ROSAMUNDE PILCHER could easily be a character in one of her own novels. Serene, gracious and quietly humorous, the best-selling British author is all of a piece with the well-bred, intelligent people she writes about.

"I guess I write about them because they're the sort of people and the way of life I know the most about," Pilcher said in an interview at Mary Washington College last week.

Pilcher, 75, was in Fredericksburg for the semiannual meeting of the Regents of Kenmore. She has been a regent since 1994.

Officials at the college took advantage of her presence in town to snag her for two lectures-one for students and one for the President's Book Club and Authors Series.

Pilcher has written novels and short stories for more than 50 years. She achieved international best-seller status with her 1987 novel "The Shell Seekers," followed by "September" in 1990 and "Coming Home" in 1995.

She mined a lifetime of practicing her craft for hints to give the budding writers among Mary Washington's undergraduates.

For one thing, Pilcher said, she must get to know her characters before she can figure out what they're going to do.

"You have to live with them, talk to them for a long time. Then you can put them in situations. ... The plot comes from the characters," she said.

She told the students they have to decide whether they're writing to get a check at the end of the process or just for themselves. If they're writing for money, they have to know what's going to sell.

"I'm not desecrating art," Pilcher said, "but you have to decide if you're going to fish or cut bait."

She has been financially successful for years, but widespread recognition took its own sweet time arriving on Pilcher's doorstep. She was 14 when she decided she wanted to be a writer, and she started with short stories. She later tried novels, and as she persevered, she said, her books became less trivial, less predictable. She was 60 when she wrote "The Shell Seekers," her first international blockbuster.

"That's quite a long time to wait," she said.

The daughter of a commander in the Royal Navy, Pilcher was born and raised in Cornwall, that romantic appendage to England's southwestern edge.

"I was a voracious reader; I lived in a house filled with books," she said.

Her mother's sister, who lived in Philadelphia, gave Pilcher's family a subscription to the Ladies Home Journal every year, and young Rosamunde devoured its short stories.

"I absorbed the techniques," she said.

Her father was away much of the time, and her only sibling was a much older sister. But Rosamunde enjoyed solitude.

"I was happy to be on my own," she said. " There was so much going on inside my head."

Porthkerris, the little Cornish town where so much of her writing is set, is actually a fictional name for St. Ives, where she grew up, she said.

"Place influences what you write," she told the Mary Washington students. "I think place is terribly important."

Pilcher has lived in Scotland since marrying a Scotsman 53 years ago, and that landscape plays almost as large a part in her writing as Cornwall.

"Coming Home," her most recently published novel, is close to being autobiographical, she said.

"It's not me, but all the same things happened to me."

Set before and during World War II, it re-creates a world now vanished.

"I wrote it for my grandchildren," she said. "I wanted them to know what it was like."

Pilcher has 13 grandchildren, five of whom live on Long Island.

"It was rather fun to write about something so real, a kind of self-analysis, I guess," she said.

She sold her first short story while serving in the Far East with the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. A London women's magazine bought it for 15 guineas. She was 18, and she thought that was a fortune.

"That was one of the best days of my life," she said.

She married Graham Pilcher in 1946 at the age of 22, and soon began to write again.

"I wanted to make some money," she said. She didn't like depending on her husband for pocket money.

She did her writing in the kitchen, while keeping house and raising two sons and two daughters.

"If I shut myself away, everyone would come and beat on the door. If I was in the kitchen, nobody bothered me. They took no notice at all."

She wrote on a manual typewriter for years but now uses a word processor.

She's dryly amusing about her high-tech skills.

"I can do double spacing, and I can do italic. I can't store, but I've learned to print out before switching off the machine."

The word processor doesn't give her the same satisfaction as the typewriter.

"I loved to bang away and pull sheets of paper out of the machine. I felt like I was accomplishing something."

She's working on another book, this one about Christmas and the way it brings people closer to each other.

She and her husband still live in Perthshire, Scotland, near Dundee, with two long-haired dachshunds named Daisy and Polly.

When she's not writing she gardens, takes care of her husband and tends the dogs.

"It keeps me so busy I wonder how I ever had time to write," she said.