Saturday, October 28, 2017

My writing day / Yaa Gyasi / ‘I write a sentence. I delete it. I wonder if it’s too early for lunch’

Yaa Gyasi
Illustration by Alan Vest

MY WRITING DAY

Yaa Gyasi: ‘I write a sentence. I delete it. I wonder if it’s too early for lunch’

The Ghanaian-American novelist tries to recreate the feeling of working on her award-winning debut in ‘the dungeon’, a dank nook in her first apartment

Yaa Gyasi
Saturday 28 October 2017 10.00 BST

recently had a prolonged phone battle over a desk I had ordered and not received. Online, it said the desk had shipped, but weeks passed and nothing. I would call, repeat my story to the customer service rep du jour and be greeted with commiseration, as though they too didn’t quite understand how their shop worked. Maybe they didn’t. All I knew was that, after a year of nearly nonstop book touring, I had got it into my head that I needed this desk in order to start writing again and the fact that I didn’t have it yet was sending me into hysterics.

About a month or so in, after being told a delivery date and then waking up that day to a note online that said my delivery date had been cancelled “per customer’s request”, I really lost it. I told the customer service rep that it was news to me that I had cancelled this delivery, to which she replied that they had called me and left a voicemail. That was news to me, too.

After the call, I cried for about an hour, which probably sounds crazy to anyone who isn’t a writer, who isn’t accustomed to the kinds of irrational bargaining and ritualising that accompanies a writing practice and, yes, a writing space.

Usually, my irrational bargaining goes something like this: I start working at around 10 if I’m feeling motivated, 11 if I’m not. I reread the work from the day before and/or passages that I think I got right in order to try to set the tone. I write a sentence. I read it aloud. I delete the sentence. I look at the clock and wonder if it’s too early to think about lunch. I tell myself that, if I can make it to 300 words, I can break for lunch. I write another sentence. This one I might like. If I’m lucky, it leads to a second sentence. I think: “What is the point of all of this? Is anyone truly happy?” I delete the second sentence. I check my email. I have 15 new ones. I respond to them in my head, but don’t actually respond. I write a few more sentences. I get seven new emails. These ones following up on the emails that I didn’t respond to a few days ago. I think: “What exactly does it mean for something to be ‘urgent’?” I plead with myself to write at least another 200 words. On the best days, I stop pleading, stop bargaining and watch-checking and fall into a rhythm so satisfying that I simply forget I’m working. So much of my writing day feels like well-digging. Sometimes I dig 200ft down before coming back up, dry. Every day I search for water.

The desk helps, now that I have it. I’ve stacked piles of books that I love on it to act as talismans. They help, too. The desk makes me feel like I’m going to work, even though work is located in a cramped but bright corner of my living room. I wrote much of Homegoing in a writing nook I set up in the Iowa City apartment my parents and I used to call “the dungeon”, because of how dark and dank it was. They had driven 11 hours from Alabama to Iowa to help me set it up. The desk I chose then was cheap and ugly, but I didn’t mind. It was my first time living by myself. Every day I would wake up in the dungeon, head to my nook, sit at my desk and feel proud and productive and contented. I’m trying to recapture that feeling.

These days, I’m away more often than I’m home. I’ve never managed to get any real work done on an aeroplane or in a hotel room. How do other writers do it, the ones who seem to have a new novel every year and are constantly on tour? I used to think of myself as someone with a great deal of discipline, but I lost it in the air somewhere over the Rocky Mountains. Now, instead of discipline, I have a desk, and every day that I sit at it I dig a little deeper. At some point, I get deep enough that suddenly, amazingly, I find it – the great rush of water that I had hoped and pleaded for.

•Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing is published by Viking (Penguin, £8.99). To order a copy for £7.64, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.