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| Fiona Mozley ‘I now have a career that suits my weaknesses as well as my strengths.’ Illustration: Alan Vest |
MY WRITING DAY
Fiona Mozley: I’m on the Man Booker shortlist and top of my fantasy football league
The debut novelist, Booker-shortlisted for Elmet, on the joys of daydreaming, stationery and electric guitars
Fiona Mozley
Saturday 30 September 2017
I
have never been one for routine. At my school, I was renowned for having the second to worst punctuality record in its forty-something-year history, eclipsed in that department only by my older sister. It’s true that I wasn’t always thrilled by the prospect of school, but it wasn’t this that kept me away. I would just lose track of time. I would get ready in the morning – have a shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, whatever – then would suddenly stop. I would fall into a daydream, a deep stupor, and would be entirely unable to pull myself out of it. I would race to catch up, but no matter. I received detentions, lines, letters home. I was even once threatened with expulsion, though my smug 16-year-old self knew this to be something of an empty threat – in all other respects I was a good student. But none of it did any good. When I fell into one of these dazes, I was lost to the world.
I am still like this. My ability to zone out infuriates my family and friends. It not only causes me to be late for things, or forget to complete everyday tasks; they can be speaking directly at me and I won’t hear them. I’m sure there’s something wrong with me. Something pathological.
Only now that I am, I suppose, officially a “writer”, I can get away with this sort of thing more. Daydreaming is now work. It is the time when ideas happen. Indeed, all sorts of aspects of my personality and daily routine seem justified now that they can be allotted a position in the “creative process”. I now have a career that suits my weaknesses as well as my strengths. Ideal.
When I started my first novel, Elmet, I wasn’t a writer. I had a full-time job and a lengthy commute. I would jot down bits and pieces here and there – on my mobile phone – and I would write for more prolonged periods in the evenings and weekends. After I had moved back to York to begin my MA and PhD, writing fiction took a back-seat but I would still return to it now and then, particularly when I had a pressing thesis deadline.
These days, I start the morning with a cup or five of coffee. It still takes me a while to get going, and my partner, who has generally walked the dog and commenced work on her PhD by the time I have finished my shower, will often come back into the bedroom from our shared study to find me sitting, staring into space, with a sock halfway up my foot. She will gently bring me back to the world and remind me to finish getting dressed, and slowly but surely I will clothe myself and begin to work. Oh, the invisible labour of writers’ wives.
I sometimes write on my computer and I sometimes write by hand. I have a serious stationery fetish and if I see a nice new notepad or pen I will have to buy it, regardless of whether I have finished the one I am currently using. There was a time when I felt guilty about this, but then I realised that if the very particular pleasure of writing on virgin paper meant that I managed even a few sentences, it was probably worth it, regardless of how wasteful it was.
When I write on my computer, there is, of course, the temptation of the internet. Email, Facebook and Twitter are prime culprits, but I must also admit to some other, more niche, distractions. I am a person who develops obsessions quite easily. Two of my serious interests are electric guitars and vintage cameras. So far, so hipster.
However, when I am really lost in procrastination, it is not just the playing of music or the taking of photographs that catches my attention, but the objects themselves. I can spend hours watching YouTube videos about the circuitry of different distortion pedals or the properties of different photo-negative developing agents. I tell myself this knowledge may one day find its way into a novel, and will therefore be useful, but I’m pretty sure it’s the kind of detail that any good editor would instantly cut.
My present obsession is fantasy football and, lately, writing has been punctuated by checking scores, transfer rumours and injury updates (yes, on the Guardian online). I am in a league comprised of the owners and members of staff of the bookshop I work at, along with their partners and extended families, and I am sitting at the top of that little league. My recent good news regarding the Man Booker prize shortlist has been met with unanimous joy. My success in our league, however, has not been.
Fiona Mozley's Elmet is on the Man Booker shortlist.
In brief
Hours: occasionally • Words: hopefully • Time spent emailing: divided by time spent ignoring emails • Work satisfaction: direct correlation to fantasy football points
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