On writing in the morning

The question I am asked most often is this: how many hours a day do you write? The honest answer is dull: three. But the number of hours is not the point — which hours they are, is.

I don't get up at half past five because I enjoy it. I get up because at that hour nobody wants anything from me. The phone is silent, the door doesn't knock, the street hasn't woken. What writing fears is not interruption but the possibility of interruption. If an alarm is going to ring in an hour, you cannot write for that hour — you only wait for the alarm.

Two things sit on the desk: a glass of water and half a sentence left from the night before. The half sentence matters. It is hard to begin a day after a finished scene; returning to an unfinished sentence happens almost by itself.

Three hours later I stand up, and I don't read what I wrote. Reading is evening work. The person who writes in the morning and the person who reads at night are not the same, and shouldn't be.