I’ve been tapping merrily away at By The Sea since 9 March and this morning I passed the 30,000-word mark.

This one looks like it’ll be a monster. I hadn’t thought of it as a long book, but if I carry on at the same rate and according to the carefully-crafted plan, the draft will top out at around 178,000 words. Curiously, this is almost exactly the length of my last novel, The Sigil, which was always intended to be an ‘epic’ and was therefore planned and executed in an entirely different way from what I like to think of as the tighter plotting of By The Sea. It could just be that I have got carried away with invention, and have far too much description and too many characters (I adore characters — the plot mentions them in two words, but as soon as I get to work on them in earnest, they come alive and start telling me what to do.)

On the other hand, perhaps I shouldn’t worry. It could be that this length — longer than Dan Simmons’ Hyperion but not quite as long as Frank Herbert’s Dune, is my ‘natural’ length for a novel. Even so, I think the text could do with some shortening, once I’ve finished the drafting and returned to my normal state of mind.

What strikes me is that of all these 30,000 words, 29,000 have been written on trains. To be precise, I’d say that the bulk of this verbiage has been cranked out aboard the 06:55 between Norwich and London, and more specific than that, in the hour or so between Norwich and Colchester (around 1,000 words per trip). Quite a lot has been written during the return trip at the end of the day, but I’m tired by then, so I don’t write as much (700-ish words on a good day).

The train is a great environment for writing. You have a seat at a table, from which it is probably impossible to extricate onself in a hurry without massive herniation. You have a laptop with a decent battery. WiFi flits around enticingly but remains forever ungraspable, so you’re not distracted by email. And if a couple of blokes in shiny suits and too much aftershave sit opposite you and start braying in estuarine tones about the Ingatestone Contract, you can plug in the headphones and listen to Deep Purple In Rock. In the topsy-turvy world of writing, there’s nothing quite so reassuring as a good, solid slab of 1970s rock’n’roll.

I only do this three days a week — most of the time I’m at home, where I have the neatest possible workspace. It is a cupboard off the sitting room, under the stairs, that used to be a pantry. It has a light and a window, and just enough room for a desk and a chair. The perfect Escapism Podule. And yet the only writing I do there is work-related. On my recent two-week vacation, I managed all of 1,000 words of the novel. Why?

It could be that the train provides the necessary discipline for writing. There is nothing else to do except write. You can set yourself manageable targets (such as ‘finish this scene before Ipswich’), and one doesn’t have the distractions of family life. Conversely, you are stuck in a seat and far from home, so you cannot feel the guilt of a writer at home who really feels he should be doing something more boring but nevertheless necessary, like decerebrating the kids’ buckets and spades, feeding the hamster to the snake, or (that hardy perennial) washing up. I’m not alone in this sentiment, apparently. This blog entry exploring the popularity of coffee shops as places to write attracted this pithy comment from a reader – “it allows me to focus only on writing (and not on the laundry or dishes in the sink). Writing from home made me fat and unproductive.”

The last time I sat down to write at such a level was The Sigil, and I did this in our last house in a converted garage. I did it late at night, starting when the kids were in bed. Before I converted the garage into a workroom, I wrote quite a few books on a bright yellow desk from IKEA in a below-stairs cubbyhole. But when I really wanted to break the back of a book, I’d take two weeks off, and commute with my laptop to the Linnean Society of London in Piccadilly, in whose library I’d work from 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch. Just like a job. It’s the discipline, you see. To be a writer you can’t hang around, gurning like a lovesick golden retriever, waiting for the muse to strike. It doesn’t work like that.

Therefore I’ve always looked askance at writers who build their own custom writers’ retreats. I worry that were I to do such a thing, my productivity would plummet. You can always tell when rock stars pass their peak — unless they are amazingly disciplined, it’s the moment when they build their own recording studio, and are free from the discipline of commercial studios, where time is money.

Dan Simmons, seasoned SF author, has written amusingly about the prospect of designing his own house, going on to discuss the houses of famous writers, from Mark Twain to Harlan Ellison, Dean R Koontz to Stephen King, and ending with a fascinating discussion on the general principles of house design, and how the often grandiose houses of the rich are at variance with our more basic human needs of cosiness and clutter (perhaps I should open my house to visitors as an exemplar of these last two virtues …)

What struck me most about Simmons’ article is that writers, once in homes presumably designed with their every convenience in mind as writers, actually write on the kitchen table, the billiard room, in the garden — anywhere but the writing rooms whose dimensions, warmth, quality of light and so on have been tailored to their needs.

As Leigh Hunt never wrote:

And to the writer in the room he said,
‘Where writest thou?’
The author raised his head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered ‘wherever I can carve a word.’

Or, as Orson Scott Card has it on this FAQ – “I have a laptop computer that goes everywhere with me, and that’s where I do all of my writing — whether it’s in my office at home, in a hotel room somewhere, or at the beach.”

Dan Simmons has just scored a massive bestseller with his latest novel, The Terror. As far as I know, he hasn’t built his dream house yet. Perhaps the one is related to the other, for as Simmons himself says, “writers shouldn’t be allowed to design and build their own houses.”

There is creativity then, in adversity. Must rush, I have a train to catch.