I'VE always enjoyed the mixture of freedom and discipline which is an integral part of writing. When I'm on the first draft of a novel, I rise at seven because it's quiet between then and ten o'clock. The answering-machine is on and I leave it that way in the afternoon, too, because I'm often tired by three o'clock, when my daughter has to be picked up from school. We eat dinner together, mid-afternoon, swinging between Den 2 and The Arts Show (which sounds very nice, but family life and art will always be powerful and ill-matched forces).
I unwind easily once I'm away from domestic things. I sometimes take a long walk, or go to a film during the day with a friend. Or I go to a book-launch in town. Launches are where many writers socialise. I can enjoy crowds, but I don't need them as much as I need periods of quiet, what Adam Bellow recently described rather comically as "the procreative hush". There's nothing bleak about being a writer, though. It's reasonably enriching. Somehow, within the confines of our tigerish culture, writers have permission to speak to the heart of the culture, if they wish, without being court jesters. It's important not to become a court jester!
I try not to let career annoyances affect my mood, but they sometimes do. I like to be with other writers, because of the lovely freedom to gab and gossip and banter. Most of all, I enjoy the idealism of other writers. It's not a quality you find everywhere. In certain occupations, it seems to me that idealism survives by accident.
Archetypes interest me, the notion of connecting with them, so I sometimes light a candle and meditate before I begin work. It's a question of readying myself, of making the channels of the imagination free from interferences.
I work quickly once committed to a project, whether it's a novel, a story or, more recently, a play. It's essential not to delay at the outset and I bring my best "heat" to the work during that period. It's the most creative phase, the seminal one, and I turn the gas up high. Then I pull back. The writer Richard Eder once wrote: "There is no music without room for an echo; no poetry without a silence to repeat itself. There is no novel without pauses for chewing on the characters, for the aftertaste of a phrase, for irrelevant speculation."
In my day-to-day life - whether I'm teaching creative writing (another part of my life) or just out and about, I meet people who dream of becoming a writer. Not all that many bring a fidelity of craft, of regular keeping-in-touch to their art. The truth is, writing can be downright boring, which is something that surprises beginning writers. I tell people I don't swing from chandeliers at four in the morning, but I try to stay true to my own lodestar - and, basically, I just write!
Mary O'Donnell's new novel, The Elysium Testament, will be published next month