Breakfast and CNN. Wrote Babel for an hour1. Rewriting The Suicide Essay.
This is not very much. One hour. But it’s keeping going. It’s Isak Dinesen’s ‘Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.’
When eventually young-Toby becomes a full time writer — in around six years from now — he’ll write for three or four hours most days.
Rarely, toward the end of a novel or at the beginning of a story, he’ll write seven or eight hours. His record is probably eleven.
Having written around day jobs, and not being an alarm-clock-setting kind of person, he’ll sit down at the desk in the afternoon or evening. That’s how he writes his first published novel, Beatniks. Sometime he’ll stay up until one or two in the morning. He likes writing at night.
But fairly soon he’ll realise that this late start leaves too much unused time during the day, and also leaves him open to things going wrong, becoming annoying. When he works in the bookshop, it is customers who’ll get him so angry that he can’t work. When he’s free most of the time, it’s himself. And also, if he gets invited to a launch party or goes out on a date, that’s a whole lost day.
And so, when he reaches his next couple of novels, Corpsing and deadkidsongs, he switches to being a morning writer; or a hopefully-morning-starting-writer.
This means that his mood is more likely to be neutral. He hasn’t been intruded upon.
Today, when I’m asked for advice about a writing routine, this is what I’m remembering — Young-Toby’s discovery of his best routine.
My concentration, I know, is destroyed by the screen of my phone; even seeing that bright grid of twenty-four ingratiating apps starts the fragmentation. Chess. Weather. Notifications are off. Messages get through. Checking the news is like sticking a hand blender in my ear and pumping the button.
But, hey, I’m pre-internet.
Some writers, I know, think this aversion is prissy. These are the conditions we have to deal with. Our time is screentime.
I sometimes teach residential writing courses for Arvon, at their deep-in-the-countryside centres. The Hurst, Totleigh Barton, Lumb Bank. It used to be that the attending students didn’t have wifi. I thought this was a good thing — a break from info-inflow to allow them to concentrate; but several of my co-tutors thought it was artificial, and a bit cruel.
Evil laugh.