When I started writing Sword at Sunset I made at least three false starts, but I couldn’t think what was the matter. I knew exactly what the story was that I wanted to tell, but it wouldn’t come. Then suddenly the penny dropped: it had to be first-person singular. I had never done first-person singular before, but the moment I started doing it that way it came, like a bird. But I had problems with it: first-person singular is very different from third-person writing, and I had no experience of it at all. But it was the only way it could be written.

Source: Raymond Thompson | Taliesin’s Successors: Interviews with Authors of Modern Arthurian Literature 

• More on Sword at Sunset on this blog about Rosemary Sutcliff
• More on this website about Rosemary Sutcliff’s writing, often in her own words