An Irishman's Diary

BARRING unforeseen events, the Chilean author Isabel Allende will start a new novel later today. At about 5pm, Irish time, in fact. I know this, more or less for a certainty, because she does the same thing every January 8th, and has done for the past 29 years.

The habit began on this date in 1981, after she received a phone call telling her that her much-loved grandfather was dying, aged 99. Sad as the news was, it inspired her to write him a letter. And the letter in turn grew into her first novel, The House of the Spirits.

This was a great success, drawing comparisons with Gabriel García Márquez's magic-realist masterpiece: One Hundred Years of Solitude. So ever since, Allende has considered today's date lucky and marks it each year by starting another book (although not all the books are finished).

She also works very regular hours: Monday to Saturday from 9am until at least seven in the evening. And last I heard, she lived in California. So, allowing for the eight-hour time difference, her first sentence should be taking shape around 5pm GMT, as Irish office workers are trudging home through the snow.

It might be more information than most readers need to know. But any struggling writers among you, who even now are putting off the evil moment when you put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, might benefit from Allende’s advice on mood-setting. About this too she has commented extensively.

In keeping with her mystical attachment to the date, she begins each January 8th with a ceremony: “I light some candles for the spirits and the muses. I meditate for a while. I always have fresh flowers and incense. And I open myself completely to this experience that begins in that moment.”

If all goes well, the spirits and/or muses then take over: “I try to write the first sentence in a state of trance, as if somebody else was writing it through me. That first sentence usually determines the whole book. It’s a door that opens into an unknown territory that I have to explore with my characters.

“And slowly [. . .] the story seems to unfold itself, in spite of me.” I have to admit, with my head bowed in shame, to having no idea how well this regimen has served Allende so far in her career, having read none of her books. I intend to start rectifying the situation by buying one later today. If the experience proves auspicious, maybe I’ll begin reading another new one every January 8th from now on..

But someone who has read her extensively, needless say, is this newspaper's brilliant literary critic Eileen Battersby. Who, reviewing one of the more recent novels, found it compared badly with The House of the Spirits, "her most original and certainly most convincing performance to date".

In the latest effort, by contrast, “Allende seems caught between wanting to write a long, leisurely period yarn, and a snappy authorial impatience which seems to be telling her to wrap it all up as quickly as possible. There is a weary harshness about the narrative. It is as if she simply had to write this book not out of some creative urge but because telling stories has become a job to be done.”

Oh dear. Perhaps the incense and flowers were not working quite so well that year. Or maybe the muses were feeling a bit rough, post-Christmas. In any case, another January 8th has arrived and perhaps this one will be prove luckier. Readers will no doubt join me in wishing Isabel Allende well with her latest work.

FEW AUTHORS have given us so complete a picture of the moment of a book’s conception as the aforementioned. And of those who have described the process, I can’t think of another writer who admits to deploying flowers and incense. Jack Kerouac was probably more typical of the genre. This was his approach to a book: “You think about what actually happened, you tell friends long stories about it, you mull it over in your mind, you connect it together at leisure, then when the time comes to pay the rent again you force yourself to sit at the typewriter, or at the writing notebook, and get it over with as fast as you can.”

Another American, Patrick Dennis – now forgotten but a million-selling author of the 1950s – described his method even more succinctly: “I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind.” Many other writers have at least shared details of their daily working habits, which make interesting comparisons. In an echo – albeit a faint one – of Isabel Allende, Gore Vidal put it this way: “First coffee, then a bowel movement, then the muse joins me.” Lawrence Durrell was more oblique: “The best method is to get up early, insult yourself a bit in the shaving mirror, and then pretend you’re cutting wood”.

And William Styron spoke for many writers – of the old school anyway – when he described his routine: “I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. I wish I could break the habit but I can’t. The afternoon is the only time I have left and I try to use it to the best advantage, with a hangover.” Styron died in 2006, incidentally, at the tragically young age of 81.

• fmcnally@irishtimes.com