J.K. Rowling, best known for the Harry Potter franchise

Many of writers today complain about the difficulties of focusing and technological distractions.

"You can actually write a chapter easily - say, if you’re writing a novel and it’s not such a long chapter — in your head, and then write it and have very few things to revise. But I think it’s harder for many people to do that now because of the fragmentation of the mind and the many gadgets we all have claiming our attention," said Alice Walker.

While Donna Tartt lives on a farm in Virginia part time, she has experienced this. "Since finishing the book [The Goldfinch] I’ve been thrown into having to check my cellphone more than five times a day," said the writer. I used to check it once a week. I’d leave it up in a corner of the house, because that’s the only place where there’s cellphone reception. Now it’s very different. Obviously I can’t do that right now or people from Little, Brown would come and break down my door."

Walker believes one-pointedness - a state of being completely focused or concentrated - is essential for writing. "I don’t know what people are going to do when they really lose all notion of one-pointedness. There’s no sense of focus. There should be for everybody a period in every day when you’re just free to sink into your own space, your internal space. And without that I think people have no true compass."

This holds true for Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games trilogy. "Some days all I do is stare at the wall,"she said. "That can be productive, too, if you’re working out character and plot problems. The rest of the time, I walk around with the story slipping in and out of my thoughts."

Margaret Atwood says she has two desks. "On one desk there’s a computer that is not connected to the internet. On the other desk is a computer that is connected to the internet. You can see the point of that!"

When the idea for Harry Potter "fell into" J.K. Rowling's head while travelling back to London on her own on a crowded train, she had "had never been so excited about an idea before". But she didn't have a functioning pen with her and was too shy to ask someone for one. "I do think that this was probably a good thing. I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me," said Rowling. "Perhaps, if I had slowed down the ideas to capture them on paper, I might have stifled some of them".

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