Never having had the luxury of not working full-time, I have to scavenge for time to write at my day job. My Writing Day is hidden inside My Working Day. Here's the strategy for when I have an idea for a novel. As a computer programmer and technical writer at Microsoft, I spend literally eight hours a day in front of a screen. While working I have a word document open in the background on my computer. I toggle back and forth between my real work and my writing throughout the course of the day. I probably give the writing five to 10-minute bursts where I create what I call fiction islands, small pieces of writing that can be from a simple note about a twist in a plot I need to work on, or part of a dialogue between two characters, or just background description of place. Again, there is no real format, other than getting some text on paper. Then at a certain point there is a critical mass of these islands and I know I have the beginnings of a novel on my hands.
Another strategy for creating these fiction islands is my running. After some long, boring corporate meeting when the carnivores head off to stuff themselves with catered food, I'll escape for a run near the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington. It's an absolute wilderness not five miles from the campus where you can go high into the mountains. I always think it ironic that I've sat in on some top-level computer issues about what will define the next generation of computers, and not an hour later I'm about two miles up the side of a mountain where there's a legitimate danger I could be mauled by bears or mountain lions.
Anyway, I do from 60 to 100 miles a week, depending on the time I have, and I take a tape recorder with me. The sense of euphoria running brings must be akin to drugs. At a certain point, usually about 10 miles into a run, I feel a sudden alertness. This is when the tape recorder comes out. The pressure of the day recedes, and I begin talking to myself, usually in brief exchanges of dialogue. Role-playing is what I do mostly out on these long runs of up to 30 miles on the weekend. I wrote my novels, Emerald Underground and the new novel The Keepers of Truth, by speaking for over 80 hours in total on these runs.
When I'm actually writing a novel, I go into Literary Boot Camp, into an intense period of running and writing, usually lasting about five months. The writing begins at the office at about seven p.m. after my day's work is done, and goes until about one to two a.m., or later. I think the sense of fatigue from running brings a heightened awareness to my writing. In fact, it's late at night on the Microsoft Campus that things really get going. This is when the developers have their programmer epiphanies, when the future of how we will live our lives is created and dreamt up. You hear developers shouting, cursing, slurping sodas, belching. This is the underbelly of what creates our society. I get a real charge out of this frenetic pace, surrounded by true genius, listening to the space-age noise from video machines that litter the hallways of Microsoft that the developers love to play with at night between coding. And then there I am, surreptitiously pretending to be engaged in computer work, a sham piece of code on the screen, which I can toggle to the fore if anybody comes near me; but really I am there writing, trying to keep the novel alive amidst the electronic information age. I often feel like a Neanderthal aboard a spaceship.
Michael Collins' The Keepers of Truth has just been published by Phoenix House, £9.99 in UK