Lisa McInerney: ‘The phone has to be in another room. And even then I’ll play Minesweeper'

The winner of the Baileys women’s prize for fiction on running, blogging and why she’s learning to eavesdrop

I don’t start when I get up. I know a lot of people work in the early morning, but I am not one of them. I get up and do whatever chores need to be done – I’ll bring the dog out for a walk or I might go for a run. I have a friend in Ireland who’s a crime novelist, Arlene Hunt, and she runs as well. She says, “Isn’t it wonderful, when you run and get all these ideas?” That has never happened to me. All I think about is how I don’t want to be running any more. No ideas.

I’ll come back and have breakfast, and at some stage I know I’m going to have to think about going to the computer. So I sit there drinking my coffee, and getting more and more belligerent. Once I go up there, though, I set a thousand words. I can’t finish work for the day without it done, even if it’s 1,000 words of rubbish, that I may actually scrap.

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