Chapter 1
The Long Morning
The best hours are the ones nobody asks for. They arrive before the day has decided
what it wants from you, and they leave without ceremony, and what happens in them is
almost never what you planned.
I have kept the same desk for eleven years. It is not a good desk. One leg is
shorter than the others and I have never fixed it, because the small tilt reminds
me, every time I sit down, that the work is not going to be perfect either, and that
this has never once stopped anybody.
What I have learned about working slowly is that it is not slow. It only looks that
way from the outside. From inside it feels like the only speed at which anything
holds together.
There is a particular hour, somewhere between the first coffee and the second, when
the work stops feeling like a performance. Nothing on the page has changed. What has
changed is that you have stopped listening for applause.
The trick, if there is one, is to start before you are ready. Readiness is a story
you tell yourself about a future morning that will be calmer than this one, and it
will not be. The calm is something you make, badly at first, out of whatever the day
has left lying around.
I write the first sentence standing up. I do not know why this works and I have
stopped asking. Somewhere in the business of not sitting down the sentence loses its
self-consciousness, and by the time I take the chair there is something on the page
to argue with.
Everything after that is argument. You put a thing down, you read it back, you tell
it that it is not quite true, and you try again. Nine times out of ten the second
attempt is worse. The tenth is why anybody does this.
By eleven the light has moved across the desk and the day has started making its
claims. I stop where I am, mid-sentence if I can manage it, because a sentence left
open is a door left open, and tomorrow I will walk straight back through it.
None of this is a method. A method is something you can hand to somebody else, and I
have tried, and what they get is a description of a room they do not live in.
What I can hand over is smaller. Sit down before the day has an opinion. Write badly
on purpose for ten minutes. Stop while it is still going well. That is the whole of
it, and it has taken me eleven years to be able to say it in three sentences.
7
What the desk knows, and I keep forgetting, is that the work is not a mood. It does
not care whether I arrived at it happily. It only registers whether I arrived, and
how long I stayed, and whether I was honest about the sentence in front of me while
I was there.
The second hour is quieter than the first, which nobody warns you about. You expect
momentum. What you get is a kind of patience, and it turns out that patience is
faster.
I have never once regretted a morning spent this way. I have regretted almost every
morning spent otherwise, which is not the same as saying that I stopped having them.
There is a version of this essay that argues for discipline, and I have read it many
times, and it has never once got me out of bed.
The version that works is duller. Make the room boring. Put the phone in another
room, not face down on the desk, because face down on the desk is still a decision
you have to keep making. Decide once, in advance, while you are calm, and then let
the morning be simple.
I am not a fast writer. I have watched fast writers with the particular envy of
someone who has done the arithmetic and knows it does not matter. Over a year the
slow ones and the quick ones arrive at roughly the same place, and the slow ones
seem to enjoy the journey more, which is not nothing.
What I want from a morning is not very much. Two hours. One paragraph I did not have
when I sat down. The sense, at the end, that I told the truth about something small.