“The ideal view for daily writing,
hour on hour, is the blank brick wall of a
cold storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch
of sky will do, cloudless if possible.”
Edna Ferber

Writing should be the ultimately portable activity. The stereotype of the author, reinforced by numerous advertisements for writing courses, is of the creative spirit freed from the constraints of time and space. One writing school that advertised for years in Writers’ Digest used a picture of a woman half-reclining on a beach with her laptop, gazing into space. She was obviously just about to produce a great novel or poem, regardless of sun glare blotting out the screen, sand getting into the keyboard, and all the other distractions that a beach offers.

I envy people who can write anywhere. I’ve met a few of them, and they are very annoying. It doesn’t matter where they are – on a train rumbling through Turkey, on a Boeing 747 flying over the North Pole, at a counter top in somebody else’s kitchen, or at a truck stop diner in Iowa – they can always produce a yellow pad or a laptop and start writing.

This gives them an enormous competitive advantage over people like me, who can only write in one place. The geographically promiscuous writer is inevitably more productive, because no potential writing time is wasted.

This may be a problem that nobody else shares, but I suspect that they do. I can and do take notes anywhere, but I can only concentrate on writing in the familiar place where I always write.

The room I call my study is very pleasant. It overlooks the garden and some woods. The shutters create slanting bars of sunshine, so I can imagine that I’m writing on a tropical island like Graham Greene. All my stuff is conveniently arranged. I even have two desks, although one of them is always covered with cats. But, after we moved into this new house, I found myself mute in this nice room, completely unable to write for about two weeks. The same thing has happened before. Rooms that I wrote in for years became almost an essential part of my equipment. When I had to leave them it was like death or divorce. It induced a kind of mental paralysis.

Now my new study is familiar, and I think I can see why familiarity is so essential, at least for me. It’s a question of blanking out everything else, of reducing distractions to the absolute minimum. When I have my space properly organized the routine stuff becomes automatic. My shelves of general reference books and music reference books are on the left. Other books of current interest – a changing selection – are on the right. Filing cabinets are behind. The computer is on one desk, and the typewriter and the cats are on the other. Recording gear and CD players are on a cabinet that also holds stationery. When I need a stapler or a paper clip or a notebook my hand knows exactly where to find it. My favorite pictures are on the walls. The bird feeders are clearly visible from the windows. Order has been achieved. There are no distractions. I can write. If this sounds like a bad case of obsessive-compulsive disorder then I plead guilty. But I think it makes some psychological sense.

Virginia Woolf, in a much-quoted sentence, wrote: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

My responses to that are: what does being a woman have to do with it, and what does fiction have to do with it? We all need money and a room of our own if we are to write anything.

At least, I have a nice room.

Last week I started on the somewhat daunting task of reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain. This work has been assembled over many years by the Mark Twain Project, and is not so much an autobiography as a cleverly edited collection of notes and fragments that Mr. Clemens left behind when he died in 1910.

Mark Twain is a model for any writer, and it is particularly interesting that he left instructions that none of his autobiographical material was to be published until one hundred years after his death. He argued that this was the only way a man could tell the whole truth without embarassing himself or hurting other people.

How right he was, and how little we care to admit it! Your secret personal writings can be as searingly honest as you like, but when you write (knowingly) for publication the veil of self-censorship comes sweeping down, and most of the really interesting stuff gets left out. This is the vast hidden reservoir of what the French call “le non dit” or the unsaid.

It’s not just embarassing personal matters that activate the self-protective instinct. A seasoned writer (what in the bad old days we called “a hack”) knows very well what his audience doesn’t want to hear, and more important what his editor doesn’t want to hear. The mental scissors are always at work, snipping away those undesirable thoughts. In America, I find, there are three taboo areas: religion, patriotism and (interestingly) sports. These are dangerous themes for any writer with a sense of humor. Politics, thank goodness, is wide open. But Mark Twain, bless him, cared nothing for any of these sensibitities, which is why we should still read him today.

Millions of writers all over the world will be making their New Year’s resolutions right now or (if you read this any time after January 7) contemplating the futility of their good intentions.
It’s not just writers of course, but everybody. But in my very personal experience writers tend to have a limited repertoire of resolutions, and on this day it may be worth examining three of them.

