Will Self: ‘I write first thing, when I can suspend disbelief in the act of making things up’ | Books

When I’m working on a novel I type the initial draft first thing in the morning. Really: first thing. For preference, I have a cigarette ready-rolled and a coffee percolator loaded the night before; then I simply roll out of bed, fuel up and set to it. I believe the dreaming and imagining faculties are closely related, such that wreathed in night-time visions I find it possible to suspend disbelief in the very act of making stuff up, which, in the cold light of day would seem utterly preposterous. I’ve always been a morning writer, and frankly I believe 99% of the difficulties novices experience are as a result of their unwillingness to do the same. Narrative structure, mise en scene, characterisation − you can’t get to grips with these problems unless you’ve put the words on the page.

So, my rule is I don’t rise from my desk until I’ve done my allotted portion. When I began writing seriously I measured my word counts in “Conrads”, one Conrad being 800 words, which is what the master wrote daily – an output on which he was able to support a considerable establishment, including two housemaids and a chauffeur. Back in the 1990s I could manage two or even three Conrads in a morning, but with age (and possibly the increasing complexity of the work itself), my pace has slowed – and I now manage 1.25 Conrads. (My journalism word rate, by contrast, is 500 words per hour.)

I wrote all my early books on computers, but when broadband came along in 2004 I understood intuitively it was inimical to the novel, an art form that depends on the codex for its inception as well as its reception. So I shifted to writing on a manual typewriter − an Olivetti Lettera 22 used by my late mother, who was also a writer. When I’m working on a first draft I may do some additional research in the afternoon, but usually I’ll shift my attention to something else altogether. It’s when I get about two-thirds of the way through that things get interesting, for then I begin rewriting the text from the beginning, even as I’m still working on the end. This necessitates a lengthening of the working day to around eight full hours − but it pays massive dividends: it’s far easier to make a novel “cohere” overall if you’re working on different parts of it simultaneously.

This methodology gets still more interesting when I finish the first draft and begin working on the third while I’m still writing the second. The second draft entails me rekeying the text into a computer – which in turn explains why doing the first draft manually isn’t really that onerous; after all, if you know you’re going to have to rewrite a work entirely, you can afford to be a little more cavalier when you attack the blank page. During the early stages of a novel I’m able to work under conditions of partial − but not total − isolation (no internet-enabled devices on, children and dogs muzzled); but by the time I’m working on the third draft I need up to 16 hours a day in complete purdah. I’ve often wondered if this isn’t an indulgence on my part, and whether I should train myself to cope with more human interaction − but I fear Auden’s characterisation of poetry (“The social act of the solitary man”) applies still better to novelising, which requires its practitioner to listen very intently so as to hear the voices and thoughts of wholly inexistent beings.