My writing day / Maggie O’Farrell / There is nothing so dangerous to good writing

 

Maggie O'Farrell
Illustration by Alan Vest

My writing day: Maggie O’Farrell

There is nothing so dangerous to good writing

‘There is nothing so dangerous to good writing as having too much time, too much liberty. You need the filtration system of being kept from your work.’

Saturday 17 December 2016

M

ost writers’ work happens when they are away from their desks, when they are looking the other way, when they are engaged with some other mundane task. The washing up, the folding of laundry, the school run, the debate with a small child over the merits and demerits of wearing of a coat in December.

This is, at least, what I try to tell myself. The idea that there is a typical “writing day” makes me laugh, with a slight edge of hysteria. Life with children precludes such planning, such routine, such predictability. Last week, for example, my writing mornings were disrupted and erased by, in no particular order: the cat being copiously indisposed on sofa and carpet; my daughter drawing a seascape of swimming lions on top of some notes I had made; one child sent home ill from school; and another requiring lifts to and from concert rehearsals.

All books are written against impossible odds; the odds just change as time goes on. I write around the edges, and always have. My first two novels were written while I was working full-time, the next in an odd, tractionless hinterland between giving up full-time work and having children. Then my son was born and I developed such skills as how to juggle a pen and a notebook while breastfeeding, how to find a cafe table with both space for a buggy and power for a laptop, how to silently and secretly entertain a toddler while simultaneously taking a serious phonecall.

The edges, however, work for me. I do believe that a book has its own engine that is always running somewhere at the back of your mind. When I was going over the final draft of my last book, This Must Be the Place, I became bothered by the fact that I had used the word “penumbra” twice. Penumbra is a beautiful word but you can’t use it twice, not even in a 130,000-word novel, so I spent days puzzling over synonyms. “Halo”? I asked myself. Not quite right. “Meniscus”, “aureole”, “veil”? Then one of my children was sick in the middle of the night and I was mopping puke off the floor at 3am when the word “corona” slid into my mind. Corona, I thought, with relief, with joy, as I shovelled soiled bedding into the washing machine.

Maggie O’Farrell: ‘I do believe that a book has its own engine that is always running somewhere at the back of your mind.’ Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

There is nothing so dangerous to good writing as having too much time, too much liberty. You need the filtration system of being kept from your work. You need to reach the keyboard in a state of hunger, of desperation. You need to sit down at your desk with a desire to unleash all that you have been mulling over, all those solutions and permutations and reframings.

Children are wonderful editors, not in the sense that they will go through your manuscripts with a red pen, but in that they occupy so much of your time and head that only the good words will make it to the page. It is only during periods of domestic distraction that the blind alleys, overblown passages and whimsical detours may be considered – and discarded.

Children are also very good at dragging you out of your imaginary world, at forcing you to engage with life. They have no truck with word counts, tricky metaphors, lexical conundrums, characters who won’t do as they are told. Make things with pipecleaners, is their solution to life’s problems. Paint me a nest. Help me find a dragon costume.

I am devoted to the practice of redrafting. I don’t plan too much but like to mould and alter as I go. In the mid-1990s, I went to weekly poetry classes given by the Irish-American poet Michael Donaghy. He gave us two pieces of advice that I still hold close. The first: to make every word pull its weight. The second: you will need scaffolding to build your writing inside but must remember to take it down at the end.

It’s a solace, when you are cutting great swaths through your paragraphs, to think of them as a necessary but disposable part of construction. The tricky bit is working out what is scaffolding and what is brickwork. One can be mistaken for the other but that, I tell myself, is what multiple drafts are for.

 Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be the Place has been shortlisted for the 2016 Costa novel award.

THE GUARDIAN