I'm a journalist who occasionally writes books, so my normal writing day is firmly structured by the needs of a national newspaper: arrive at desk 10ish a.m., make phone calls, answer mail, read acres of newsprint over colossal cafe mocha, and at 11 a.m. get shanghaied by arts desk into writing huge piece on Millennium Dome/ Kandinsky/Viz comic by 3 p.m.
These are not ideal conditions for the creative writer, so when I was given three months sabbatical, to write The Falling Angels, I was in unknown territory. I'd written two earlier books, on business management and Catholicism, but only managed it by ruining scores of my evenings and weekends. This was different. This was hardcore. Suddenly I was a serious, nine-to-five kinda writer. Soon I'd turn into the guy Philip Larkin described so attractively as "the shit in the shuttered chateau/ Who does his five hundred words/ Then parcels out his days/ Between bathing, and booze and birds." The only concession towards such a sybaritic regimen was a garden shed I'd bought a year earlier, complete with a half-size fridge full of Chardonnay and a tiny CD player full of early Tom Waits. From June 1st to August 31st, I sat in the shed from 10 a.m until 1.30 p.m. every day, writing steadily.
People wonder about memoirs: does it come in a glorious wave of recollection, or do you spend ages shaping the raw material of your life into a coherent pattern? The answer is: both. You start off with a flood of stuff (Saul Bellow called it just bringing in the buckets) that's been pre-digested over the years into the stories you tell near-strangers. They're mostly glib and probably untrue. You have to start again, staring at the memory of a character or an event, trying to hold it in your hand, trying to hear what it was saying, trying to make it newly seen, and using the black arts of drama and fiction to make it live. After lunch each day, I read my way through Irish family memoirs, from O'Casey to McCourt by way of George O'Brien and Seamus Deane. At 4 p.m, my children would decide that was quite enough creativity for one day and demand to be taken cycling.
Things became dismayingly idyllic. Squirrels scampered along the wooden fence. A family of robins moved into the compost heap. I half-expected Disney bluebirds to start orbiting my head as I wrote grimly on. Distractions queued up for my attention: Wimbledon tennis, the Test matches, the bloody World Cup. My strict regimen of 1,500 words per diem became 1,000, then 700. I haunted the British Library and the newspaper archive in Colindale, before realising they were just displacement activity. The only cure was to head for Ireland, drive around places I'd haunted 25 years ago, trying to establish, say, the exact visual components of Irish melancholy (they turned out to be a combination of TV aerials, rain, peeling paint and exposed wiring) and, newly armed with sense-data, return to the shed - refreshed, and back on 1,500 words a day.
It couldn't last. Sadly, it was all an idyll and I had to return to the paper. At Christmas, I had to finish the book in a beat-the-deadline rush, taking weeks off, retiring at 2 a.m, rising at 6 a.m, refusing to shave until the first draft was over. An unlovely scramble took the place of my carefully-parcelled writing regimen. The book was finished two months late, and 50 per cent longer than I'd planned. It was quite a relief to go back to journalism.
The Falling Angels: An Irish Romance by John Walsh has just been published by Harper Collins at £16.99 in the UK.