I think it was Raymond Chandler who divided his day into hours spent eating, sleeping, writing and thinking about writing, the latter taking up by far the largest proportion of his time. This may simply have been an excuse on his part to indulge in some afternoon drinking, but it does seem to be a pretty accurate summation of how I spend my days.
I have never considered myself to be a particularly disciplined writer, and can usually come up with countless novel ways to put off sitting at a keyboard. (One indication of my innate slothfulness is that I now know the name of my postman, since his arrival gives me an excuse to leave the desk, make a cup of coffee and spend a disproportionate amount of time opening envelopes.) Yet, despite various delaying tactics, I have somehow managed to write two novels and a sheaf of other bits and pieces, which makes me wonder what I could achieve if I actually set my mind to it.
I write in the morning and usually continue until lunchtime, but I don't set myself a target of words. Instead, I just keep going until I feel my concentration lapsing, and then leave my apartment and go to the gym, or for lunch. It's good to get away from the desk and do something completely different, although I do find myself preparing the following day's work in my mind. I rarely sit down to write without having some idea of what I plan to do, so in that sense, even when I'm not actually writing I am still working, in a way. (It can be quite annoying for the people around me and is, I fear, a prelude to talking to myself.) Sometimes, I'll get a burst of energy at the end of the day and spend a couple of hours at the computer quite late into the night, fuelled by a big glass of wine.
When I'm researching in the US, I carry a hardback notebook and camera everywhere. By the end of a trip, the notebook is usually held together with a rubber band and is crammed with articles torn from newspapers, notes written on napkins and stray pieces of card. I rarely write while I'm researching, preferring to wait until I return home where I can get my notes into some kind of order. These notes are then added to the pile of other unsorted notes which sit on my desk. Order, I like to think, is a relative concept.
It now seems that the books are taking on three-year cycles, with one year spent researching, one year writing a first draft and one year rewriting, with various books at different stages in that process. I am a compulsive rewriter: Every Dead Thing went through about 40 drafts, and Dark Hollow about 21 or 22. A book is never really finished: there just comes a time when it has to be handed over to the publisher and then no more can be done with it. The experience has given me some taste of the innate flaw in all human endeavour: the impossibility of achieving perfection.
Still, I sometimes console myself by imagining that, at least once, Michelangelo must have climbed down from his scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, looked up at the third thumb he'd just painted on an angel and thought: "Oh, bugger . . ."
John Connolly's latest thriller, Dark Hollow, has just been published by Hodder and Stoughton