Charlotte Mendelson: ‘I live for the moments when something comes into verbal focus’

Originally published in the GUARDIAN

here’s no magic to it. I rise at dawn to answer the correspondence of my grateful fans, then it’s 1,000 words long-hand daily, including Christmas and birthdays, a trek with the dogs over the Downs, a simple three-course dinner brought to my study door while I edit, then to bed, exhausted by my sheer creativity. With my old platinum Graf von Faber-Castell and a ream of cream archival, I can work anywhere: the green room at Hay, poolside at the Colombe d’Or. One has to in this business. It’s a vagabond life.

If this were true I’d hate me too. Pinning down one of my real-life writing days is trickier. Ignore the 20 weeks a year taken up with clashing school holidays; imagine that the endless hiccups of family life, the ceaseless mending, buying, exchanging, meeting, delivering and, most outrageously of all, feeding, that one’s dependents require, have been dealt with by employees of the Society of Authors, at night. And let’s exclude all the other work: teaching creative writing, or privately mentoring new novelists; writing introductions or articles; events. Say we’re face to face with that miracle: a clear day.

I long for writing time, pine without it, and now I have it: until three o’clock.

And so the self-sabotage begins.

It’s ridiculous. Obstetricians don’t pause, mid-breech, to check their Twitter notifications; bricklayers can’t demolish their wall-in-progress and start again. For 20 years I had a real job I was good at: fixing other people’s novels. Now, however, that I work alone, making up stories, I am locked in a battle between self-doubt and self-discipline, and the former usually wins. I have the concentration of... oh, I like your shoes. It is so much easier to plummet down the sinkhole of Twitter, or clean the front door with baby wipes, or update one’s log of Terrible Comments Made At Readings, or potter in the garden during the busy season (Feb-Oct), than to sit at one’s desk in front of Draft 18/b, trying to scale the wall of self-loathing, certain that this novel is doomed.

The solution is to get out.

Some writers like cafes: the loving waiters included in their acknowledgements; the flapjacks. But I always sit by the loud idiot. Besides, my back is, even by writer standards, bad, and unsuited to distressed metal furniture. Where else is there? My criteria are modest: excellent people-watching; good seating; quiet without privacy. The answer, thank the sweet Lord, is the British Library.

The BL is an idyll for chatty introverts: enough familiar faces to keep one from utter loneliness, yet absolute solitude for as long as one can stay at one’s desk. And I can stay there, because they let me use an office chair, and I stretch regularly, left, right, left. There are always coughers and sniffers, odd regulars – Stompy Woman, Man Who Coughs Like a Sea Lion – but the prevailing atmosphere is of industrious near-quiet, and one is too visible to sleep or weep or pick one’s split ends for long.

Because I own a neolithic Nokia, and have downloaded Freedom on my sexy MacBook, internet access is tricky. The diversions are finite: friendly security guards, tiny paper cones to fill with drinking water, experiments with overcaffeination, a range of routes to one’s locker for squares of extremely dark chocolate, or, my own peculiar fetish, wooden coffee-stirrers which I chew for concentration, carefully gathering the soggy splinters from my desk before leaving.

And then, in the brief intervals, when I’ve remembered my characters’ crises, and the sheer cliff face before me feels attackable, I consult my weird hand-drawn maps and timetables and, secure in the certainty that I won’t be interrupted, I can, occasionally, briefly, float into the novel and, Hosanna, write.

How much? Oh, who cares? The point, the bit I live for, is the rare moment of satisfaction when a smell or a quality of sadness comes into perfect verbal focus. That’s how my family know the day has gone well: I have a lightness which comes from the absence of panic, the knowledge that, for once, I did what I’m best at doing. I wrote.