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| Jon McGregor by Alan Vest |
MY WRITING DAY
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
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