Non-writers are endlessly fascinated by how we actually do the thing: how, as Margaret Atwood puts it, we get our slippery double to commit the writing. I think it's actually an unanswerable question, though Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead comes closer to pinning it down than most. But I suppose it's hardly surprising that one of the questions which comes up at readings and festivals is 'How do you write?' (It comes up among aspiring writers, too, but that's more about wanting to find and try out other possibilities for their process.) 'How' could be about pen or computer? Cheap pad or beautiful notebook? Paper or screen? I write first drafts longhand, but I do rather fancy the idea of a digital pen and a handwriting recognition programme, to save me the bother of typing up. Only that's an important stage of my process, so maybe not. Regularly or in bursts? Morning or evening, desk or lap, kitchen table or sofa cushion? Tea or coffee? Bourbon or red wine? Wait for the Muse, or Just Show Up? The latter is beginning to get interesting, because it's beginning to get close to something about actual process.
But I think quite a lot of people are surprised that I say that I write for four hours, which is ten pages, which is 1300 words. It sounds a bit cold-blooded, doesn't it, for a kind of writing which, as Libby Purves puts it, "springs irresponsible and unfettered from every soil." (Do read the piece: it's the best thing I've read yet about the mistake fiction makes when it tries to pretend it's non-fiction). It's true that I'm a shitty-first-draft person, so as long as I keep writing it doesn't much matter, at this stage, what the words are. I have friends who can't move on from a page till it's perfect, and then scarcely visit it again. The 1300 words is because 130 words happens to be what fits on one page of the notebooks I use. The ten pages is a nice round number, and the four hours is as long as I can go before my brain starts to feel fried. And if I don't sit down for a set time, it's just too easy to not write a novel. If you wait for something to occur to you, if you allow yourself to do something else much more urgent, it's too easy to convince yourself that there's nothing to write today...
Since I plan my plots all the way through, by chapter, albeit in the barest, most skeletal detail, I usually know what needs to happen in the next chunk. And that next chunk has a funny way of turning out to be about ten pages long. Not always, obviously, because things change as I write, and there are lots of extra bits and crossings out, and so on. But roughly. When I first realised, I worried that it was too formulaic, but one of the good things about having written so much is that I do, these days, trust the alarm bells in the readerly half of my writerly attention, and they weren't ringing. And what's really interesting is that, because I start out on each 1300 word chunk thinking, 'Okay, what needs to happen in this?' and looking at the plan, each morning's work has a goal of plot, as well as a goal of numbers of words: in the back of my head, as my characters start to speak and move, is where they're starting, what they're trying to get, what's getting in the way, and the place I need them to end up. (Though of course sometimes they end up somewhere else.)
I think what I'm saying is that this is another time where we think in terms of the product - the number of words, the story on the page - but an accidental product of the process which suits me for other reasons, turns out to generate much of the micro- and midi-level narrative drive of my plot. I suspect that if I said to myself, 'Now, make sure you've got narrative drive in the next bit,' it wouldn't work nearly as well, because it would be much more self-conscious. As so often, getting the process right, which seems such a mechanical business, paradoxically, frees your own sense of storytelling, your own characters, to work as they do best.
