‘Pre-dawn literary analysis includes the leveling philosophy of Everybody Poos’ … Sarah Hall.
Illustration by Alan Vest

MY WRITING DAY

Sarah Hall: ‘Everything is subject to the priorities of single parenting'

Gruffalo, laundry, fishfinger sandwiches, writing, often no writing … the author on taking inspiration from her two-year-old daughter and short story writing

SARAH HALL

Saturday 15 July 2017

M

y two-year-old daughter gets up around 5.30am and likes to bring hundreds of books into my bed to read. I can usually negotiate a cup of coffee first, by which I mean a pot of industrial-strength stovetop espresso. Pre-dawn literary analysis includes the leveling philosophy of Everybody Poos and the alarming dearth of female protagonists who solve their own problems in children’s fiction. Currently, I’m judging the Man Booker prize – the hypotheses are not dissimilar.

Toddlers radically alter your concept of a working day, so I’ve recalibrated my notions of creative purpose. Often I have to wait to work, but hopefully this state of repose (let’s optimistically call it “implicit learning”) has a potent effect on what I do write.

Childcare permitting, I have sporadic windows in which to work, email and read – morning or afternoon sessions, daughter’s naptime, evenings. The latter is dangerous territory for writing, however, a place of frequent botchery on the page. Nor is owlish composition conducive to 5.30am awakenings. I don’t have an external office or home study, so I tend to roam the house setting up temporary work camps wherever the noise and play is not – none are fortified against surprise toy dinosaur bombardment. My systems need refining. I keep looking at the windowless, semi-derelict garden shed and the damp unconverted cellar, wondering whether eyestrain, hypothermia and Victorian-grade spores might be worthwhile payoff for a touch more focus and seclusion from the gales of laughter/feral howls.

For the last few years I’ve been working mostly with short form fiction. Intense, abbreviated work sessions and early years’ parenting mania are suited to creating short stories, it turns out. Those qualities of compression, distillation and existential lunacy, plus the necessity of being efficient, are in fact ideal metaphysics. Here is the new productivity score list. Number of words on the page is irrelevant. An hour’s uninterrupted work is a success. A completed story is a triumph. Movement on the new novel is miraculous. Inbox empty is impossible. A moment to sit with a glass of wine and mull my endeavours seems like heaven and about as unlikely. Everything is subject to the priorities and variables of unforeseen single parenting, as it must and should be.

 

Of the thousand and one commissions that might be exciting, time allows for almost none

I can participate in fewer events. In the last few weeks I’ve turned down work in Russia, South Korea, Croatia and Belgium, as well as all over the UK. Of the thousand and one commissions that might be exciting and worthy, time allows for almost none. But the better part of this year belongs to prize reading anyway. The reality is lots of literary projects and establishments are still not geared, financially, practically or politically, to support mothers who are writers. And – here’s your red rag, trolls – mothers who are writers often have very different experiences, work limitations and financial penalties, to fathers who are writers, as do mothers in all professions. Is the festival creche a radical idea? I’ve been horrified to hear of merit-based residencies for women I’ve nominated being awarded then revoked because somewhere couldn’t accommodate family. I always inquire, politely, about official policy when an invitation comes. What I would really like to do is set up a “Pro-Ma” website that commends the supportive and the progressive. But, time ...

The bottom line is, more than ever I desperately want to write. Self‑employment in any artistic field is a privilege, as well as hard won, and the requirement to support another human being in a vicissitudinous profession is excellent motivation to just get on with it, even in the smallest gaps. I want to write things my daughter will be proud of, not just jobbing pieces that pay the bills, but every working day hard, compromising choices must be made. I’m lucky that brilliant opportunities such as the Man Booker judging come along (insert fanfare and entry one on Pro-Ma).

Back to my actual working day: Gruffalo, cleaning unidentifiable effluents, toddler groups, laundry, park activity, fishfinger sandwiches with ketchup bombs, some writing, often no writing, keeping the house running, bath-stories-songs-bed routine, next on the teetering reading pile, collapse. A novelist I enormously admired wrote to me after the birth of my daughter saying that a child is the greatest blessing. Yes. Truly inspirational. Proximity to the most darling, imaginative of beings – the two-year-old running wild in the park with pants on her head, flailing a stick and shouting “I’ll save you cucumber-lizard” – is literature itself.

• Sarah Hall’s Madame Zero is published by Faber.

THE GUARDIAN