‘Writing a novel is like hacking at the rock face’ … Penelope Lively. Illustration: Alan Vest
MY WRITING DAY
Penelope Lively: ‘One of the pleasures of old age is the thought that I shall never see Heathrow again’
Saturday 23 September 2017
W
hat writing day? I am 84, for heaven’s sake. Which is not to say that I no longer write, simply that the concept of an ordered daily ritual is now out of reach. I look back – not with nostalgia, but with a kind of friendly interest – to those years when I would get to the desk by about half past nine and stay there till five or so, even if staring out of the window a good deal of the time.
Siddhartha Mukherjee: ‘Two hours writing, then a researcher knocks on the door with a pipette’
The author and oncologist on his red suede writing couch, his admiration for Orwell and his love of cell biology
Saturday 13 January 2018
B
y the time I sit down to write in my office, I’ve typically gone through several internal cycles of remission and relapse. I’ve probably finished my rounds in the cancer ward. Perhaps I’ve taught the red-eyed, exhausted overnight intern to recognise the difference between the drug rash from Amoxicillin (bright, angry, often harmless) and the innocuous-looking rash of immune rejection after a transplant (dusky, hazy, often deadly). Perhaps it’s eight in the morning now. I’ve had two shots of espresso. I might have written orders for chemo for a young woman with breast cancer, and – since her babysitter had to cancel this morning – I may have asked one of the nurses to distract a three-year-old daughter while another nurse puts an IV line into Mom’s arm. Then I may have scooted down to the pathology lab to look at the bone marrow biopsies that I did last week. There’s one man whose marrow shows a spectacular response to the drug that is on trial. Another patient has definitely relapsed. It’s barely midday, and my pulse has stopped, started and stopped about four times.
‘Green tea is good for the cholesterol, but bad for the self-respect’ … Roddy Doyle. Illustration: Alan Vest
Roddy Doyle: my work is fuelled by music, mitching and mugs of green tea
The bestselling author writes his novel in the morning, a play or column in the afternoon – and likes to sneak off to the cinema when nobody is looking
Roddy Doyle Saturday 9 September 2017
I wake early but don’t work. I like having the world to myself for a while. I make coffee – with an AeroPress: lots of stirring and shoving – and read until the rest of the house wakes up.
Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘I don’t have writer’s block, but am a chronic sufferer of “Jonathan block”’
This article is more than 7 years old
The author on canal boats, libraries and why he writes with a blanket on his lap
Jonathan Safran Foer
Saturday 29 August 2016
To mark the imminent end of summer, my boys and I recently went on a journey down the Erie Canal. Before being handed the key to our 12-ton narrowboat, the Oneida, we were given a shockingly brief and casual orientation. Much that was assumed obvious – “Obviously you tie your line around the cord in the lock, but don’t tie up, otherwise you’ll capsize” – was not only unobvious to us, but incomprehensible. When explaining the process of docking, the marina worker asked if we “knew knots”. Speaking on behalf of my kids, one of whom has Velcro shoes, while the other walks around with two snakes of laces trailing each foot, I told him we didn’t. He said, “Well, you know the saying.” I told him we didn’t even know that. He said, “If you don’t know knots, tie lots.”
Nicola Barker: ‘Each novel has its own specially designed notebook. These are sacred objects to me’
The novelist on why she loves marker pens, Post-it notes and notebooks – and why she is a ‘clucky, agenda-driven mother hen’
Nicola Barker
Saturday 18 November 2017 10.00 GMT
I
work on an old apple laptop that isn’t online – it’s heavy and the keyboard is worn. It tells you if a word is spelled incorrectly (in American English so all my Ss need to be Zs or the page is covered in irritable red marks) but it doesn’t suggest alternatives. Every so often a key locks and you’ll look down at the screen and see or It also likes to impose random gaps and spaces on to the text (in geometric boxes) that are impossible to remove so you have to copy the narrative and open a new document. When I completed my last book, H(a)ppy, I suspected that I’d need a new laptop and I bought one and began working on it but this one was online. And it was way more portable. So I began slouching on the sofa (instead of sitting at my desk) and working whenever I felt the urge.
