Like many writers I have a permanent guilt complex about not doing enough work. I keep reading about people who claim to write for 10 or 12 or even 15 hours a day. Frankly, this strains belief. Don DeLillo called writing "concentrated thinking". It should be hard work. It should consume vast amounts of mental energy. After five hours, particularly if I'm on a first draft, I feel punch-drunk and barely capable of sensible conversation.
I get to my desk at about 10.30, usually still dressed in whatever I slept in. The desk is absurdly small, cluttered with computer equipment, notes, telephone numbers, unwashed wineglasses. It faces the window so I have a view of rooftops and sky. I spend a few minutes trying to settle myself, letting my mind become stiller. Getting started requires a kind of minor violence against my invariable mood of drowsy mid-morning indolence. Sometimes, to ring the changes, I walk about the apartment reading aloud, or stick pages onto the wall and attack them with the collection of drawing pencils I use for correcting. At midday I brew coffee on the stove and drink it while smoking one of my carefully rationed cigarettes. Occasionally I lie flat on the floor in a rather abject manner, or do yoga exercises. In the outer world the dogs bark to each other across the courtyard, and someone, two or three apartments below me, practises scales at the piano. I sometimes work with music on but more usually in silence, though I suppose I talk aloud and even shout reprimands at myself for some slovenly line. So much of writing is vigilance against vagueness and all the subtle dishonesties of a lazy intellect.
Now the good weather has come, I often take three or four pages of printed manuscript to a cafe terrace and work on them there, quite intensively and without being in the least disturbed by the chatter, mobile phones etc. I try to have at least a couple of sessions at the gym each week. Writers need to be in shape and a treadmill is not a bad place to think, though I find it strange how we pay good money to use a machine previously found in Victorian prisons where it was known as the "cockchafer".
Between the drafts of manuscript I read and travel. Often it's research for the next part of the book but sometimes it's just an overwhelming need to get away from the "filthy workshop of creation".
I don't show the work-in-progress to anyone. I don't think my editor would thank me for it though I'm told there are plenty of writers, well established and well thought of, who send in first chapters to their agents or editors to hear if it's any good. I know very well that what I'm doing will be no good at all for the first six months. Not until the fourth or fifth re-write does anything interesting begin to happen.
I'm staying in Paris for a few months, in the 11th arrondissement, Edith Piaf country, and my day ends in one of the local bars. A few beers with my brother or my girlfriend and perhaps a stroll under the street lamps is the perfect way to wind down.
Andrew Miller is the author of Ingenious Pain, the winner of the 1999 IMPAC award. He will be presented with the award in Dublin this evening