Just now I find myself, as they say, between books - which sounds more and more to me like a specimen of whistling-in-the-dark American cant, along the lines of "physically challenged" or "differently abled". It has been a good six months (that is, it has been a miserable six months) since I've actually had a writing day, but here's what I remember.
Four days a week I'm in my office at Newsweek, doing my impersonation of a book and music critic; on those mornings I'll steal an hour or so to recline on a bed or a sofa and scrawl (the mot juste, believe me) with a black, medium-point, Bic ballpoint pen in a spiral notebook, which I brace on a well-worn masonite I've had ever since I was in high school. (I'm now 53, and it has developed as fine a patina as masonite can develop.) Or if time is really short, I'll simply write a bit on the bus or subway if I can find a seat.
On the other three days, I try to work from the time I wake up and start cranking myself up on coffee until noon or one o'clock. "Try" is also the mot juste. In the early stages of a story or a novel, I'm thankful for the limitations on my time. My method, such as it is, is to play around with images, words, phrases, places, names, snippets of dialogue, memories, fantasies, imagined deeds and events; eventually they either start to come together or I give up on them.
An hour of feeling around in this murk can be a long time; often a ten-minute subway ride is more than plenty. And anyway, I seem to thrive in neutral public spaces, especially when they're in motion. I've worked well on long rail and airplane trips; in fact, I began writing seriously, 20 years ago this month, on a daily commuter train between ex-urban Connecticut and New York.
But once I've got a hand-written draft of something, I can work - and need to work - for hours at a stretch, on the computer, before going into the office in the morning, after coming home at night, and all the long weekend. (When I'm really on a roll, I can work in the office, but it's not my favourite place.) When I can, I take financially disastrous, unpaid leaves of absence from Newsweek.
Once I start putting the piece into the computer, the idea of a "draft" becomes meaningless: I just rewrite and rewrite, I'm not meticulous about saving or printing out each version, and I never show anything to anybody until I can't stand not showing it any longer.
Because I got impatient with the relatively slow speed of handwriting, I wrote much of my second book directly into the computer - which may be why I ended up cutting a third of it. That novel (338 printed pages) took seven years; my first one (237 pages) took four or five. With luck, I can finish a short story in six months, but some have lurked around for ten years before I felt satisfied with them.
It's a strange way to spend your life, but as I write this, I miss it more than I can say. And by the time you read this, I may be back at it again. Do you remember the end of Raymond Carver's wonderful story, Fat? "My life is going to change. I feel it." My mantra these days.
David Gates' novel, Preston Falls, has just been published by Gollancz