Jon McGregor: ‘I have never been asked how I juggle writing and fatherhood’
The winner of the Costa best novel award on the surprising similarities between writing and training for an Olympic slalom
Jon McGregor Saturday 6 January 2018
Iread an interview in the New Yorker recently with Mikaela Shiffrin, one of the world’s leading slalom skiers, in which she talked about how little time she actually spends on the slopes. After accounting for the hours spent travelling between training runs, kitting out, warming up and sitting on chairlifts, even the most dedicated skier will struggle to get more than seven minutes skiing out of a training day. Contrary to the famous Malcolm Gladwell assertion that success requires 10,000 hours of practice, Shiffrin considers it the height of dedication to be achieving 11 hours of skiing over the course of a year.
In many ways, I like to think of myself as an Olympic medal-winning skier. Sometimes, when people ask how long it takes to write a novel, I wonder what they really want to hear. How long does it take to get to the bottom of the ski run? How much of that seven years was spent actually writing the actual text that went into the actual finished novel? In common with most people who work from home – and have more than one job, and have children in their lives – the mechanics of when and where I’m actually sitting at a desk doing work are complex and inconsistent. But even taking that into account, the work that actually happens at a desk is not always time spent actually writing. There are other things that happen.
There are other sorts of time, besides the writing time. There is thinking time, reading time, research time and sketching out ideas time. There is working on the first page over and over again until you find the tone you’re looking for time. There is spending just five minutes catching up on email time. There is spending five minutes more on Twitter because, in a way, that is part of the research process time. There is writing time, somewhere in there. There is making the coffee and clearing away the coffee and thinking about lunch and making the lunch and clearing away the lunch time. There is stretching the legs time. There is going for a long walk because all the great writers always talk about walking time being the best thinking time, and then there is getting back from that walk and realising what the hell the time is now time. There’s looking back over what you’ve written so far and deciding it is all a load of awkwardly phrased bobbins time; there is wondering what kind of a way this is to make a living at all time. There is finding the tail-end of an idea that might just work and trying to get that down on the page before you run out of time time. There is answering emails that just can’t be put off any longer time. There is moving to another table and setting a timer and refusing to look up from the page until you’ve written for 40 minutes solid time. There is reading that back and crossing it out time. And then there is running out of the door and trying to get to the school gates at anything like a decent time time.
(Fun fact: I have never been asked how I juggle writing and fatherhood. I’m not complaining; it’s nobody’s business, and nothing to do with writing. But I wonder what assumptions lie behind the question of juggling writing and motherhood coming up so regularly?)
I rarely manage a whole unbroken day at the desk. And it can be frustrating, sometimes. Once or twice a year I manage to get away somewhere and live like a hermit for a week, eating and sleeping next to a desk and talking to no one and getting a lot of work done. Imagine if I could work like that all the time, I think, then. Think how productive I’d be! But if my life was always like that, I suspect I’d have very little to write about. Those seven minutes that Shiffrin spends on the training runs each day are the culmination of everything else she does: the time she spends thinking about her technique, working on her fitness, weight training. Even the time on the chairlift is time spent planning her next run, assessing the snow conditions, observing the weather.
In this analogy, sharpening pencils and buying new notebooks is the same as weight training, thank you.
I imagine, however, that sometimes Shiffrin dreams of setting off from the starting gate and discovering that the training run is 10 times as long as she was expecting, and that she can get an hour of unbroken skiing under her belt, and suddenly everything else falls away while she puts all her concentration into this thing she has spent her life trying to get better at doing, the powder crunching beneath her skis, the wind in her face, the passing trees a faint blur; and when she finally reaches the bottom – where the crowds would usually be, but today there is no one – she lifts the goggles from her face and turns to the electronic scoreboard to see how she got on. Not quite good enough. Not quite what she was trying to do. The chairlift awaits. Time for one more run.
Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, published by 4th Estate, has won the Costa award for best novel of 2017.
In brief
Coffee: no more than two or three Hours at desk: eight, minimum Social media: apparently I tweet 7.8 times a day, which is odd because I don’t even know what Twitter is and have total discipline as a writer Self-deception: some
Julie Myerson … ‘I need to be able to lose myself when I am writing.’ Illustration: Alan Vest
MY WRITING DAY
Julie Myerson: ‘I am a solipsistic maniac who can think of nothing but the book’
The author and columnist on her powers of concentration, the importance of Pilates and the trials of co-existing with an inquisitive tabby cat
Julie Myerson
Saturday 30 December 2017
Iwrote my first novel at evenings and weekends, with an office job, two babies and another one on the way. I also had debilitating back pain and often had to lie down on the floor between paragraphs. I now wonder how I did it (a husband untroubled by childcare is the honest answer). These days it’s all very different but it still feels like the biggest luxury, to be allowed to think, write and work exactly when and how I want to. The only non-negotiable is twice weekly Pilates: if I didn’t stretch my body seriously and regularly, I don’t think I’d be able to sit and write.
