What's a typical day's work like for you?
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Now that I'm writing full-time, I've had to devise a proper timetable for myself in order to get any work done. Without
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some kind of schedule, I'm quite happy to fritter my time away - it's very easy to do if your office is in your house and
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there's no boss to shout at you if you're late.
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I get up around 7.00am and start work an hour and a half after that. I need that first hour and a half to wake up:
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despite the early rise, I'm much more an evening person than a morning person, and it takes me a long while to get
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into my stride. (I don't really feel like I'm fully functioning until about two in the afternoon. Given the chance, I happily
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stay up until three or four in the morning - though of course than means I get no work done the next day, so I have to
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be stern with myself during the week and save the late nights for the weekends.)
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On writing days, I do three hours in the morning and three in the afternoon. That's as much as I can manage without
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starting to write rubbish (and even so, it's no guarantee! I almost always end up rewriting my work quite substantially.)
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The gaps are filled with office jobs (I have to write letters and make phone calls, keep in touch with the other people
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involved in any film or TV project I'm working on, and so forth).
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Writing days are Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I'll write on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well, but most weeks
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one or both of those days are used going to meetings with various film and TV people - having script meetings,
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pitching ideas, 'networking' and so on. These things would expand to fill the whole week if I let them, which is why
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I've had to start telling people that I can only manage meetings on two days of the week: otherwise, I'd never get any
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writing done.
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Exactly how I approach a writing day depends on the material I'm writing. Screenplay writing works well in short,
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concentrated busts: I'll do three hours and then leave it, either to move on to another project or to do something
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related but different - perhaps planning the next sequence of scenes or something like that. Novel writing works
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better if I take the time to immerse myself in it, and so I find it better to spend the whole day working on a section.
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I find it trememdously useful to finish the writing day by sketching a few quick notes about where the passage or
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scene I've just written goes from this point. These notes are invaluable the next day: when I pick up the project, they
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'kick-start' my imagination, reminding me immediately what I was thinking at the end of the previous session, when I
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was really involved. This way I have much less mental gearing-up to do before I can continue. (Top)
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Do you write longhand or on a computer?
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I wrote my first three manuscripts longhand, on A4 file paper, before typing them up on a manual typewriter. (These
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were the three that never got published.) After the Hole was written half-and-half longhand and on a computer - an
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Atari ST, actually, running a word-processing program that came free on the cover of a magazine. (I mention this to
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prove that you don't need thousands of pounds worth of equipment to get published!)
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Once I started working on a computer I was hooked. By the time Sophie was published, I had enough money saved
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to buy an Apple Macintosh (the Atari was relegated to music sequencing tasks - a hobby of mine). I've stuck with
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Macs ever since. I find it far easier to work and edit onscreen while I write, and there's something subliminally
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reassuring about seeing printed pages at the end of the working day. Moreover, there's simply no choice for script
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work: I have to conform to screenplay layout conventions and that dictates a computer.
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For anyone who's interested, I use a program called Nisus Writer for novel-writing and all general word-processing
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tasks. It's smaller and faster and infinitely more intuitive than Word, which I roundly loathe. For screenplays, I used to
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use Nisus (customised with many macros to handle all the formatting), but have recently switched to Final Draft,
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which is a specialised screenwriting program. A lot of production houses have it, so I can email files to them and they
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can print them out, and it handles the irritating minutiae of script layout and handling automatically. (Top)
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Do you have any writing rituals or superstitions?
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John Steinbeck, an author I like and admire very much, used to insist on writing his novels in longhand using black
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pencils. He only liked the ones which were round in cross-section, not the hexagonal ones, and he wouldn't use
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them once they got too short: they were donated at that stage to his sons, for picture-drawing purposes. Plenty of
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writers have some kind of little supersitious ritual that gets them going. However, I'm not a superstitious person -
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actually, I'm pretty much a sceptic generally - so I don't have a lucky pen-holder or anything like that. As far as rituals
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go, I don't do anything that is extraneous to the process of writing - by which I mean that my only rituals are things like
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sitting for a while and getting back into the mood and setting of the story before I start to write, which I think probably
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isn't a 'ritual' so much as just good writing technique. (Top)
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Do you plan your stories or just 'go for it'?
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I am learning to plan my stories more and more.
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My early novels were all written 'on the fly', as it were: I started with one basic idea and just started writing from there,
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often with no clear idea of where the story would end up. This approach has one advantage - it keeps the writing
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spontaneous and keeps you, the writer, interested - but the overwhelming disadvantage is that you lose a great
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measure of control over what you're doing. In every case, I would get half-way through the book (or further) and then
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realise that I'd got it all wrong. The process of writing served to develop and extend the initial idea until I could see
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where I should have started the story in the first place.
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This is, obviously, very uneconomical in terms of effort: I was working out my stories as I went along, and then going
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back to rewrite them from the beginning in the light of what I'd learnt. It would, I gradually realised, make far more
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sense to plan them out properly to start with, and reach the same conclusions without having to write sixty or eighty
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thousand words to do so.
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This is exactly what I tried to do with The Dandelion Clock. When the idea for the story came to me, I didn't really have
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time to embark on writing it straight away: I was teaching full-time in a very demanding environment. I made the
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decision to wait until my teaching job was over, which it would be at the end of the academic year, and then to take a
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whole year out to write the novel. (I'd already had the idea of taking some time out, and so was saving towards it. This
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just cleared up exactly what I would do with the time.)
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In the end, I spent about eighteen months planning and thinking about the novel - a far greater amount of up-front
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work than I'd done for After the Hole or Sophie, both of which had been extensively revised. It did pay off. The
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characters and the setting of the book were, I think, far better defined by the time I came to write it, and I had a far
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clearer idea of what impact I wanted the book to have. (Ironically, I then wrote for three months before realising I'd got
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it all wrong, and had to start again - but what I'd got wrong was actually a stylistic thing, rather than a plot or character
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thing, so I suppose I coudn't really have foreseen it.)
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Although it's tempting to launch straight into telling a story the moment you've got the idea, I think it's far more
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worthwhile to spend some time living with and exploring that idea, so that it communicates more richly and fully when
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you do write it out. (Top)
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