1. “I will finish my novel. “ This a bad joke, of course. All writers have boxes of unfinished novels. It’s part of the definition of being a writer. If the novels are any good they would have been or will be finished; if not, not.

2. “I will work much harder at my writing.” Usually this means starting at 5 am like Kurt Vonnegut of Anthony Trollope, or making a massive concentrated effort to finish each project, like Simenon. This sort of work style is based on the discipline and the habits of a lifetime. If you haven’t done it yet, you won’t start doing it tomorrow.

3. “I will branch out and try something completely new.” Yes, essayists want to be novelists, people who write magazine articles dream about being poets, everybody has fantasies about writing memoirs or screenplays. The grass is always greener on the other side of the literary fence, especially if it looks more artistic, fashionable, or trendy. Beware of getting what you wish or, even worse, discovering that it is not at all what you wish.

Everybody can and should try everything, of course – especially in writing where the stakes are not high and there’s no chance of sustaining a physical injury by being adventurous. But I always suspect the short-term, emotionally-charged language of “resolutions” at this time of year. Resolutions are too intense, and failure hurts too much.

Add the phrase “One of these days…” to any of the resolutions above and you will have the recipe for a perfectly happy year in 2012. One of these days, anything can happen.

Being an essayist may have been fashionable in the eighteenth century, but today it feels like the literary equivalent of playing the lute or weaving on the hand loom – an archaic pastime for nostalgic dilettantes. The action is elsewhere, in fiction. So why not write fiction?

Believe me I’ve tried, starting when I was a mere teenager. Over the years I have even published about a dozen short stories, although my two novels remain nothing more than hopeful fragments. You can read about these in my book Writer at Work, in the chapter called “The Perpetual Novel.”

Once again I have been enlightened by one of Arthur Krystal’s excellent essays, “Why I’m not a novelist.” The fiction block, he argues, is the result of a lack of concern for other people – not necessarily a lack of empathy but a lack of deep curiosity about other lives and experiences.

That’s the answer. Anyone can invent plots and characters, but only a certain type of writer can enter into the emotional lives of those characters and make them come alive. I love reading fiction, and right now I’m re-reading the sea stories of Patrick O’Brian, whose main characters seem sometimes more real to me than people I actually know.

Sometimes the simplest and least welcome answer is the one you need to hear

Every time I do any kind of public speaking I’m struck by the difference between the words that we write and the words that we say. I first learned this almost forty years ago when I first began teaching, but it still comes as a surprise. Things that are easy to write may be difficult or almost impossible to speak out loud. The most obvious example is the contrast between a love letter (easy, a piece of cake) and a verbal declaration of love face to face (terrifying, virtually out of the question).

There are a number of reasons for this. The spoken word carries a load of meaning and emotion that the written word can never match. Speech and hearing are instinctively human, while writing and reading are mere techniques. When we speak we get an instant reaction from our audience, whether it is two hundred people or one. A live audience responds in a way that a computer keyboard does not, and you as a speaker may be diverted and even derailed by their responses. Also, when we speak, we hear the awful inadequacies of our own words. That’s why one of the best pieces of advice for writers is: “Read it out loud.”

Public speaking is a good exercise for writers, as well as being a potential source of income (always welcome). Reading your own works and talking about them is a great way to expand your audience, and your understanding of how other people react to your ideas.

Arthur Krystal, whose new book of essays I mentioned in the previous post,* has many interesting things to say about writers as speakers. With vivid examples, from Hazlitt to Nabokov, he shows how incompetent even very good writers can be when they have to express themselves in speech and in public. The tongue tied “famous writer” at the dinner table is a stereotype that has some truth in it, at least in my experience. Krystal argues that this is because writers are mostly solitary and unsociable creatures (or they would never get anything done), and also because the process of writing is entirely different from the process of speaking. Writing is slow, calculated, and constantly edited. Speech is fast, almost instinctive, and spontaneous.