Otherwise, my requirements are straightforward: a desk, a good chair, a screen and a door that shuts. I do need quiet (right now the bell ringers are rehearsing at the church next door and it’s not ideal). I also need it to be daytime – I’ve never been able to write a coherent word after about 6.45pm.
What I don’t really need is for a tabby to sit on my desk and stare at me or pat the cursor with her fat furry paw, but I seem to have that anyway. But I do need calm, or the appearance of it. I have never found chaos creative. I need to be able to lose myself when I am writing, and I can’t do that if I’m even slightly anxious about what might happen next.
I wake up, have coffee, do my meditation and the Guardian quick crossword (often simultaneously, which is not good), put on a wash, wipe the kitchen counters, send my children some annoying texts and answer emails. Which sounds boring but it’s vital – I can’t sink into my writing until I feel there’s nothing else pending, no one and nothing else to worry about.
Once I start, my concentration is absolute. Nothing distracts me. All my working life I’ve had to set alarms to prise me from my writing trance and remind me that kids need picking up or appointments need to be kept. But if this makes it sound as if I work very hard, I don’t. In fact the first months of writing a novel always feel like a con. I’ll tell people I’m writing something – and I probably am, or trying to, or thinking about trying to – but the so-called writing is as likely to be happening in my head, on the bus, on the backs of shop receipts, in the bath, even while talking to someone who (wrongly) presumes they have my full attention.
Once I’ve started thinking about a novel, it’s as if I’m hyper-sensitised. I am curious, open, alert to anything and everything. I daren’t pass up a single random detail or idea, just in case it turns out to be relevant. But at this stage of writing, I’m still laughably unproductive. I’ll tread water for pages and pages, sometimes spending weeks on a couple of (very bad) pages or even paragraphs, only to delete, delete, delete.
I’d love to be one of those writers who can do a whole draft and then rewrite it better, but I can’t. The only way I can find the story is by writing. And unless the last page I wrote startles and excites me – unless it feels, actually, as if someone who’s not me has written it – then I can’t move on in any way at all.
And even when I do move on, it’s still unlikely I’ll have any idea of where the novel’s going. I follow my instincts, almost always in the dark. If I knew what the book was, I doubt I would write it. The need to write comes from not knowing. It’s like solving a problem. I only write in order to discover what I have to say.
The second stage, though, is ferocious. Now I am mad, distracted, terrible to live with, a solipsistic maniac who can think of nothing but the book. I used to be slightly appalled at how a novel would suck up all my energy – physical, emotional, everything – but I’m used to it now. During this period my family and friends are saint-like, as I duck out of meetings, forget to answer emails, ruthlessly cancel on people. I will write for hours at a time at this stage, staying at my computer sometimes until I am in physical pain. But still I can’t speak about what I’m doing or show it to anyone until I am satisfied, or at least no longer embarrassed by it.
I’m finishing a novel right now and am still at that final, brutal stage. It doesn’t help that it’s Christmas. My poor family. The tree is up and people will be getting presents, but only just.
In brief
Hours: seven or eight a day right now, then I fall apart Words: I’m a deleter. A good day ends with less, rather than more Cups of coffee: three; espressos with almond milk, but no more or I’m unmanageable Instagram posts: I’m a Colourpop fiend. When I’m sick of words, I make pictures!
Judith Kerr ‘I’ve spent 94 years looking at things.’ Illustration: Alan Vest
MY WRITING DAY
Judith Kerr: ‘I’m still surprised at the success of The Tiger Who Came to Tea’
The creator of Mog on learning how to draw a tiger at the zoo, heeding the advice of her cat and still working at 94
Judith Kerr Saturday 25 November 2017
M
ine isn’t really a writing day, it is a drawing day and it varies according to the time of year. I can draw by artificial light, but I can’t colour or paint by it, so I always hope to finish a book before the clocks go back. In the summer it is wonderful, I can work until 9pm if I want to, but in the winter I try to get on with it in the morning. The summers are very carefree because I can go out for a walk during the day, knowing I can work the rest of the day.
