Saturday, May 20, 2017

My writing day / Geoff Dyer / ‘At the first sign of sleepiness I commit absolutely to a nap … I lie down and force myself’

Geoff Dyer
Illustration by Alan Vest

MY WRITING DAY

Geoff Dyer: ‘At the first sign of sleepiness I commit absolutely to a nap … I lie down and force myself’

The writer on his search for food and the importance of playing tennis twice a week

Geoff Dyer
Saturday 20 May 2017 10.00 BST

live like a hunter-gatherer without the wandering or the contentment anthropologists claim is the defining feature of such societies. I’m always hungry, always out foraging – in a transactional sense – for food. I remember reading somewhere that the best time for writing is in the morning when you have easier access to the unconscious – ie when you’re half asleep – but because of the eight-hour time difference, my day in Los Angeles starts with emailing so I can have easier access to people in London, before the working day there ends.

This alone is enough to destroy the day at the very moment it begins. The sun sets as it rises, as the pre-digital Hemingway didn’t quite put it. Next I prepare orange and carrot and apple juice for myself and my wife. Making this takes 10 minutes, cleaning up afterwards another 10, while the interval of consumption lasts five seconds, max. We glug it down so that we can hurry out for breakfast at Gjusta, our local cafe. We go there every day, even when we don’t feel like it. Some days we talk about going somewhere else and then, as we sit down, one of us will remember that we’d intended to go somewhere else but the tug of habit always proves too strong.

After my wife goes to her office, a day of uninterrupted work yawns ahead. Musicians wake up knowing what they want to do each day: they want to play music, can’t wait to play music. Many writers dread the idea of writing but force themselves to do it. I’m not like that. Built up over 30-plus years of working at home, the habit of self-discipline means that at the first sign of sleepiness I commit absolutely to a nap. Some days I don’t really feel like sleeping but I lie down and force myself. The drift into a nap, steeping my senses in forgetfulness, is lovely; emerging from it is awful as I realise I’m behind schedule: late for my elevenses. Undeterred, I hurry to the aptly named Intelligentsia for a reviving cappuccino.

It’s full of idiots writing film scripts on their Macs, but I’d as lief work in public as I would take a dump so I hurry-trudge back home, wishing I hadn’t had a coffee because it’s made me: a) desperate to go to the toilet, and b) hungrier than ever, so, after a quick stop at home (see a, above) still more time is wasted as I trudge somewhere for lunch, but the place I trudge to is exactly the same place I’d trudged to for breakfast: Gjusta, where the lunch-line is always huge but I have to wait because there’s nothing in the house except oranges and carrots.

To make up for lost time I scarf down my soup, buy some bread and trudge back to my desk. Maybe I do some work in the writing sense but more and more time is spent either just administering my life or attempting to un-fuck things, trying to prevent things that have gone wrong from becoming full-blown disasters.

Needless to say, this constitutes an ongoing, incremental disaster as prevention assumes the symptoms of that which it is trying to alleviate. I am talking, I suppose, about tennis, about the way that continuing to play compounds the weaknesses that constant play is intended to overcome.

But it’s only while I’m playing tennis, by the ocean, under the cloudless sky, that I feel I’m living the life of the writer to the full. Writers who don’t play tennis twice a week are not writers at all, they’re just faking it. That’s a fact. Another fact is that I trudge home from tennis starving and exhausted. I shower, scarf the bread I’d had the foresight to buy earlier, wrap an ice-pack around my elbow and collapse into something deeper than a nap, more like a half-hearted coma.

After this I feel both sharp as a pin and slightly fuzzy, mainly at the edges, but in the aptly named dead centre of my brain too. I do a bit of work, the amount that a mum with a full-time job and two kids could have managed by 10 in the morning. Failing that, I contemplate the most remarkable thing about getting older: the sheer acceleration of time. Sometimes I just sit for an hour, feeling time almost as a physical force. Even sitting motionless at my desk I can feel it blowing back my hair as though I’m in an open-top car, careering towards oblivion.