Radio (my main work at the moment) occupies an interesting middle ground between public speaking and writing, and allows us to avoid most of these problems. The performer is invisible, but his or her words are carried by the voice which can be and usually is carefully scripted. Good radio performers, and voice actors who read recorded books, can have tremendous impact, perhaps even greater than in a face-to-face situation. Sometimes I think that the invisible speaker is the best communicator of all – but we must come out into the daylight sometimes.

The best technique for preparing a public speech is well known, and it works. First write the whole thing out in full, so you can judge its completeness, its logic, and its length. This version will be almost literally unspeakable – stilted and awkward when you read it out loud. Then take the full version and make a series of brief notes cover the main points, and speak only from the notes. The effect is like magic. Your speech will suddenly flow naturally and expressively, and everyone will acclaim you as a great speaker. The ghastly effect of reading a speech from a text can be heard by listening to any politician and almost any preacher. “If you don’t know what you want to say,” as a critic once admonished me, “then shut up and don’t say it.”

* * *

*Except When I Write by Arthur Krystal. He is a well-known essayist and critic (New Yorker, Harpers, etc.) and has collected together twelve of his best essays and critical reviews from 2005 to 2009.

Here’s a book worth reading – Except When I Write by Arthur Krystal. He is a well-known essayist and critic (New Yorker, Harpers, etc.) and has collected together twelve of his best essays and critical reviews from 2005 to 2009.

The first essay alone is worth the price – “When Writers Speak.” In it Krystal offers a quotation that Edgar Allan Poe attributed to Montaigne.

“People talk about thinking, but for my part I never think except when I sit down to write.”

This mild but disturbing aperçu brought me up short. It had the same effect on Krystal, and perhaps on you. How true it is – at least for my mental habit. Most of the time I live and talk on automatic pilot, using the same stock repertoire of actions and phrases that I’ve been using all my life. Thought is not necessary, unless I try to solve a crossword or puzzle out some new outrage committed by my computer.
It’s the same for most of us. Yesterday I took a two-hour train trip to and from New York, during which I was surrounded by people who talked loudly and incessantly to each other or (more often) to some disembodied entity hiding inside a cell phone. I must have been an unwilling listener to eight or ten conversations on that train, and none of them made any sense whatsoever. They were (to use a good old-fashioned word) just blather, empty words, ungrammatical stream of consciousness noise. No communication was taking place, except the kind of communication that occurs when one monkey chatters to another – a kind of verbal grooming or exchange of recognition signals.

It was depressing to realize that I often do exactly the same thing. Faced with a social situation, or an unexpected phone call or an encounter in the post office, I can blather as well as anyone. Not a single thought enters my head while I am doing it.

But when I sit down to write, as Montaigne said, I begin to think. The rusty gears of my brain grind into action and (as has often been pointed out to me by my nearest and dearest) I disappear into a state of abstraction where I don’t want to talk to anybody. This is exactly why writing is so hard. It’s not the writing it’s the thinking that produces keyboard avoidance and writer’s block.

The reverse side of this phenomenon, as Krystal points out, is that writers are often poor speakers. Our literary skills don’t always translate into verbal skills, perhaps because the thinking part of our brains is reserved for or used up by the first.

As someone who works in radio, where speech and writing (and, occasionally, thought) come together, I found Krystal’s speculations fascinating. But you have to read the whole of Krystal’s essay – if I describe it in any more detail here I will probably be guilty of copyright infringement. The rest of his book is excellent too, especially if you are interested in Hazlitt, Poe, Barzun, or Scott Fitzgerald (some of his favorite subjects). His essays are models of complex yet completely friendly writing, and they must have required a lot of thought.

Great writers, once they are safely dead, become celebrities by default, no matter how ignored they were in their lifetimes. And because celebrities are the gods of our age, we feel an obscure impulse to pay homage at the shrines they made famous.

These literary pilgrimages, to Shakespeare’s Stratford-on-Avon, or Jane Austen’s City of Bath for example, are a strange, irrational habit. It’s as if we believe that there really is a Spirit of Place, and hope that some of it might rub off on us. The modern, post-literate version of the literary pilgrimage, I suppose, is people crowding into the “Cheers” bar in Boston, or visiting the Disney movie studios in Florida, hoping to glimpse the illusion just behind the fantasy.

It was in this hopeful spirit that I determined to make a pilgrimage to Walden Pond, the place that inspired Thoreau to write his famous account of his life in the woods.