I need to walk in order to think about work. I feel lucky to be alive at this time: I’ve had two cataract operations so my sight is fine and I’ve got a new hip so I can walk. I live in Barnes, west London, so I walk along the river or to the duck pond or into the village. At the moment, I walk after dark so as not to waste the light. I like it too: everything looks good in the dark. The other day I got to the end of a book, which I’d worked particularly hard on, I’d only had one day off in the last month, and though it’s always nice to finish something, this time I felt strangely triumphant. So I went out for a walk at about eight in the evening and suddenly there were fireworks going off all around me. I hadn’t realised it was Guy Fawkes night. All these fireworks were going off and the church bells started to ring. I thought: this is very kind, but it’s only a little picture book. It was such a happy thing.
It may be my 32nd or 33rd book. They say you slow down as you get older, but it seems to be the opposite with me. I am getting faster. Tom, my husband, died 11 years ago, and this is probably the first time in my life that I can work 24 hours a day if I want. I don’t cook, I mircrowave. I also think I am getting better at it, because the work has been so concentrated in the last years. I think there should be as few words in a picture book as possible, and they have to be exactly right, so I mull over the words while I walk, whether something should be an “and” or a “but”. Drawing, on the other hand, is solid application. I rub out a lot and redraw to get it right.
I work in an attic at the top at the house with a view over the common. The yellow trees across the road have grown so much in the 55 years we’ve lived here that they have taken some of my light. Every so often a branch drops and I get a bit more light; I think it is probably my influence on them. This attic is where I live really: every book I’ve ever done I’ve done up here on the same drawing table, which is collapsing a bit now. You come into this room and you become the person who does this work. It’s as though something folds round you – yes, here I am, now get on with it.
Listening to music on Radio 3 is a great help to get going. I use Winsor & Newton inks and crayons on top. I keep the crayons in different jars according to colour so I can find them quickly, and I like very soft pencils. You know when something has totally died on you and you can’t do any more. Although often the work I am doing is rubbish, you do have to go through the rubbish, until sometimes at the end you just get it right. These days I’m better at planning and I do a rough drawing in a sketchbook before I start. I’ve spent 94 years looking at things, so I have enough images of people and cats in my head that I can draw them. If I don’t know what somebody looks like in a certain position I draw myself in a mirror. I have a small mirror on my desk to look at the reflection of my hands, because I like to get hands right if they are doing something. I’m not good at trees, because I don’t seem to look at those enough. And other things like badgers – I don’t think I’ve ever met a badger – I Google a lot. It’s a huge help. I used to have to look endlessly through books to see what a badger looks like. I’ve Googled open-mouthed tigers and you get photographs showing exactly what their teeth look like. There was no internet when I wrote The Tiger Who Came to Tea so I spent days at the zoo drawing tigers.
Normally my cat, Katinka, who is all white with a tabby tail, appears when she thinks it is time to be fed. She’s always been good at judging when I’m ready to quit for the day. But since I published Katinka’s Tail she’s done something very strange: she comes up here and sits in my working chair. It’s as if she’s saying: this book is really my doing; you may have done a few drawings, but it is about me. When I tried to move her off she bit me. Katinka is Russian for Katy, she’s my ninth cat; Mog was our first. Cats are so strange and surprising that I thought I would do a picture book of all the mad things this animal did.
I’m still surprised by the success of The Tiger Who Came to Tea. I made it up for my daughter when she was two or three and I put in everything she liked. She was crazy about going out in the dark, for example. I used to tell her all sorts of stories and she was quite critical of the others and used to say “talk the tiger”. I’m very grateful. It got me started on picture books. I went to art school, never had any money, never had the right clothes, and I remember my mother and brother getting quite worried about me. The last thing that they expected was that I would be a success and actually earn some money. And I’m still amazed that people are willing to pay me for doing what I love.
I would be very sad and lonely if I didn’t work. I finished this book a few weeks after the last one was published, which is unlike me, and I’m already thinking about the next one. There is a new urgency to my working. Maybe it is like the disease, honey fungus, that trees get when they have an incredible display one year and look better than they ever have before. And then it kills them. Perhaps you get something like that at the age of 94, because, after all, I can’t rely on going on and on.
