As I sat listening to my colleague today fairly hammering the keys of his keyboard, it occurred to me that he had probably learned to type on a typewriter decades ago, and had simply never realised that a keyboard is not a system of levers; that there are no letter heads that have to be whammed against the screen. It's amazing how unadaptable human beings are. Once we learn to write with one hand, we could never conceive of writing with the other. I grew up writing stories in a certain style which is probably wearily familar to those who know my work, and it's not so easy to bust out of it.

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Are you a writer if you're not actively writing?

Deep, man. A friend posed this a little while back, in the rhetorical fashion. As I remember, all of us readily agreed with sentiment; after all, it's about slogging and grafting, not coasting. But I can't help thinking the question has a telling ring of 'if a tree falls in the forest' about it, and much like that old favourite, I think the answer entirely depends on your terms.

I've had a think about it (it takes me a while) and I've come to the conclusion:


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So once again, I ally myself with the hordes by talking about things I know bobbins about.

Am I a charlatan for not quite getting Hamlet? It seems more celebrated for its contribution to the English language than for whatever it is actually about. T.S. Eliot baldly declared the play an artistic failure, taking apart the play in an essay Hamlet and his Problems. In this essay he argued that the the play failed to show the emotions and ideas expressed by the the character Hamlet:


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In the beginning, all action was fast paced. If you could have been in the Garden of Eden, before that unfortunate incident with the apple, you would surely have seen Adam zipping about like a child overdosed on Sunny Delight, hurtling from one screwball caper to the next...

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"I didn't fall asleep - I just started to think about death."

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'Let us consider an albino crow. Is it not said, by the great poets, that such creatures have been seen? And there is, I believe, an old Phoenician tale regarding such an occurrence. But is a white crow not a crow nonetheless?'

'That it is, Socrates.'

'Then it is true that all crows must be white?'

'That must be correct.'

'Then what would you say is that black corvid, under the tree over there?'

'Why, Socrates, it is a crow.'

'But have we not just established that crows are white?'

'Yes.'

'Can a white crow ever appear as black?'

'Impossible.'

'Then it must be a mandarin duck.'

'Undoubtedly, Socrates.'

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In the beginning, I started out producing what I would have described as intensely psychological prose, creating entirely interior worlds, interior dilemmas, inner struggles... It seemed almost writerly. A chapter would involve one person, walking in a park, thinking. Or perhaps only sitting on a park bench. Perhaps this was because the thoughts came to me that way, and I didn't quite have the wit to dress it up more. This, I might call the Insight stage. Irony, hey.

I grew past it, in time. I started having two or even three people in a scene, even interacting sometimes. This, finally, was proper writing. They began to talk to each other, sometimes at length. They were (sort of) demonstrating things, through dialogue at least. No longer did the author clumsily illuminate via his eighteenth century narrator. Sometimes the characters even misunderstood each other, or talked across each other. Or were unreliable in their knowledge. I felt advanced.

But a different kind of pattern emerged. Each chapter, it was politely pointed out to me, is just people talking. Yet again. They were right, naturally. What was actually happening? I counted ten chapters in a single novel that each consisted in some part of two people talking at a checkout (mostly in coffee shops, but also, through a burst of wild imagination, in a supermarket).

Conversation isn't action, of course. Only action is action. Which is not to say a building blows up in every chapter, but at last I am deleting entire chapters that had seemed integral only months ago, and expressing a good thing once instead of a dozen times. It's the same thought that has football managers screaming at their daft winger to stop turning the defender and just bloody cross the ball.

I wonder what the next stage is?

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The weather has changed. Being away, I didn't see it happen here, but I'd imagine it's much the same anywhere you go. I return from holiday to find a cooler, windier, wetter London. Trotting round my neighbourhood the colours have changed, and its not just that the housing estate has been repainted in battleship grey.

In the Eurostar magazine on the way home an article heralded the change in seasons with the suggestion that autumn is the start of the cultural year en France, unlike ever-dynamic, always on London. I'm not so sure we're any different. The Wednesday writing group I go to has been low in numbers all summer, and suddenly in September the attendance has doubled. The deadlines of literary competitions seem to cluster around October and November; perhaps if you're interested in these things, now would be the time to prepare for them. The signs are everywhere.

I'm sure real writers don't ever slack in summer, even if real-world writers do. At least we're finally liberated of the fantasy that we might just spend the day lying in the park instead.

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I've always been able to console myself that despite lacking an agent or a (conventional) publisher I am still, at any rate, the most successful writer in my lone occupant household.

Sadly, even this turns out not to be true.

I got a letter last week addressed to "Paulo Coelho", who has given the Metropolitan Police my address in connection with an incident they would like to talk to him about. I'm not sure where in the flat he's been living but I guess it's a sign that I need to be a bit tidier around the place; clearly I'm providing too much habitat for writers. I cleaned out all the kitchen cupboards before the riots, but maybe he's been putting his head down in my wardrobe. Note to self: really must be more careful.

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We know that books can really suck, don't we? And not just collectively, when they're out with their mates. Sometimes particular books can suck, all on their own, in their own special way...


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