Henry David Thoreau was a strange, curmudgeonly kind of writer, which is why he appeals to me. I knew he had become a genuine celebrity when I found his name quoted on the bottom of a box of coffee filters. It’s one thing to have your books in every library in the world, but to have your name used in advertising guarantees that real fame has arrived.

Thoreau’s Walden, first published in 1854, is a nationally and internationally famous book, a classic. As Mark Twain once remarked, a classic is a book that everyone praises, and nobody reads, which is why it remains a classic. I doubt that many people read Walden these days, unless set to the task by cruel college professors. Most of Thoreau’s masterpiece is pure scolding and grumbling about the excesses of society, and a lot of self-satisfied preaching about how superior Thoreau himself was. Then there’s the occasional flash of absolute insight or brilliantly original writing, which makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Thoreau’s two solitary years in the woods were less romantic than he pretended. The land was owned by his mentor and father- figure, Ralph Waldo Emerson who gave permission for Thoreau to live out there, rather like a pesky small boy being allowed to camp out in the family’s backyard. Thoreau makes a big deal in his book of self-sufficiency, but he regularly crept back to the Emerson house for decent meals, and very probably for laundry. These days he could creep into Concord for Dunkin Donuts, and a quick visit to the Laundromat.

But that just tells us that Thoreau was human, and the home he built beside Walden Pond was very human too: just a single room hut, ten feet by fifteen, which Thoreau built with his own hands as he tells us in excruciating detail. He gave the total cost as twenty eight dollars, twelve and a half cents.

There’s a replica of the hut at Walden Pond, built just as he described. It is very cozy inside, “All the essentials of a house,” to quote Thoreau, “and nothing for housekeeping.” No sunken living room, no Jacuzzi, not even a bathroom, none of the extravagant touches we now consider essential to happiness. His total furnishings comprised a stove, a desk, a bed, and three chairs.

“I have three chairs in my house,” he wrote, “One for solitude, two for company, and three for society.” One chair for solitude: I like that. Solitude is hard to find in this age of total communication. A modern Thoreau at Walden Pond would have his solitude splattered into a million fragments by e-mails, tweets, and telephone calls from people trying to sell insurance and oil delivery services. The site of the pond is squeezed into a triangle bounded by the Concord Turnpike, Route 126, and the railroad line. There’s a steady background noise of traffic, low-flying helicopters and aircraft heading to and from Boston. School parties of kids play with Frisbees, along the edge of the pond. A modern Thoreau would never have quiet time to think an original thought, still less to set it down on paper.

These days, the only place we can be alone is in our cars, millions of little Walden Ponds on wheels, spinning up and down the expressways and the interstates: one seat for solitude, two for car pooling, and two at the back for the family dog.

Somewhere out there on the highways a solitary writer must be thinking, really thinking, the way Thoreau did in his hut. And a great book is taking shape. And future literary pilgrims will stop (if they can) and say “It was here that she was inspired, at Exit 55. Or was it Exit 43, or perhaps Exit 39?”

People who insist on telling their dreams
are among the terrors of the breakfast table.
Max Beerbohm

At a dinner party I was seated next to a charming lady who had a professional interest in fantasies and fairy stories. This intrigued me at once because I really admire authors who can conjure up fantastic worlds, stories, and characters. Some storytellers have this gift of imagination, all poets must have it, and most of us prose writers simply envy it. The real world is prosaic.

Consider the explosive inventiveness of a book like Alice in Wonderland, or of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series that held me enthralled when I was a teenager, or of Rowling’s highly successful Harry Potter books, or for that matter of Shakespeare’s magical Midsummer Night’s Dream. Could you imagine any of that? I couldn’t.

So I asked my neighbor where such strange inspirations come from. She said: “It’s mostly dream material.”

I was afraid of that.

It’s not that I am dream-deprived: I have an intense dream life. Some people have accused me of dreaming all the time even when I am awake, but that’s unkind. Every night I have long and complicated dreams, some of which I remember for a few minutes when I get up. Like you I have been advised to keep a dream diary so that the acrobatics of the sleeping brain can be recaptured for later use. When I tried this I got a notebook full of slightly disturbing nonsense.

