My writing space is not here. In fact it’s anywhere but here. I don’t find it easy to settle down to writing at home, so I tend to be one of those cafe writers. You know the ones with their laptops and their carefully-paced consumption of one-drink-per-hour, hogging the table by the power point closest to the window for the decent light but furthest from the door to be out of the draught. The ones whose orders the barristas know by heart. I’m one of them.
Since I’ve been writing in cafes for a while now, most of what I’ve published over the last ten years or so has been at least partly written in one or other of the cafes I use. I’m proud of everything I’ve written, most recently my novel, Queen of Clouds, which is currently on submission.
Over the years I’ve built my writing into my working week as well as my weekends. I write in a cafe for up to an hour before going in to work every morning, and then have another stint at lunchtime. At weekends I’ll spend somewhere between two and four hours in the cafe across the road from our flat.
I listen to music all the time when I’m writing. I’ve got a playlist of writing music on Spotify that contains a collection of instrumental music such as movie soundtracks and abstract compositions. The big thing for me is that it acts as a barrier to the outside – in effect, becoming the walls of my writing space – without itself being distracting. So: no words, no hugely distinctive melodies. Currently my list contains work by Max Richter, Johann Johannsson, Dario Marianelli, Olafur Arnalds, Poppy Ackroyd and Mogwai.
The biggest distractions for me while writing are people talking and the internet. I use music to cut myself off from my environment and I use a phone app to make myself focus for 25 minutes in every half hour which seems to work pretty well. The only thing I can’t write without is tea. Which tends, I think, to make me look like a bit of a cheapskate when there’s so much fancy coffee on offer in the places I choose to work in, although the reality is that I’m simply not a huge fan of coffee while tea runs hot and steaming in my veins
The two most enjoyable things about writing for me are 1/ creating things that have never existed and 2/ making the words on the page sound good. As a reader myself invention and craft are what I value above all else in a book and nothing beats the feeling of reading something back that I’ve written and being surprised, even delighted, by the art I’ve made. Knowing that readers are going to have that same experience. The least enjoyable thing about writing is making the little bits of logic all fit together. The longer the story is the worse that is, and you find yourself constantly stopping to check whether what you were just about to write clashes with something already in the story, or might clash with something in the future. That’s such a frustrating experience.
I’ve not long started a new novel (currently) called The Poisoner’s Road. It’s more of a traditional style fantasy than I’ve done before and features a wandering poisoner master, a runaway warrior and a holy transcriber joining forces to save a sculpted forest city under seige by an army of napalm-filled paper golems. Among other things. It’s keeping me busy anyway.
Neil Williamson is a writer of short stories and novels. His most recent novel THE MOON KING is available from all reputable vendors (and some disreputable ones too) and his website can be found here.