The nearest I get to a work-out every morning is the (London) Times crossword - and the more cryptic the better. You can almost hear the rusty brain-cogs with massive reluctance cranking up and beginning to turn, tuning up in readiness for all of the stuff lying in wait.
That, at least, is the theory - and, as all writers know, theories and plans, notes and layouts, synopses and schematic structures are all just other and large ways of chancing it, each of them a potential pitfall that can easily result in no work done, and the pitiful and merely rueful reflection that at least one meant well. The idea is that I have a huge cup of black, proper coffee, and the crossword and the coffee come to a simultaneous end. It is true that often, in order to bring about so poetical a conclusion, one is forced to eke out cold and practically gelid coffee for hours on end, but never mind: this merely sharpens one's determination that the rest of the day (what there is left of it) will not be so idly frittered away.
I don't have a set routine of so many words or hours a day - far too much like the regime of a nine-to-five job, which is one of the awful strictures that professional writers are lucky to avoid. It is very easy to start a novel - I actually believe that any vaguely imaginative and half-way literate individual is capable of starting a novel (and so, of course, do they). The tricksy part is the 100,000 or so words you have to tack on to that glorious opening, and then bring the whole crate safely in to land. I write for as long as my wrist can stand it: this article, in common with all my books, is written by hand with a pen, and then typed out electronically, simply so that other people can read it.
I write in the garden in the summer, and in my top-floor study at all other times - I've never written fiction away from home, and I'm not quite sure how it would go: maybe neither better nor worse, but almost certainly different. My new novel, Winter Breaks, is a sequel to Summer Things - I have never before attempted a sequel, and it was rather harder work than I anticipated: while the characters at the outset of something barely begun tend to malleable, mine were simply not to be pushed around; they were telling me what to do, and once I buckled down to their instructions, behaviour improved all round.
I seem to be writing a novel a year, at the moment. One of them (This Is It) I wrote in about ten weeks, but that's not typical: I am very pleased with 2,000 words a day, and often I'm grateful for a tenth of that. When I finish a book, as well as all the usual relief and letdown one is forever hearing about, I become convinced that this is truly the end forever: I am bereft of adjectives, I have used my last noun; even the business of punctuation, now, would defeat me utterly. And then, slowly, the meter begins to tick and ideas phrases magically form. More coffee, one more crossword: get tooled-up for another day, another round.
Joseph Connolly's details about his latest book are to come