Robert Louis Stevenson tells the story of waking up in the night after a powerful dream. He was convinced that the most profound secret of the universe had been revealed to him. Half asleep, he scribbled it down.

When he woke up in the morning he read: “The whole world is pervaded by a strong odor of turpentine.”

Many African cultures (and no doubt others) make an important distinction between “Big Dreams” and “Little Dreams.” The latter are the ordinary nighttime dramas: erotic dreams, anxiety dreams, frustration dreams, and so on.

Big Dreams on the other hand come like revelations from another world. They are usually about the meaning of life and death, and appear as vast adventures of the imagination – as in the visions of the old-time prophets. Big Dreams are rare, and highly valued in those cultures.

Sigmund Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) gave us a language to talk about this universal experience. He proposed that dreams are not meaningless brain static, but reflect our deepest fears and forbidden wishes. The theory caused outrage at the time, but it always made sense to me.

Once I started on this topic I realized that I should offer dream material of my own, so I went back to keeping a notebook beside the bed. Here’s a record of eight dreams I noted down from consecutive nights. Erotic dreams are omitted on grounds of good taste, and simple anxiety dreams are boring. These are some of the others. I admit in advance that these dreams make no sense. But they are all genuine according to my morning-after memory, allowing for the fact that the waking mind tends to edit and tidy things up in accordance with daytime rationality.

Dream 1: I have stolen a steamroller (a massive, heavy, noisy machine), but I cannot find a way to return it to its owners discreetly. There are many complications. (I often have dreams about odd forms of transportation).

Dream 2: I have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem. This mathematical paradox, proposed by Pierre de Fermat about 1630, states that: xn + yn = zn has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y and z when n > 2. Nobody has ever been able to solve it, but I solved it in my dream. Needless to say I could not remember the solution, and I don’t even understand the problem, so what was Fermat’s theorem doing in my brain?

Dream 3: I meet Fanny Mendelssohn and her brother Felix, the great German composer, at a party. They have both been dead since 1847, but I wasn’t surprised to see them. Fanny is really rather lovely with big, liquid eyes like her portrait. Felix is rather pompous. I feel sad because they are both so talented, and they will both die (have died) young. So I am especially kind to Fanny.

Dream 4: I am teaching at a third-rate theological college. All the other professors are gay priests, and I seem to be the token heterosexual atheist. All the students are older women who want to be priests, but act like radical feminists. One of the younger priests propositions me in a joking way. I reject him, citing religious differences.

Dream 5: (Another transport dream). I’m driving a huge black stretch limo into La Guardia airport in New York. I get stuck slantwise outside the departure building, blocking all lanes. My father – long dead – comes up to the driver’s window, riding a very sleek black Italian motorcycle. “Why are you driving that ridiculous car?” he asks, and rides off.

Dream 6: (Another dream with motorcycles). I am trying to buy a Dunkin’ Donut – something I almost never do. I am passionate about it. But every time I see the famous sign, something is wrong. One place is a hut half buried in the ground, full of sleeping Indians, the donuts covered in flies. The next is a combination donut shop and out-patient surgery center, I get on the wrong line and nearly get taken in for anesthesia. The third is like a biker bar, where female bikers are fighting with donuts. One of the bikers asks for my autograph.

Dream 7: (Another dream about music). In this dream I am obsessed by a simple tune from childhood – a sad melody with a hint of joy in it, origin unknown. I pick out the tune on my electronic keyboard, planning to write it down. Then I begin embroidering variations. They become very complicated (and to me) very beautiful. They seem to solve something. My hands just flow over the keyboard. I am a fine player, in my dreams. Then I wake up and realize that I never wrote down the basic melody. But it’s gone, and I can’t recall it.

Dream 8: I encounter my oldest friend Bob in a very strange place, like the ultra modern lobby of an airport hotel. He has been very ill but now looks much better, and amazes me by saying he is learning Latin. I begin to suspect he has died (he has), and we are both in a kind of limbo. Other people around are dressed ancient Roman style, and don’t recognize my existence. At last I meet a character who looks like the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. “Are we in hell?” I ask the Commendatore. “Why else is Bob learning Latin?” The Commendatore replies cheerfully: “Latin is just the beginning. Then he will learn history, psychology, literature, art, and all the rest of human knowledge. We are teaching him to understand himself. Then he will be in hell.”

