When I start work depends on whether it's during the school holidays or not. During termtime I get down to work when the last of my three children leaves, usually at about 8.30 or 9 a.m. After years of commuting, when I wouldn't even have reached my offices by 10 o'clock, I still think that I've got a head-start. I do worry about time - it's my obsession. I'm constantly aware that by 3.30 the day is gone, and even if I do get some work done after that time, I won't have the same freedom.
I work in the basement of our house in south London, which is ideal, as it is large and fairly cut-off from the rest of the house and so I have quiet. I look out on to the back garden, where there are all kinds of animal and bird life.
I grew up in the country and never saw a fox or a heron, yet just this morning a fox walked past the window and a heron flew off from the garden. I thought he would have eaten the goldfish in the pond, but they seem to have survived. These are the exciting events of the day.
My desk is appalling. There's a PC in the middle, a big pile of books to the left and a big pile of unanswered letters to the right, plus all the empty and half-empty coffee cups. I don't smoke but bending paper clips would be my equivalent vice - there are always about 10 destroyed paper clips on my desk at the end of the day.
I don't really have rituals, only practical things that I do each day. First of all, I collect my e-mail, something that I've only recently started using. Then I turn down the answering machine if things are going badly. If things are going well, I might leave it turned up.
I worked in newspapers for 15 years, and have only had the luxury of not doing so for four years, so I realise how easy it would be to be idle. My main fear would be not getting enough done, so I try and limit the disruptions by sealing myself off.
I am doing this current work very fast. I gave myself two months to finish the first draft of a short novel, so I am trying to get two short chapters done every day. I would be unhappy if I got less than 2,000 words done in a day.
With my poetry I never used to put myself in front of a screen to write. If it came to me it would be in the margins, and it doesn't come to me very often these days. With prose I think you can move it along and make things happen.
When I'm out and about I always carry a notebook and write snatches of poems. If I was away and didn't have my laptop, I might even finish my poems in longhand in the notebook but I wouldn't feel they were real until I saw them on-screen and printed out. I take lunch at 1 or 2 p.m. and try to keep it to half-an-hour. The number of days in which there are no interruptions or I don't have to go out is very rare, so I try to work right through until 3 o'clock. I might do a late spurt but, like a lot of writers, I tend to find mid-afternoon a rather dead time. I don't look back. I try to forget what I wrote yesterday and just plough on, putting off the horrible truth about what I've written until the whole draft is done. In the past I have got stalled and then I become terribly self-critical.
I'm trying to be speedy with this book. I began as a poet and had a very modest sense of how many pages one could achieve - quite rightly, too, as poetry is very concentrated work. The book about my father only took about nine or 10 months to write, and I was still working full-time in newspapers, but I think that was because it was such a personal, biographical work. The book on the Bulger trial was more like a novel - the trial finished in 1993 and the book appeared in 1997, so that wasn't very speedy. I then worked on a novel for about a year and then broke off to work on this smaller work of fiction.
In conversation with Louise East
Selected Poems by Blake Morrison is published by Granta