The Costa award-winning novelist and standup takes us through the icons, treasured and obsolete, that share her workspace
I don't really bond with inanimate objects. When I had a car, I didn't give it a name, or care when it got a bit mouldy; my kitchen isn't full of whizzy gadgets; my computer is here to help me write. And spell. And not lose things. Obviously, like all my other computers, this one will eventually fail catastrophically and lose all my things.
It is traditional that computers fail when I am a page away from completing something and therefore horribly exposed. The screengrab above doesn't show all the backup data sticks and the external drive that I use obsessively and which mean I can sleep at night.
Dropbox is a pain in the neck and I will remove it when I get the time – trouble is, other people use it and want me to. You'll notice the Word file icons are very old-fashioned. I simply don't like the newer versions of Word. Of course, this means that I have to use a special little file viewer to read .docx files. If I download the full awfulness of the up-to-date Word, it just aggressively colonises all my old files and I have to take it off. But .docx files being read-only isn't convenient and eventually I will have to change. I know, I know…
The Word files are only visible because this is my Travel Laptop. I was, temporarily, homeless and lazy about tidying contracts and itineraries away, because I thought that I would eventually lose an e-ticket, or turn up in Bavaria on the wrong day. Life was a little disrupted. I'm so busy I have to be organised or I'd drown. I have a chum whose house looks as if he's just moved in – naked. We both feel there's nothing odd about that. But we may be wrong.
Minimised are my Talktalk mail – which limps along badly – and my Twitter account – which cheers me. I am highly impressed by my followers.
Give As You Live is a good idea, although I rarely find I can buy anything that earns them money. You'll see the Final Draft icon – a piece of software that I adore. For those of you who don't have to write any kinds of drama, imagine how utterly soul-destroying it is to have to endlessly retype location names, times of day, number scenes, try to get text to wrap within the necessary formatting, renumber scenes and generally produce a script which looks like a script. Film people are very visual (which is a polite way of saying they can often barely read and yet insist on using a standard document format that's pretty hard to digest …) and so your script has to look like a script, or it will be mocked and ignored. I wrote my first scripts for a Francophone Canadian company who insisted I use their software – a horrible monster they'd constructed out of Windows, which didn't really format and refused to spell in anything other than French.
Final Draft makes all the bad things go away and means you can just focus on the people and what they are saying and doing. I got quite tearful when I first used it and immediately forgave it for being moderately expensive. It's the industry standard, which may not be absolutely healthy for the market, but it is really good. I use it for all dramas, even radio, although it doesn't understand radio – it comes from somewhere heathen with no radio drama.
Norton has defended me from incoming horrors in a way that several previous programmes really, really didn't. Don't get me started on Macs – the place that used to be the sole dealer for Macs in Glasgow sold me a broken printer and a broken Mac. The printer finally got replaced; I then had all those wonderful conversations where you talk to someone in Ireland about repairs being carried out in Holland and delivered by an English company of entirely mysterious provenance … It was months of no computer and dementia.
There's a file about "Uncle Sean", a children's character. I wrote stories about him for my godkids and may still do, although the nippers are a bit old. I've never published them. I suppose I should. We enjoy them. "Small Wonder" is a very dull file; a contract between me and a very lovely festival near Lewes called Small Wonder. "Bits" is a file for notes and odds and ends for standup. I never used it much, but it made me feel I was doing something when I started out. I should really just erase it, although it might make me laugh (in the wrong way) to see what's in there now.
The background is a photo I took of a cove called the Pot on the island of Sark. I have used entirely sweet images of faces and places I love, but they do get distracting, or devalued through repetition, so this has been on here for about three years. On the one hand, I love Sark and the Pot; on the other, this particular shot gives the impression that to advance and break free I have to crawl under an unstable rock formation, risking injury and death. There's a degree of challenge and hostility here that can be helpful. Or, on some mornings, I start work and feel I'm being punched in the eye with my own assistance.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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