I used to be a disciplined morning writer, but in the spring of 2010 I was visiting a router-making facility in Shanghai’s Pudong district and witnessed thousands of workers in robin’s egg blue jumpsuits building the equipment necessary to pole-vault China’s technological connectedness ahead of all other countries in our new world order. This tableau prompted in me a gentle realisation that the world was changing even more quickly than I’d thought it was, and that I’d better shake things up creatively to keep pace with it.
I asked myself a few questions: how can I imbue fiction with that same fractal sense of falling down a rabbit hole that we all experience when we’re online? How can writing compete with Netflix? How could I compress emotion into as few words as possible – not just on a page but something people can read from a car at 50 miles per hour?
To this end I deliberately upended what had been a 20-year-old writing routine. No more AM clock-based passivity, quietly awaiting words that may or may not come depending on the fussiness of my muse. No more predictability; instead of sitting there feeling nostalgic for my pre-internet brain, I tried to figure out what my new brain was becoming and how that affected my writing. So if you ask me what is my typical writing day, I have no specific answer, just a series of tendencies which together define my new writing normal.
One: I do much of my writing on planes. I’m actually at my happiest when I’m writing on a plane, and I’m writing these words on a plane right now, Lufthansa flight 1436 from Frankfurt to St Petersburg. There’s no Wi-Fi (sanctuary!) and I’m having that not unpleasant sensation of soon-to-end Schengen-era statelessness – the kind of transnational fluidity so accurately touted by Monocle magazine – a headspace where all the men wear slim-fit clothing and all the women in little black dresses go back to the office from the Embassy function to do some late night C++ coding.
Q: Would you like a glass of water with your vodka tonic?
A: No. That’s why God invented ice cubes.
Two: I do much of my writing in hotel rooms, especially if there’s a deadline. Actually, since I wrote the above paragraph I’ve landed and am now in the St Petersburg W hotel which has killer Wi-Fi and interior design choices possibly made (in the best possible sense) by an oligarch’s mistress. There’s something about being in a hotel room – most writers know this implicitly – that frees up one’s thinking. First you place a scorched earth do-not-disturb on your email account (autoreply: “I’m dead and hence unable to reply to your email”) and second, hide the mobile phone in the desk drawer and … it’s almost as good as being on a plane. Nobody can reach you. You’re safe.
Three: I write in places connected in definable ways to the forces of both globalisation and deglobalisation: Shanghai router-making facilities; Chilean classrooms taken over by protesting students, the rooms now converted into artists’ studios; the International House of Pancakes on the north side of Interstate 15 in Las Vegas. The more random and unexpected the better.
There’s a kind of existential heebie-jeebies that accompanies the abandonment of routine: what if I lose my skills and they never come back? What if I become too fragmented? What if the forces of the future I’m trying to depict crush me like a bug? But then, nothing ventured, nothing gained. The world has never been so interesting as it is now. How sad not to go out and bungee-jump into it from a cosmic New Zealand cliff.
A few years back, the New York Times did a series of photos of writers in their writing places. All of the other ones I saw were of desks in almost empty white rooms with linen sheers blowing in through the windows. The photo of me was of a small room painted black with all of the walls covered in shelving that was densely filled with hoarder-like amounts of design objects and art. I don’t understand why writers would want an empty white room. It’s like a metaphor for no life after life after death. My spaces will never be normal; normal has never seemed to be my friend. Words always come first.
• Bit Rot, a collection of stories and essays by Douglas Coupland, is published by Heinemann on 13 October. To order a copy for £16.40 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
