The Ideal Writing Day

Eventually, if you type anything at all, you will – of course – be asked about your typical writing day and you will have to say something, or be sneered and mocked during the kind of parties I don't attend.

What would your ideal writing day be like? There are those who would have us believe that we have to get up and write at the crack of dawn (ala Dorothea Brande) to get anything meaningful down on paper, and while this might be commendable,  what's perhaps more important is that we find our individual rhythms.

I very much enjoyed reading A.L. Kennedy's account of how she would ease herself into her perfect writing day (though she admits it is far from a typical writing day). 

A Hobo's Life for Writers

A.L. Kennedy issues a stark warning to wannabe writers ... and knows no-one will heed it :

... I do try to tell other people what it will come to – hence my occasional visits to Warwick University and its creative writing students. They want to write, they have application and vigour, they've all come on since I read them last and yet ... it would be unfair not to remind them of how horrible their futures may become. If they're unsuccessful, they'll be clattering through a global Depression with a skill no one requires, a writing demon gnawing at their spine to be expressed and a delicately-nurtured sensitivity that will only make their predicaments seem worse – and yet somehow of no interest to anyone else. If they're successful, they still may not make a living, will travel more than a drug mule, may be so emotionally preoccupied that they fail to notice entire relationships, will have to deal with media demands no sane person would want to understand and may well wear far too much black. (Yes, it is slimming, but unisex Richard III isn't always what the occasion demands. Trust me: experience is a painful teacher.)

Naturally, I don't believe anyone will be deterred by my mad-eyed rantings. Once somebody wants to write it's almost impossible to stop them without also killing them to some significant degree. Nothing beats that raging delight at three in the morning when sentence number 15 finally agrees to do what you want, and never has banging wiggly marks on to a computer screen seemed so heroic – even if you're simply ensuring that the orthopaedic surgeon ravishing your senior nurse in the sluice room doesn't seem implausibly limber and can meanwhile reawaken echoes of that summer afternoon with her funny uncle ... And if you think you might actually be doing some good, amusing someone other than yourself – making them less lonely, more alive, more informed – well, you're just not going to chuck that over in favour of crafting, long walks and a quiet life. Hence the number of regimes and leaders who have discovered that killing writers until they are entirely dead is a highly effective method of slowing literary output. And may angels and ministers of grace preserve the students and indeed myself from any shades of that. We may feel hard done by, but we're not doing that badly – for individuals trapped in a society intent upon eating its own tongue.

Desk Space

Following the sale of Dicken's desk the other day, Jane Sullivan in The Age meditates on our continuing fascination with the writer's desk. (How would you explain this vicarious interest?)

She mentions the ongoing series in The Writer's Room in The Guardian (not online - and I really hope there an eventual book) in which author's writing spaces are photographed :

Andrew O'Hagan is clearly proud of his desk's Dickensian connection: it used to belong to a Victorian lawyer's office in Doughty Street in London, next door to Dickens' place. O'Hagan has a "crazily tidy" room and he confesses to obsessive-compulsive tendencies: "Every day I write up the two or three biggest priorities on the blackboard, and, even if the tasks aren't completed, I wipe the board clean when I knock off."

Other writers are much messier. Clutter is the norm. Very few writers go in for state-of-the-art technology or cutting-edge design: most workspaces look like modest makeshift converted bedrooms or student rooms. They are crammed with books, family pictures, children's creations or mementoes of past triumphs that David Lodge describes as "ego salve". The authors often avoid PCs, bashing out their books on typewriters or getting down first drafts in longhand. There are quite a few huge, horrible chairs for bad backs. Some like a room with a view: others prefer a blank wall.

Colm Toibin thinks of his room as a cave: "I have left instructions that I would like to be buried here when I die or a bit before, the cave bricked up." His chair is one of the most uncomfortable ever made: "After a day's work, it causes pain in parts of the body you did not know existed. It keeps me awake."

Some writers don't have a designated workspace, or even a desk. A. L. Kennedy lies down on a monster black leather chair with her laptop in her lap, in a room the colour of blood.

The literary relic with the most resonance for her, she says is Henry Lawson's pen.

Kennedy's Big Day

Scottish author A. L. Kennedy has emerged the overall winner of the 2007 Costa Prize (narrowly beating Catherine O'Flynn). Her novel Day is about the after effects of war, and was written as a response to the invasion of Iraq and she says she set out to draw parallels, and highlight the difference in morality, between the two conflicts.

Day centres on a traumatised second world war tail gunner, and you can read an extract here.

Chair of the judges, Joanna Trollope called the book:

... a perfectly and beautifully written novel. ... a masterpiece ...

and declared Kennedy:

... an extraordinary stylist

Kennedy used her acceptance speech to make a plea for fair treatment for authors and issued a strong pro-literacy message. Her impassioned plea to her audience:

If you genuinely care about reading and books, defend them.

When Kennedy is not writing, she works as a stand-up comedian, and is also an ordained minister*. Find out more about her here.

*Oops. Got this sort of wrong. See Rob's correction in the comments.

Postscript:

Post-win, Kennedy is interviewed by Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian, and Fiona Sampson on the Guardian blog pays tribute.

I've also really enjoyed Ariffa Akbar's piece in the Independent which brings this unique, funny, haunted, complex woman to life. (I am much tickled that her strongest ambition now is to be allowed to write episodes of Dr. Who! I'd like to lobby for that.)