Once, when I was a teenager and dreamed of being a writer, I dreamed the perfect day of words. I dreamed of stillness and silence, of a large wooden table in some house in the country, of rows of books, the scent of white paper, and the kind of elegant pens people give to writers on their birthdays. I imagined waking lazily into an unhurried world, the plot of a novel paused for my return, a mug of tea, the creak in the comfortable familiar chair, and the easy deliverance of that day's portion of words before I might get up and busy myself with a little reading. Twenty years later, I have still not arrived in that writing day. I know no such thing. For me, some time after marriage and the arrival of my children, the notion of this ideal vanished, without regret. We had moved here to Kiltumper in west Clare and the days had to be made in the garden and about the cottage as much as on the page. I write in the late evenings or very early mornings. The imagination develops like any other habit, and I grew used to writing in short spaces of time. I also learned a kind of rhythm that has served me ever since. So much of writing, it seems to me, is done when not writing.
From the moment I wake I lie and watch the clouds through the skylight above the bed. Ineluctably I slip into the story. I awaken with the characters I am carrying and, as if I am the reader not the writer, wonder what is next for them. Often I have the next sentence but no more. I am pulling the thread of the plot day by day and fearful that at any moment it will snap and leave me in the middle of a book with no end.
From early morning through the business of the day, those characters are not very far away. They await me as I await something too. I am driving the car, bringing the children to school, teaching, or walking back along the road that skirts the top of the valley, and they are there. I know the last sentences of yesterday and sound them out. Then, finally, when I have figured out the next phrases, I go to the keyboard. Some time may have passed. I wrote the first sentence of Four Letters of Love: "When I was 12 years old God spoke to my father for the first time", and was two months waiting to figure out exactly what God had said. And then it came: "God didn't say much."
I write out loud. I begin by rereading everything of the past few days, saying the words out loud until I arrive at last at the new phrases that begin the day's work. I sound them as they appear on the screen and then see if I can continue. It doesn't matter what other noise or activity is around me. I have often written with my children practising musical instruments in the same room. I seem to be able to lock in to the sound of the language in my head and live there intensely for a while. I try not to get up from the chair, for I may not return to it. Instead I swim down the river of words, flying along, exhilarated, enjoying every second of the writing and sometimes being unable to type quickly enough.
Tomorrow I may erase everything. I may discover I have been seduced by the sounds of the words and lost where I was going. But in the moment of writing, in that brief but thrilling time when I am sounding out the words here in the cottage in Kiltumper, they are The Writing Dayatemporal, beyond the tick and tock of clocks, existing the way music exists for musicians, always, like a living world.
Niall Williams's second novel As it is in Heaven will be published by Picador in June.