My writing day began today at 3 a.m. I blame the worm.
If you are a writer, you know the worm. It’s that little voice that pipes up just as you are drifting peacefully to sleep or – worse still – when you suddenly find yourself awake in the small hours. “Here’s an intriguing plot twist,” it murmurs seductively. “Here’s a snappy bit of dialogue. Here’s a character you never knew you needed.”
Of course I fought it. How I fought it! I played word games; I counted bunnies frolicking in a sunlit meadow; I tried to recall what my Spanish teacher said about imperfect subjunctives – that usually does the trick. All to no avail. I was wide awake, and I just had to get to my computer.
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Getting up in the hours of darkness in our house requires negotiation. If it were just two of us in the bedroom, the exercise would be simple. Get up, creep downstairs in the dark, get writing.
But there is a third: our excitable and highly demanding Brittany spaniel. If I wake, she wakes, and thinks it’s time for a) food, b) a trip to the garden, c) cuddles. If I go downstairs I will be expected to feed her and then, like as not, she will dash upstairs and bounce on my sleeping husband with merry cries of “Get up and play with me!” Now my husband is a tolerant man, but this will not do.
And so my writing day, and it is a fairly typical one, goes something like this. I wake, as I have said, in the small hours. Ten minutes’ wrestling with the worm convince me that I simply have to write. A further ten minutes are wasted hoping I can sneak out of bed waking neither husband nor dog. Of course, this isn’t going to happen: Patrick slumbers on regardless; Purdey is up and at ‘em.
I silence the dog with craven promises of food, and we tiptoe downstairs together. I am careful to shut the bedroom door tight against later canine incursions. First to the office, to switch on the computer. Despite the wonders of modern technology it still takes a minute or two to warm up. Switch on kettle, feed dog, open the kitchen door for the dog to visit the garden, make a cup of tea. All the time the worm is nagging at me; my head feels like a hard-boiled egg as I try to retain all the deathless prose that is forming in my brain.
At last I am seated at my desk with a cup of tea and a (temporarily) pacified dog sitting on my feet. My fingers fall over themselves with urgency; they fly over the keyboard, spellchecker galloping behind me waving its fist. I ignore it – don’t bother me with details!
These are the moments that make it all worthwhile. Anyone who has tried it will tell you that writing is a lonely, and often a thankless business. I’ve done my fair share, and more, of sitting in despair in front of a lumpen piece of prose that simply won’t come right. No wonder I revel in the times when the ideas are pouring out faster than I can set them down and – for the moment at least – please me in the writing.
I type without stopping. This is the time to be indiscriminate, to put down everything just as it comes to me. I bounce from thought to thought, putting down here a snippet of dialogue, there a vivid description, there a note about how a plot could develop. I know that most of it will be dross, but I am hoping that at the end there will be the occasional small nugget as well.
After an hour or so I surface as if out of a deep pool, exhausted and exhilarated. The tea has gone cold, the dog has gone to sleep. Time for an intermission.
With a freshly made cup of tea I settle down in front of the television. If I am lucky, it is gone 6 o’clock so I can watch the news on the BBC breakfast programme. Charlie Stayt and Louise Minchin natter on companionably, but I only take in a fraction of what they are saying. It’s a spot of R and R before I get back to the real work of the day.
My TV break lasts half an hour or so. Usually this gives me another hour to work before the household is stirring. This second tranche of work is a lot more serious than the earlier, heady session. It’s time for a critical read of what I have been writing. Sometimes it will surprise me by being better than I had hoped. Often, though, it’s a case of reaching for the figurative blue pencil. Over-writing is every writer’s joy and bane. It’s fun to do, but it’s tedious for the reader on whom it is inflicted.
I spend an hour or so structuring, tightening and often re-writing. Paragraphs whizz up and down the page till they find their right place – whatever did we do before word processing?
By this time there are definite signs from above – the bedroom, that is, not divine inspiration – and I know it’s breakfast time. The morning routine is set in stone: breakfast, a little more time with the local news, then out for a walk with the dog. The day is filled with other demands, so I don’t usually get back to my desk until around 4:30, and then with none of the fine careless rapture that informed the morning’s efforts. The last push is the hardest. After a few hours away from my desk I come to it with a fresh eye: I polish, cut and polish again, ruthlessly, and, if I am really lucky, by the end of the day I have something I am reasonably pleased with to show for my efforts.
I count myself fortunate that I am not a novelist. Short stories, articles and the odd bit of comic verse satisfy the writer’s itch in me, and I doubt if I would have the stamina for a sustained effort. My writer’s day over, I can go to bed with a sense of accomplishment, and so to peaceful slumber… until the worm bites again.
