My writing day has changed a bit since I had my daughter who is nearly four. Now I get up at seven to get her off to school and as soon as she's out the door I go back to sleep. Before I had her I would wake up at 9.30 or 10 a.m. so, of course, now I have to go back to bed as I need as much sleep as a three-year-old.
I wake again at about 11 o'clock and drink some coffee. I work on a laptop and my dream life is never to get out of bed - and I don't really. I used to have a typewriter, but that made me very hunched-up as my dogs have to sit on me - either on my lap or on my shoulders, which made life very uncomfortable. Now that I work on my laptop in my bed it's fine, because they can be nearby at all times. The crumbs are very important. I always eat toast or cereal or something in bed and my husband, Tim, always says he wouldn't know he was home unless there were crumbs in the bed. It's difficult to get started. I always read a day-old newspaper that Tim has taken to work and which I save to read in my crumby bed in the morning. Day-old news is better. I set myself a target of 1,500 words or X number of pages to get through. When that's done I'm delighted, because I have words down to work on. I stop at about 3 o'clock and have a shower and check on the plants on my terrace - not often, only 10 or 15 times a day. Then I make phone calls, pay bills and run downstairs to check if there's any exciting mail. Every day I take a walk or go on the subway and end up at a discount store or a Salvation Army store or a market. I'd like to think I`m observing life, but actually I just like to get out of the house and go shopping. I always think I need some kind of reward at the end of the day, and even if I buy a 50-cent teacup I'm sated.
At five o'clock the babysitter leaves, so that little animal is around and we go into her room and play. Each novel usually takes me a couple of years - one year if I'm lucky. I re-write a lot, although progress gradually becomes harder. At the end of each draft you get about five minutes of saying "Yes!" and then five minutes later you're going "Oh no, now I have to write another book." I'm trying to say something different each time I write a book and each one is like a baby. It doesn't really matter what critics say because, to me, it's like somebody else did it.
Sometimes it's hard to focus. It's like entering a room - you can spend ages knocking trying to get in, but once you're in there, you're gone. Concentration like that is a brief thing but those moments are so intense they leave you drained. At night I'll sometimes wake up and scribble things which are often helpful, even if they're never quite what you think they are in the middle of the night.
The one thing I have to do is to still that critical voice that says "Oh, no, that's awful. You can't write," and so on, which is why I write when I'm half-asleep so that those voices are half-asleep, too. We've recently moved into a new apartment, and the best room in the house with the most amazing view is where I'm meant to write. Of course I can't because I'm looking at the view. The dream situation for writing is to have a blank white wall in front of you, so then you have to imagine everything.
(In conversation with Louise East)
A Certain Age by Tama Janowitz is published this month by Bloomsbury