+
+
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.
+
+