Dear Reader,
I write to you on my last day at Cove Park Artists’ Residency, perched above Loch Long in the grip of the Arrochar Alps, Western Scotland. I’ve been here for a week, staying in a converted shipping container with a view of water curving between rising hills towards a mountain that reminds me of the old painted logo for Paramount, one shadowed flank like the dark side of the moon, the other chequered by pine trees, red bracken and scrabbly earth.
Every day, the panorama changes, the loch striped with the reflection of a breaking sky, or burnished by sun spots, or grey beneath clouds that slip into the valley overnight before rising like steam as the day warms. In the distance, Loch Long meets Holy Loch in a hazy horizon of land and water that winds its way towards the Firth of Clyde.
One day, I looked up from my desk to see the biggest bird I’ve ever seen circling over the loch, so big I wondered if it was superman. Then I realised it was an eagle and hurried out onto the deck, laughing with sudden tears in my eyes, because it felt sublime. The eagle kept me company for a long time. The next day, I thought I saw it far away with a friend. The day after, three flew together in a shifting figure of eight, threading an infinity loop across the valley. I said thank you to the sky.
Another time, a delicate fox pattered across the decking. I froze, less than a metre from it, separated by a sliding door. The fox sniffed about, pawing something, then pattered on. Blue and red dragonflies buzzed me as I wrote. At night, toads guarded the paths, but flopped onto their bellies when they saw me. A lizard flashed its tail. Highland cows watched me curiously. Blackberries are in abundance.
Is this paradise? I think it just might be.
I arranged the residency when it became clear that between teaching, literary festivals and renovating the house, my writing had slowed to a glacial pace. In fact, the last time I really felt immersed in the third novel of the Double O series was my trip to Barcelona back in spring, when the combination of a heatwave and rooftop bar meant it would have been churlish not to lie on a deck chair and write for hours.
There are as many versions of the creative process as there are guides to creative writing. Here a few about getting started, which I’ve jotted down over the years.
‘…the first hint for Nostromo came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely destitute of valuable details’ – Joseph Conrad
‘Now about this book, The Moths. How am I to begin it? And what is to be? I feel no great impulse; no fever; only a great pressure of difficulty. Why write it then? Why write at all? Every morning I write a little sketch, to amuse myself. I am not saying, I might say, that these sketches have any relevance. I am not trying to tell a story. Yet it might be done that way. A mind thinking’ – Virginia Woolf
‘I am a very irregular writer: can form no plan; nor write after what I have preconceived’ – Samuel Richardson
‘It had at this time become my custom… to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour’ – Anthony Trollope
Doesn’t Anthony Trollope sound like a barrel of laughs?
I’ve never followed a prescription for writing, though I’ve been handed them all by creative writing lecturers, friends, editors. Write first thing in the morning, they say. But I have no morning brain and often teach 9am classes (yes, these things sound mutually exclusive and yes, I drink a lot of caffeine while teaching). Set yourself a daily target. A weekly target. Write with music, white noise, silence. Create a schedule and don’t let anything get in the way. Close the door on a room of one’s own. Don’t answer the phone, don’t email, turn off the wifi. Don’t even open the mail (there is a writer who actually follows this dictum and he’s won a Nobel Prize, so maybe there’s something to it).
I’ve never managed to follow any of this advice. Never kept to a schedule. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always taught, and each term comes with a new timetable. Or perhaps it’s that my publicity and events schedule is now just as busy as my teaching, something I’m grateful for, but of course it does rather squeeze the toothpaste of time, to coin a phrase I’m sure will immediately catch on.
So what does this leave?
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