Forgetting time and money for a minute, I might as well start this blog with one of the things which held me back from writing my first novel for many, many years — the presumption that there was one right way to do it, and therefore a million wrong ways to do it. If only I could find that magic formula, I told myself, everything would be okay. Until I’d found it, there was little point in getting started.
NOT TRUE.
Because I’d procrastinated in the safe space of reading lots of books about other people’s ways of writing novels instead of actually doing some novel writing myself, I was numbed and overwhelmed by the array of possibilities I’d encountered when it came to establishing a writing routine, or a writing practice, or whatever you might like to call it.
Should I write during the day or at night? Work before dawn? During the morning? Over a hurried lunch hour? Across a long leisurely afternoon? In the evening, before or after tea? (That’s what I call my evening meal. I’ll do me, you do you.) Past midnight and beyond?
How long should I spend writing each day — the whole day? A few hours? Half a day? An hour, or less? How many words should I be producing per day? What does 1,000 words even look like? How long does it take to write that much? Is that enough for a day’s work?
Should I use a computer, or write by hand? Should I correct things I’d already written or should I save the editing until the end? Did I need to have character biographies in front of me, or maps of the world of the story? Was it essential to have a detailed synopsis before I started, or was I supposed to just have a sense of an ending and then courageously write towards it? How much or how little research was I required to have done? Wasn’t I meant to be making it all up from scratch?
If you aren’t sitting in a shed with a board across your lap like Roald Dahl did, are you even really writing at all?
My first novel, R.C., was heavily influenced in the beginning of its life by one of my favourite writers, J G Ballard. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen much about his writing routine, but if you trust in the Internet, it will usually provide.
So there’s this glorious exchange from The Paris Review #94 (Winter, 1984), an interview conducted by Thomas Frick:
INTERVIEWER: What are your daily working habits like?
BALLARD: Every day, five days a week. Longhand now, it’s less tiring than a typewriter. When I’m writing a novel or story I set myself a target of about seven hundred words a day, sometimes a little more. I do a first draft in longhand, then do a very careful longhand revision of the text, then type out the final manuscript. I used to type first and revise in longhand, but I find that modern fiber-tip pens are less effort than a typewriter. Perhaps I ought to try a seventeenth-century quill. I rewrite a great deal, so the word processor sounds like my dream. (…)
INTERVIEWER: How many hours a day do you put in at the desk?
BALLARD: Two hours in the late morning, two in the early afternoon, followed by a walk along the river to think over the next day. Then at six, scotch and soda, and oblivion.
INTERVIEWER: That sounds like the schedule of an efficient worker.
A few sentences later, the whisky bottle is back out again:
BALLARD: I used to start the working day once I returned from delivering the children to school, at 9:30 in the morning, with a large scotch. It separated me from the domestic world, like a huge dose of Novocaine injected into reality in the same way that a dentist calms a fractious patient so that he can get on with some fancy bridgework.
So when it was finally time for me to knuckle down to my own first draft, “two hours in the late morning, two in the early afternoon” became my mantra. I dispensed with the large scotch at 9.30 in the morning and with the scotch and soda at six, but I can report there was no appreciable negative impact on my output.
Far from it, in fact. Whereas Ballard set himself a target of about seven hundred words a day, I was averaging somewhere around the 3,500 or 4,000 mark — longhand, in a stack of A4 school exercise books with different coloured covers, and using black ink fine-liner pens that were hexagonal in profile. The pens’ edges were so hard that they soon bit into my thumb and middle finger really badly, meaning I had to resort to applying fabric plaster straps each morning to get me through the day.
