Saturday, May 14, 2016

My writing day / William Boyd / ‘I can only manage three hours’ writing before fatigue sets in’

William Boyd
Illustration by Alan Vest

MY WRINTING DAY

William Boyd: ‘I can only manage three hours’ writing before fatigue sets in’

The novelist on the two desks in his office, finding the perfect pen and looking forward to cocktail hour

William Boyd

Saturday 14 May 2016 00.00 BST

mong the many binary divisions that writers fit in to – raw or cooked, cowboys or Indians, town or country, etcetera – is that of larks or owls. I have a feeling that most writers are larks, starting their day early and winding down with a bibulous lunch. I’m very much an owl, however. It’s not that I sleep late in the morning, it’s just that my brain – my writing brain – seems to function best in the second half of the day, after lunch and on into the evening. So the morning is reserved for the mundane business of living – emails, admin, going for a walk, shopping, phoning, posting letters – and then after lunch (a sandwich, a bowl of soup, cheese on toast – nothing too copious) the day’s work really begins.

I write my first draft of a novel in longhand. I have found the perfect pen that goes by the bizarre name of a Rotring Tikky Graphic with a 0.2mm nib. It suits my tiny, near-illegible handwriting and I always write in spiral-backed marginless A4 notebooks – I try to keep my fetishes to a minimum. There are two desks in my study but I always seem to write on the one with the computer, perhaps because it has a view though it's an unexceptional one: a curving side street of terraced houses in Chelsea. Just out of sight is the house John Betjeman used to live in.

When I first started my life as a novelist I seemed able to write for hours – six, seven, eight – no problem. Now, writing my 15th novel, I can only manage three hours or so before brain fatigue sets in. It’s just like a plug has been pulled out of a socket and I have stopped – as if a battery has died. Maybe this decline will continue inexorably as I age further, but, anyway, three hours is not bad, and I always seem to manage a thousand words or so. I write every day – if I can; there is a life to be lived as well, after all – weekends included. A thousand words a day, seven days a week, is a good rate for me.

After I’ve finished the longhand draft, I take a break. The cocktail hour is looming. Wine, TV news, conversation, family, friends and food distract – a bit. Interestingly, I don’t require isolation or silence while I write – I can be interrupted by the phone or a knock on the front door – I just switch off and switch on again. Most evenings I’ll return to the study at some stage and type up that day’s writing on the computer.

A novel takes me about a year to write after approximately two years of figuring it out, plotting and researching. The working day, as the book progresses, takes the form of a slow crescendo. It doesn’t start any earlier, it just goes on longer – the inner owl takes over and, as the novel reaches its endgame, my evening session can go on past midnight into the wee small hours. Paradoxically, the more you’ve written of a novel, the more you find you want to write.

One great advantage of a longhand draft is that, in transferring it to the computer, every single word is written at least twice. Then the computer draft can be endlessly revised. Writing in longhand is important, I think – and not just because I’m a pre-computer novelist (I bought myself my first typewriter, an Olivetti, for my 21st birthday). In handwriting there is a vital head-hand-page connection that a keyboard and computer removes. When you write in longhand you’re unconsciously aware of aspects of your prose – such as sentence length, cadence, rhythm, repetition, prolixity – that I find keyboard writing doesn’t alert you to in the same way. Also you can see all the litter of the progress you’ve made that day – the scorings-out; the arrows; the insertions; the bubbles; the second, third, fourth choices. The page reflects the mental effort that the screen doesn’t. It’s a toiling, messy business writing a novel. I go to bed knackered and sleep well.

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