The literary world rejoiced this week at the news that Naomi Campbell is to publish the diary she wrote while serving time at a sanitation facility in New York, a period during which she is said to have found “solace in sweeping”.

Much of the world’s great literature was written during or after a period of penal servitude — Pandit Nehru went as far as to say “I would recommend prison to aspiring writers” — and, as this exclusive extract from Naomi’s diary shows, she is both awed by the burden of literary history and exhilarated by the prospect of competing:

Monday One of the hard things about writing a book is organising your material. When I wrote my first novel, Black Swan, I got someone else to organise it for me. And also write it. But that’s because I am so busy, unlike people like Charles Dickens, who just lie around all day, whereas my mobile never stops ringing. Except when I smash it sometimes on people’s heads.

So I thought I might just write about one day, which is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn did with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, probably because he was just so busy, no doubt modelling important hats and stuff like me. If you thought it was a bit lazy of him not to at least write about a whole week or something, it’s because you just don’t understand how busy famous people like us are.

Doing six days cleaning in New York is basically the same as being committed to a Soviet labour camp for your whole life, so I thought I might call it One Day in the Life of Naomi Campbellovich. But when I said this to my agent she thought I had said One Day in the Life of Naomi Campbell, a Bitch, and said she was glad my experience had brought me such self-knowledge.

So I hit her with a really big phone. One of those old ones from the ’80s. They have a really good heft to them and when you whack an employee with one, let me tell you, she stays whacked. Although it doesn’t take photos.

Tuesday Now I’m thinking maybe I should write a huge, two-volume fiction mocking the hollowness of the chivalric idyll and inventing the very European novel itself as I go. But I don’t have time. It was all right for Cervantes, he was in prison for years. Being Latino, he probably had a huge arse and looked bad in jeans so never got much work, unlike me. That’s probably why he made Don Quixote so thin.

Wednesday Maybe an autobiography. Hitler wrote his in Landesburg Prison after the Munich Putsch and he wasn’t even a model. He basically wasn’t tall enough. And also a lot of the modelling agencies were run by Jews. At least that was his excuse.

People called him bossy, but sometimes you have to be. After the war the Germans were all, like, “I was only following orders”. Which is exactly what you want your staff to follow. And not give you lip, or lose your favourite jeans.

Thursday I decided to write poems as they’re shorter, so I read some that Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in prison (he is the patron saint of supermodels because he invented fags). There’s this one where he’s like, “Give me my scallop shell of quiet . . .” and I’m like, that’s probably why he was in prison: because he told his PA to bring him this scallop thing and the lazy cow was too busy reading Hello! magazine and so he’s decked her with his phone.

And then he’s like, “Even such is time, which takes in trust/Our youth, our joys, and all we have/ And pays us but with age and dust.”

He only had to do dusting! No wonder he was in the mood to write poetry. While I share his general contemptus mundi, I’d like to see him expressing it so languidly after a morning spent scraping a crusty toilet bowl with a plastic nailbrush.

And anyway, Raleigh knew he was going to be executed in the morning, which means it doesn’t matter how you look, whereas I’m going to have to face the paparazzi. And if I don’t look great they’ll be like, my God, Naomi’s turned into a dog!

Friday I’ve been reading The Prince, which Niccolò Machiavelli wrote while he was in prison after being wrongly accused of plotting against the Medicis. He was probably just misunderstood by the media, like me, and was actually a well nice person.

There’s this bit in the book where Machiavelli’s like, “It’s better to be feared than loved”, which is what I’m always telling people. But otherwise it’s properly boring. I don’t know who he got to write it for him, but he should have fired them. Or at least whacked them with a phone.

Saturday Oscar Wilde is another one. He wrote The Ballad of Reading Goal. But I don’t know anything about football.

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