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Julie Hearn: Welcome to my world |
I wrote Follow Me Down under the stairs - not in a cupboard, I hasten to add, but in a very small corner-space with just enough room for my desk and a swivel chair. Had there actually been a cupboard under our stairs I'm not sure where I would have worked - in my bedroom, probably, which is never a bright idea because then my plots and my characters and tricky bits of dialogue monopolise my dreams and exhaust me!
I was actually perfectly happy writing under the stairs, but it wasn't ideal. There were too many distractions for a start - like food and coffee being just a few steps away in the kitchen; the sight of furniture in need of a duster or breakfast things waiting to be washed up; the arrival of post or a free paper or friends wondering if I fancied coffee and a chat.
I'm a sucker for distractions when I'm writing. I'll take any that are going, so being surrounded by lots of them wasn't good. My biggest and nicest distraction has always been my daughter coming home from school at around half past three. If I'm not on a complete roll I stop then, for tea and biscuits. Sometimes though, in those under-the-stairs days, I'd be intent on finishing just one more page, or on following some thread to the end of a chapter. And for a long time Tilly was great at quietly raiding the biscuit tin before tiptoeing into the sitting room to watch telly.
Then she became a teenager and discovered heavy rock.
Enough said!
When I got my first advances for Follow Me Down I said 'Right, Tilly, let's think of three things we want and get them!' (We'd been scrimping along on a combination of benefits and my student grants for so long that there was no way all of that money was going in the bank.)
Tilly wanted Sky television, new trainers and a trip to Paris so that is what she got.
I wanted a bright orange Le Creuset kettle, some expensive lavender bath oil and an office, so that is what I got.
My new office is in the garden. It is my den and my hideaway and my own private space and I love it! It's not huge. In fact it's a lot smaller than I envisaged because when I gave the builder the dimensions I wanted I wasn't thinking of, or allowing for, the thickness of the walls (two bricks thick all round, with room in between for insulation).
There's room for my desk, my computer, a day bed piled with needlepoint cushions, a filing cabinet, a couple of chairs and lots of shelves for my books. And I have a view of the garden now instead of a wall. Because I love pink and green, the walls are the colour of leaves, the ceiling is dark pink, and I keep pots of pink geraniums on the window sill.
In the summer, with the windows open, it's almost like writing outside. I can smell the jasmine that grows in a thick hedge all down one edge of the garden and hear my blackbirds splashing in the birdbath. When it rains a big puddle forms on the flat roof and pigeons come and party there. It frightened me to death the first time I heard them - they sounded like aliens landing!
Most weekdays, when my daughter is at school, I like to be in my office by half past nine in the morning. On good days I'll work through until lunchtime then spend the rest of the afternoon, until Tilly gets home, catching up on admin, doing the shopping or swimming at the gym (my swimming time is my thinking time -I can plot whole chapters thrashing up and down that pool!) I can work in the evenings, and all through the night if necessary, but tend not to unless I'm in danger of missing a deadline.
How many words I write in a day varies. Sometimes, life being what it is and distractions being what they are, I don't write anything. Other days I'm lucky if I get a couple of hundred words down before I have to be somewhere else, start feeling sluggish, or experience an overwhelming desire for a bacon sandwich.
One thing I'm happy about though, because it saves a lot of time, is I don't write more than one draft of a novel, or spend ages going over and over the last section I wrote, cutting great chunks out or changing the storyline so completely that the whole manuscript needs revising. I think that comes from having been a journalist. There was never time, in a news room, to tinker with a story, so what you wrote straight off tended to be your first and final attempt. It's not that I don't have time, now, to tinker with what I write - and I do tinker a bit, and add things here and there - it's just that I've learned to get the right words down, in the right order, without the need for lots of changes.
It may take me all morning to write a page I'm happy with but once it's done it's done. Slowly but surely - that's my way of working. Someone - I forget who - once said that writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can't see more than a little way in front of your headlights, but you can make very long journeys like that.
Sometimes I listen to classical music while I'm writing - Mozart or Bach - but I can't have the radio on, nor can I play anything at all with voices on it because even singing distracts me from the voices in my head and on the screen. I burn sage and lavender incense - except for when the jasmine's flowering outside my window. And I never answer the phone.
Article from Magpies magazine, published in Australia, September 2006 (PDF file, 768kB) (reproduced by kind permission of the publishers)