A Way with Words
Elizabeth Knox
My many books managed to get written because I was interested in them. They’re often a hard road, winding, unsealed, sunk in mist. They are one problem after another, scene after scene, which, if I don’t get each right, will mean the whole thing can’t work. But although I often get up on writing days with a sense of tension and terror, that is usually combined with happy anticipation.
I think about my work all the time. I write books in tandem, or back to back.
So, when ideas or lines of dialogue, or whole scenes from a book one or two ahead in my queue, intrude into any day, or half hour, of writing time, I don’t push them aside because there’s the task in hand. Writing isn’t like working in a report-producing job. It’s like gardening. You plan ahead, and you weed as you go.
I don’t get down to work till I’ve had two cups of coffee, consulted the Oracle of Twitter and settled somewhere that can accommodate iPad, pencils, notebooks and three cats in close proximity – usually in the corner of the bedroom. Two cats – ritually Disky and Ida – climb onto the back of my chair to peer out the window and monitor the Indonesian Embassy’s side lawn. Eventually, they both get down and lie on top of big ginger Patrick. I toss my phone up among the pillows, where I can’t reach for it, and start writing.
I write in pencil. I’m fetishistic about them: I use only Staedtler Noris Club Triplus Jumbo. (My son also writes longhand and must have Staedtler HBs. Clearly a twitchy devotion to particular pencils is heritable.) I work until I come to the end of whatever I’m working on
– a scene in a novel, or memoir. Or an argument in an essay. Or until I have to get clean to go out to a Unity Books book launch. Or I stop because it’s my turn to cook. Sometimes in the middle of all this I go for a walk – a 35-minute loop through the Botanic Garden.
I can’t work happily if there’s a builder’s radio – and my Kelburn neighbourhood is never free of builders – so there is a bit of an agreement about the playing of radios, which I enforce with baleful stares and occasional complaints. I can’t work when I’m sunk in dread, which, these days, I too often am, as a mid-list, grey-haired female writer from New Zealand, in a world where the nation nearest to ours is proposing to discontinue student loans to those wanting to study art or literature or film. I deal with my dread by working harder. I’ll probably keel over, like Dickens.
I love writing – long narrative, fictional or non-fictional. I live for it. It’s like a forest walk of the New Zealand sort. A slog up a path of steps behind tree roots, or a board-drained DoC one, which zigzags up a hill offering bits of view through tree ferns, or scraggy middles of manuka, or persistent trackside broom, up and up, and then, finally, an outlook.
I write in pencil. I’m fetishistic about them: I use only Staedtler Noris Club Triplus Jumbo.