Why author Dimitri Nasrallah writes with the seasons

Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year's authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features Hotline author Dimitri Nasrallah.

These days, I write at a rickety desk in the smallest room of my apartment. The room's "coziness," to borrow a euphemism from real estate, is contrasted by its brightness. It has a door that opens up to the front balcony, and during stretches of warmer weather, I can let in the day's commotion and the occasional breeze.

Beyond that, most everything else in this workspace is a leftover from other rooms in my space. I have what I need: a laptop, an extra keyboard, a large screen, my own books and other books I've worked on, papers everywhere. Things collect in this space, and will often live where I set them down for months after I return from a festival or finish a project.

I'm not very particular about where I write or what personal history surrounds me while I'm doing so. All of my books have been written in a different space, and the space that produced Hotline is no longer there. I've come to regard having a personal writing space that's maintained over the years as part of a routine that I'd sooner do without; a history in a space comes with habits and assumptions that form over time, and if I want the writing to feel fresh to me, nothing works better than changing my environment and making myself pay attention to new ambient sounds and visual rhythms.

What has proven to be much more important is when I write. Over the years, I've found the way for me to write a novel is to be very consistent when I am writing — and to not think about it at all when I'm not. In practice, this has worked out into an annual cycle that involves me teaching from September to April, then dedicating myself to writing from May to August.

Winters are long and dark, and I find it more preferable in that season to do something else altogether. And so I teach and edit then, surround myself with other people and focus on collaborations. I learn quite a lot when not writing this way: how others write, how to help younger people especially get closer to communicating what they want on the page. All the while, I'm testing out my own theories and keeping my craft sharp.

Now that I've settled into that routine, I find that four months of concentrated writing is enough for me. Monday to Friday, I sit at my desk and write toward a word count. When I'm in the beginnings of a project, that number is around 500 words. Once I'm dug in, I'll aim for a thousand or more per day. Some days it may take an hour; others it will take the whole day. The point is that I don't allow myself to stop for the day until I get there.

In four months, I can usually rack up between 50 and 60 thousand words that way, about 200 pages. At summer's end, I'll close the file one last time and stop thinking about it for the next eight months. 

I like writing when it's hot out, when the days are longer and mornings naturally start earlier. I like that at a certain point in the day, it becomes too hot to think clearly and I can nap. I think of naps as a quick way to clear my head and reorganize any nagging doubts I have in a writing session. Often, when I get up, I'll go back and rewrite passages that may have taken an unsure path.

As for the space itself, whether it be in my apartment, a guest home, or a café, as long as I can have a reasonably comfortable chair and a solid surface at the time of day when I need it, I can focus on the task at hand and imagine the world I'm writing.

Read this year's Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts and tune in to Canada Reads from March 27–30.