Some poet once said that you have to have had rheumatic fever in childhood in order to become a writer. I didn't, and yet I'm grappling with my sixth book, so either the poet was wrong or my fever didn't manifest itself. Which is a little like the unwritten book. I'm always thinking of what I might like to write after this one. Truthfully, I don't know how I work.
I know that I take notes, that I get a character and become obsessed, that I fit other characters around and get them to speak to each other. I know that I work in longhand and that I have finished books, and yet I can't really say how I wrote them. There are periods that are clear, when I have had a working place away from the normal - a month in Jerusalem, six months in a writing room in Temple Bar, a month in the Santa Cruz mountains. Apart from times like that, my writing days seem to be just part of the rest of my life. When am I writing and when am I not? If I've watched the tree in the garden growing too big (we'll have to do something about that soon), have I seen it as a writer or as the person who should be pruning it? Are my opinions those of a writer? I think not. At least not totally. Other things inform my opinions, my past life, the politics of my place in the world. And the research that I've done as a writer, of course.
Writing involves the gathering together and manoeuvring of imagination and memory, so a day at the desk can be troubling. The act of writing is not a companionable one, it is a fight between the writer and the material, but can sometimes, surprisingly, be fun. While writing, I am driven to forget the actual circumstance of my life and the things that impinge upon it.
But they are always there in the background. When I'm writing short stories I walk more than when I'm writing a novel, usually on Sandymount beach. Short stories slip up on the reader's blind side; the novel is noisier and more transparent. So writing a story involves more subterfuge and, I must say, more amusement. Being a writer is a mad sort of vocation, addressing some anonymous reader who could be driven to hate you because of the importance that you give a particular character's viewpoint.
Every working day is different and is affected by the state of the characters. Naturally my mood is lighter, and I have fewer cigarette breaks, if the people on the page are about to get into bed, certainly lighter than if the main character is about to be hanged. The part of writing that I love the most is the naming of the finished book. I would like to wind up each day with a lot of red wine but God is a devious being, and, if he invented man he also made the hangover.
Evelyn Conlon's collection Telling: New and Selected Stories, will be published by Blackstaff Press in May