'."

Evidence of his highly organised attitude is a clipboard preserving a yellowing chart from 1968, in whose ruled boxes Bragg mapped out how many words he needed to write each week: "Apr-Dec aim: four books, 75,000 words each." Daily totals are filled in, with a good day yielding 3,500 and a less productive one producing 750. Working full-time at the BBC meant he got up at 5.30am to write and put in a further hour in the evening.

Sheppard compares the writing style of Elizabeth Gaskell, the successful Victorian writer and friend of Charlotte Bront who went on to pen Bront's biography. He reveals the original manuscript for her insightful tale of moral courage the 1865 novel Sylvia's Lovers, which is set in Whitby.

"Both of their manuscripts are very clean and clear, with few corrections. Bragg obviously has a very complete idea of character and where his plot is going before he starts to write. "

The Bragg archive includes film scripts, one for a version of Mutiny on the Bounty, co-scripted with the late David Lean but never made into a movie. The ending is a great deal more unhappy than in the original. Another unrealised script, for a film about the legendary Russian ballet choreographer Sergei Diaghilev was to be directed by Ken Russell, and Bragg wrote copious detailed notes about how it would be filmed. Two proposals for film treatments of his early novel Josh Lawton also go into tremendous detail.

Sheppard has had an initial trawl through the 60 boxes. "He kept absolutely everything, and already I've seen evidence of how certain notes turned into a short story, then the story was extended into a novel.

"Looking across the breadth of his writing, it's extraordinary to think Melvyn Bragg kept so many things on the go at once, and still does. For a writer, he has led an extraordinarily public life, and I'm sure there will be many requests to study his archive, which will be available to see even while we are still working to put it in order.

"The other thing is that we can perhaps take Melvyn Bragg for granted because he does so much and is so visible. But there is an amazingly high quality across all of the areas of his work that's can be easy to overlook."

The handwritten manuscript of Bragg's first novel Mirrors and Wire is there, its first paragraph describing the character of its highly determined young male protagonist – who sounds not unlike Bragg. Faber and Faber took the novel but didn't publish it, and while waiting for an answer the writer wrote For Want of a Nail, which Secker and Warburg published it in 1965.

Melvyn Bragg is 70, and has yet to write an autobiography. He'd also like to re-read Mirrors and Wire after all these years. Having handed over so many documents (although he still holds copyright), he would have to come to Yorkshire to research his own life and read the novel that got away.

"I'd be very pleased to come and spend time in that magnificent library. I hope they'll give me a library card."

In the meantime, the empty attic is slowly, but steadily filling up again.