I work inside a small tunnel of order which lies within a much larger field of total chaos. I had seven months off from the Guardian to write When I Lived in Modern Times, the longest I have ever spent working to my own agenda instead of someone else's. Each day seemed terribly precious.
I woke up at about eight and drank a cup of tea in bed. The paper was delivered but I didn't read it until later in the morning. My head was full of nothing. The post came but I didn't open it. The phone rang but I had it on the answering machine the whole time. I would go into my office, sometimes with a bit of breakfast which I would or wouldn't eat and turn on the computer. Surrounding me was complete disorder: unopened letters, books on the history of Palestine in the 1940s lying open, page down on the floor, printed out pages from the day before or even the previous week. Paying any attention to the untidiness would create something I didn't want: a state of detachment.
I think the external mess reflected a mess inside my head which was what really needed paying attention to. I would write for about two hours, seldom more, though conscious of the fact that I only had enough money to live on for seven months, I desperately wanted to work for longer. Inside my head there were characters, ideas, a sense of place, all in embryonic form and it was my job to try to translate the inchoate into something which had a structure, a narrative pace.
I would write and write, often quite quickly, but much of what was produced would be thrown away. On many days all I would do was edit. Every few days I would print out several chapters if not the whole book and sit and read it through, trying to work out whether things followed on from each other, if characters could be believed.
I would stop around 11.30 a.m., sometimes much earlier and have a cup of coffee and read the paper. I would go out shopping for food. In the afternoon, three or four times a week, there was the gym. On the treadmill I would think about my characters and their situations, as if I were going over in my mind some people I had met the night before and was trying to figure them out.
In the evening I would go out or watch TV. I read very little when writing, and very few novels.
Every time I finish a book, I am happy to return to the exhilaration of journalism: the sudden reaction to events, the sense of an outside world imposing on you, of going into it and trying to bring back for the reader a true account of what you have found. After a few months the craving begins again, for the solitary life of me alone with the blank screen and the miracle of creating something out of absolutely nothing but by myself.
Linda Grant's latest novel When I Lived in Modern Times is published this month by Granta