After bringing the blood-drenched glory of ancient Rome and the carnivorous treachery of the Elizabethan court to the big screen, the prospect of writing about the lives of a group of well-to-do Sussex villagers in microscopic detail might seem a little... well, dull.

Not so, says the twice Oscar-nominated screenwriter, playwright and novelist behind Shadowlands, Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Gladiator.

William Nicholson’s new novel The Secret Intensity Of Everyday Life does exactly what it says on the tin, prying as it does into the innermost thoughts of a small cast of ordinary people to provide a genuinely moving account of their relationships, their struggles, and their frustrated ambitions.

The 61-year-old has made his name in the notoriously cut-throat world of Hollywood for epic screenwriting that places big characters in big situations, but sitting in the garden room of his Barcombe home, it’s on the subject of a more everyday brand of heroism that he’s at his most animated.

“All the characters in the book have dreams and dramas and must cope with the fact that life doesn’t always deliver what you want, but it still goes on. Maybe you won’t get that next job, or you’re always worried about money, or your marriage isn’t as glorious as it should be – the book is a celebration of the resilience of ordinary lives.”

In the novel, Laura finds her feelings for a university love undimmed 20 years later, TV writer Henry is fuming about his lack of recognition for a new series, and farmer Martin resents the swarm of yummy mummies and over-privileged kids that have descended on the village. It’s this focus on ordinary lives that has already won praise from a clutch of admired writers – Labyrinth author Kate Mosse among them – but a cast of semi-rural 40-somethings and prep-school kids made almost every publisher run a mile.

“I was told by one publisher who liked the book that she didn’t think it was quirky enough, that books today must have something oddball about them.

I was also told they didn’t want to publish a book celebrating people who drive four-by-fours.”

As a writer who spends much of his working life in the bowels of the Hollywood machine, Nicholson is philosophical about the way the publishing industry operates, but remains adamant these private stories are as important as any other.

“I think a lot of people think ‘why should I care about well-off people?’, and that’s a fair comment, but my answer would be to read the book and see if you do care. We have quite a complicated class structure in this country and there’s a lot of resentment towards people with money.

“I wanted to write about the people I know as if they too had a legitimate claim on our attentions. As it happens, an awful lot of readers are like people I know as well.”

Raised in Seaford, Nicholson moved back to Sussex following his marriage to wife Virginia, a fellow writer and great niece of Virginia Woolf.

The new novel was very consciously set in the part of the world Nicholson knows best; his fictional village of Edenfield is based where Beddingham stands in reality. But aside from this leap, the minutest detail of his turn-of-the-noughties setting is correct, down to the parking charges at Lewes Station.

It’s to an office in his beautiful 14th-century Sussex home – recently the subject of a broadsheet glossy feature itself – that Nicholson goes early each morning to begin writing, continuing a habit he began when he was working for the BBC, to get a few hours in before the day job began.

Separate from the house, this remarkably airy room has stacks of books neatly piled up (many of which are international translations of his immensely popular teen fantasy series) and the slightly incongrous sight of a couple of uncocked air rifles, a deterrent to the squirrels and rabbits that make a nuisance of themselves in his garden.

He is yet to hit one of either species, but remains hopeful.

Unusually, he writes everything by hand before transferring it to a word processor, and the result is a peculiar mass just above the elbow of his left arm, a “writing muscle” that looks even more pronounced when he compares it to his right.

Also scattered about the room are drafts of the different projects he has on the go: three different film screenplays and a second novel that will pick up many of the characters and themes of The Secret Intensity Of Everyday Life, set nine years later. Most pressing is a draft of Indian Summer, which follows Lord and Lady Mountbatten, and the latter’s relationship with Nehru during the partition of India in 1947. As well as a film about the relationship between Harold and William in the run up to the Norman invasion, Nicholson is also re-working Nelson Mandela’s autobigraphy for the big screen.

“The politics of South Africa are immensely complex, but you take the most fascinating elements as your focus,” he says. “In many ways, it’s not real, it’s myth-making. To create the story, you fixate upon the fact that here is a man who decided to talk to his enemies and then to forgive them. You could write a thousand different stories about South Africa at that time, but you try to go for that emotional core.”

The enormous success of the film Shadowlands, which he first wrote as a television play, opened many doors for Nicholson, as did Gladiator, but a writer’s involvement takes wildly different routes.

Where Shadowlands was very much Nicholson’s baby, Gladiator (for which he was the third writer on the project) had far less of himself in, though he says his overarching theme of spirituality remained an important part of the film.

“When you write movies, you’re not expressing the contents of your soul, you’re providing the blueprint for a very expensive construction, and all the people who are putting up the money or risking their careers on it aren’t interested in my vision, only in what works.

“Because they want it to work well, they’re willing to pay well, so if you go into the business and you accept the money, you accept you’re now becoming a craftsman, and your place is not significantly different to say the cameraman.”

He says the stakes are high – the movie can flop, languish in perpetual development hell, and writers can be booted off a project with little ceremony, but the rewards can be commensurate to the risk – Nicholson’s success has seen him offered work on the Narnia films and Harry Potter, both of which he turned down because he doesn’t enjoy adapting other people’s books on the whole.

He was also offered the chance to work on Bond reboot Casino Royale, but overcame his love of Bond movies and passed because he didn’t think he’d do a good enough job.

Depite his obvious achievemnents, he says his failure rate is “about 50%”, and that his ultimate aim is to have a successful novel. His next bid will be a teen novel about first sexual experiences called Mad And Rich (the names of the principal characters). Perhaps anticipating the involvement of Jeremy Kyle or the Daily Mail, he’s keen to point out “it’s not dirty at all”.

“It’s my attempt to counteract that porn culture teenagers get so much of their ideas about sex from, which I think is very damaging. So this book is very real and based on real experience, which can be very loving.”

Whether it’s his work in film, stage or his books, Nicholson says he is constantly walking a tightrope between success and failure, but like one of his characters in The Secret Intensity Of Everyday Life, he has comes to terms with his slightly imperfect world.

“Whatever your line of work, there’s always somebody doing it better than you, so you can spend your life with this sense of frustrated achievement.

Or you can look the other way and see there are plenty of people who’d be thrilled to be doing what you do.”

*The Secret Intensity Of Everyday Life by William Nicholson is published by Quercus, priced 17.99