Ballard's Room:
Writers' rooms: JG Ballard guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 March 2007 10.03 GMT
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
My room is dominated by the huge painting, which is a copy of The Violation by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux. The original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940, and I commissioned an artist I know, Brigid Marlin, to make a copy from a photograph. I never stop looking at this painting and its mysterious and beautiful women. Sometimes I think I have gone to live inside it and each morning I emerge refreshed. It's a male dream.
There are photos of my four grandchildren (one, along with a picture of my girlfriend Claire, is just out of shot). The postcard is Dali's Persistence of Memory, the greatest painting of the 20th century, and next to it is a painting by my daughter, which is the greatest painting of the 21st century. On the desk is my old manual typewriter, which I recently found in my stair cupboard. I was inspired by a letter from Will Self, who wrote to me on his manual typewriter. So far I have just stared at the old machine, without daring to touch it, but who knows? The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.
I have worked at this desk for the past 47 years. All my novels have been written on it, and old papers of every kind have accumulated like a great reef. The chair is an old dining-room chair that my mother brought back from China and probably one I sat on as a child, so it has known me for a very long time. A Paolozzi screen-print is resting against the door, which now serves as a cat barrier during the summer months. My neighbour's cats are enormously affectionate, and in the summer leap up on to my desk and then churn up all my papers into a huge whirlwind. They are my fiercest critics.
I work for three or four hours a day, in the late morning and early afternoon. Then I go out for a walk and come back in time for a large gin and tonic.
My Room:Well, I don't have a picture of it, though in the new house I actually do have a sort of office/ writing room. On the floorplan of the house, it is referred to as "Area 10'10" x 10'2"", and it is adjacent to "Area 10'10" x 9'4"" which I will use as a studio for casting, printmaking, and general arty almost-outside stuff. There is no door, which I may change in time, but there is space for my books and my desk.
I was interested in Ballard's comment on how he does his writing, as I have long thought that the method in some part determines the composition itself. I spent much of my Christmas holiday writing what amounted to 9,300 words on the Spanish Civil War (got to get cracking on something on the Sino-Japanese War Real Soon Now) and I used the method I always have: first draft is longhand, make revisions on the fly as I am typing it into the computer, and there is my second draft. I normally find I do not have to make a third beyond a few revisions made after I let it sit for a few days.
But then again I am not a fiction writer. No gin and tonics either.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
