Eamonn Griffin: How I Write (Kinda)
I write better under time pressure than when I’ve got all the time in the world.
Or is this what I tell myself?
Like lots of people who are writers, writing is only one of the things that I do, and writing has to fit to at least some extent around other obligations. The day job, family, childcare and/or caring responsibilities, sneaking in some leisure, the supermarket run. We’ve all got calls on our time, and there are only so many hours in the day.
So, many writers to be realistic about what they can do, and have to be realistic also about non-writing. Unfortunately, for so many of us, an ideal writing life of a late breakfast followed by a couple of languid hours on the chaise longue dictating a chapter to the scribe, followed by a nap before then turning down movie offers from Steven Spielberg bears little relationship to reality.
I say ‘unfortunately’ but for me that’s probably for the best. My writing gets as good as it can when I have to squeeze it in. In the day, in the week, in the month, in the year.
My day job – because I have to have one because I’m a writer – is in higher education, which means that I don’t have much time for anything else apart from that between, say, mid-September and the beginning of June. That’s three-quarters of the year taken care of already.
This means that the activities that many people will recognise as writing (basically, the first draft of something, plus taking that chonky collection of initial ideas and streamlining it into something that somebody else will readable) has to take place in the summer.
I don’t mind that. Brighter early mornings are somehow a stimulus for that balance of productivity and creativity that any writer is striving for. Occasionally I’ll throw in a heroic all-nighter; the journey from evening sunlight into purple near-darkness through the summer night and back towards dawn can be really fun if I’m chasing down a word count or coercing a confession out of a chapter.
I’m sure this comes from the kinds of writing that I tend to positively respond to. Part of me really enjoys journalistic prose. Some of the crime and thriller writers who have been being the biggest inspirations to me started their professional careers as journalists. I’m thinking of people like Thomas Harris, Frederick Forsyth, and Michael Connelly. The ability to write fast, clear, concise prose at pace to a deadline is something to be prized.
It may be, therefore, that I work to create conditions within which writing will be provoked for me. The imposition of time limits, the necessity of working around a day job, the sense also of making progress against temporal odds. All of that works for me.
I like hearing about writers who have particular ways of working which involve the manipulation of time and/or productivity. Iain Banks would gather ideas and develop plot and character through the year, but sit down only on the 1st of September and fashion a novel in six weeks to two months. Georges Simenon could write a Maigret novel inside a fortnight: eight days for writing, and three for editing.
At the time of writing this blog post, it’s twenty to eight on the day the copy is due. Part of me, I’m sure, has conspired to leave this to the last minute so that it has to be done, and that it has to be done at speed. It’s not a way of working for everyone, but it seems to work for me.
Also, it’s the last day of April. That means the beginning of June is looming, and with it the time to write. And yes, I’ve got my notebook filled with stuff, I’ve got scratchy diagrams that indicate the flow of the plot, I’ve got a folder on my desktop for images that act as a mood board of sort: visual references for characters and locations, that sort of thing.
The challenge is therefore simply this. To have something that is submittable to agents and publishers by the 31st of August. Something I’m pleased with, and something that I think has got a readership.
We’ll see how it goes.
Eamonn’s website is https://www.eamonnmartingriffin.co.uk/ and social media-wise, he’s on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/eamonngriffin.bsky.social / @eamonngriffin.bsky.social