In brief
Hours: on a good day, 10.30 till about 5
Drawings: I’ve discovered rather late in life never to stop when you think you’ve finished; always start on the next thing so there’s something to work on the following day
Refreshments: endless coffee. It’s nice that they’ve decided it’s good for you now. I also have a Martini Rosso on ice with lunch. It gives me energy to keep going in the afternoon – at least that’s what I tell myself
‘Swimming is the best sport I know for reflecting on history’
Antonia Fraser. Illustration: Alan Vest
My writing day
Antonia Fraser: ‘I was forced to learn typing as a punishment for being uppish’
The award-winning author on morning rituals, the importance of a pleasant break at lunchtime and why she has not worked after dinner since 1968
Antonia Fraser 11 November 2017
A
close encounter with cats begins my writing day. Ferdy and Bella were originally Mayhew Animal Home rescue kittens; nowadays they have a way with technology that means that printing out overnight emails becomes a sophisticated version of cat-and-mouse. I eject them from my eyrie, as my writing room is known: they lie outside the door, hoping for another technological treat.
The room is on the fourth floor of the house, views both ways towards Southall and our beautiful garden square (my desk faces Southall) and was originally the nursery; so I changed the name firmly from nursery to eyrie to promote the notion of solitude.
Now the day will progress with total calm, won’t it, since the telephone bell is turned off, while the mobile is banished during the morning. I’ve also invested in a special computer for work, so that while I’m upstairs I do not receive those delightful distracting emails for which my baser self is secretly longing. I’ve always written on some form of typewriter, now a computer, since I was forced to learn typing on Saturdays at my convent school as a punishment for being uppish. In consequence I’m a touch typist – actually the most useful skill I ever acquired; so much for uppishness.
At this point in my day, I work with aforesaid total calm from about 9.30 until lunchtime. Ideally I then go out to a local Italian restaurant, preferably with someone who talks brilliantly about themselves, not totally impossible to achieve in London W11. I can then covertly mull over the morning’s work. I never work in the afternoon, preferring to go swimming in a local health club, for more mulling as I slowly and happily traverse the pool for 20 minutes. Swimming is the best sport I know for reflecting seriously on history. In the early evening I go back upstairs, but it will be for reading over the day’s pages, and correcting them, rather than something more creative.
I have never worked after dinner since 1968 when I was writing Mary Queen of Scotsand my then husband [Hugh Fraser] was away in his constituency. I took the opportunity to work until 4am. When I read it through in the morning, it was total rubbish. This taught me a sharp lesson. Harold [Pinter] was the exact opposite: he regularly worked all night or half the night or most of the night, depending on where the inspiration took him. In that respect we were, like many happy married couples, the embodiment of Jack Sprat and his wife.
The reason that this pattern of work-in-the-morning-only is something so deeply ingrained in me, is that I began trying to write history seriously when I had six children born in 10 years. I have actually written all my life, but history was It. So I devised a way of working like a bat out of hell, or anyway a bat out of the nursery, the moment I could cram the children into cradles, kindergartens, schools ... with the wild hope they would stay there. (There are wicked stories of notices on my door saying “Only come in if you have broken something”, which I utterly deny.) Under the circumstances, I never ever suffered from writer’s block.
Today the discipline remains. I still feel odd if I don’t work in the morning, and if I am not alone in the eyrie (with Ferdy and Bella outside). The computer is quite companion enough: “Dear Google, what year did Robert Peel die?” So much easier than combing the four biographies of Peel I possess, looking at me reproachfully from the bookshelves that wallpaper the room. Although over the years I have collected reference books to which I am profoundly grateful, such as The Historyof Parliament in seven volumes (available online, but for serious work I still prefer cuddling up to a heavy tome), which was invaluable for my last two books.
I will end on the ideal break, since every routine needs the occasional interruption. For me, this would be attending a literary festival crowded with amiable well wishers, who have only one ambition, which is to buy my book at the end of the talk. For their sake, I will put up with the first question I am now most frequently asked: “Lady Antonia, are you still writing?” The answer is: “Yes. What else to do with my day?”
In brief
Hours: three ferocious, two milder Words: 3,000 maximum, three minimum Refreshment: a glass of pinot grigio at lunch to celebrate if things have gone well, and console if they haven’t