Those are my dreams over a period of about a week, or at lease the ones I can remember. If you can make any sense of them, or see any way they could be used by a creative writer, let me know. If you can solve Fermat’s Last Theorem I’d like to know that too.

I had thought that truth in advertising was a lost cause. But I was walking on Fifth Avenue when I saw a beggar sitting on the sidewalk holding a sign that said, “Need Money for Drink.” This was such a refreshing change that I gave him a dollar, and almost went back later to give him another. An honest advertisement at last!

The problem with regular advertising is that it deals entirely in overstatement. Advertising copy writers, like beggars, feel they have to tell a good story to get your attention. So everything is wildly exaggerated. I have a brochure here offering “The World’s Top Time Management Tool.” Sounds pretty impressive. We all have trouble managing time, not least because it is utterly beyond our control. So what is this amazing product? It’s a little diary, where you write down your appointments, a personal organizer.

The impressario P.T.Barnum started it all back in the last century, with his circus, billed as “The Greatest Show on Earth.” (an outrageous claim when you remember the Franco-Prussian War was going on at the time). Barnum believed that the only way to sell something was to oversell it, and we are still living with his legacy of empty hyperbole. Everything is luxurious, superior, amazing, perfect, great, incredible.

This Barnum-speak has infiltrated the whole of the mass media, and most misleadingly, the news. Every day brings the MOST CATASTROPHIC refugee crisis, the MOST BRUTAL crime, the MOST DESTRUCTIVE forest fire, and so on, as if each day’s news is worse than yesterday’s news. In the end, we have to tune it all out, or take to Prozac.

In the entertainment world, every fashionable celebrity is billed as the brightest star, the most creative musician, the finest athlete. Perhaps the most extreme example of exaggeration was committed by the President of Columbia Records, who once introduced the late Michael Jackson as “The greatest artist of all time.” I’ll repeat that: “The Greatest Artist of All Time.”

We exaggerate wildly when in love, usually with disastrous results, and always in war, where truth is proverbially the first casualty.

And, coming down to earth, resumes.. Resumes are more and more works of pure fiction, many of them turned out by professional resume writers who could beat Stephen King in a straight fantasy-writing contest. The same goes for letters of recommendation. I must have read thousands of these, over the years, and I get the impression that the world is full of intellectually brilliant, highly committed, widely read people with outstanding leadership qualities, none of whom I ever manage to meet.

Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement, because exaggeration undermines the language. You remember from school that adjectives come in three forms: the positive, the comparative, and the superlative – as in good, better, best. When everything is superlative, all adjectives are equal, and equally meaningless. If anything really special comes along, like an artist even greater than Michael Jackson, we have no words left to describe it.

Some people are fighting back against exaggeration, like the honest beggar I described at the beginning of this essay. And, from the window of a Long Island Railroad train, I once saw a sign advertising The Adequate Rubber Stamp Company. What more could anyone ask from a rubber stamp than simple adequacy? But they’ll probably be driven out of business by the Superlatively Magnificent Rubber Stramp company.

I like the the automobile ad that says simply: “Another Kind of Company, Another Kind of Car.” They don’t say what kind, so you can’t argue with that. And there’s an airline that advertises with the slogan “Find out How Good we Really Are.” No promises there. It sounds more like a threat.

These are encouraging trends. If this kind of straight talk ever catches on Congress, we could quickly find ourselves living in the best of all possible worlds. Although, of course, we wouldn’t presume to call it the best.

Saint Quentin la Poterie
France

Summer is indeed the worst possible time for writing, especially when the sun shines and the local wine is good. Everything conspires towards relaxation and mental torpor.

Self-motivation is always hard, unless there is a prospect of big rewards. Most of us who are writers, I suspect, are driven to work by simple vanity and the desire for self-promotion. We are not alone.

All this summer I have been living in a French village that is famous for its pottery. There are at least twenty studios with shops attached, and a couple of weeks ago potters and ceramicists from all over Europe converged on the village for an indoor/outdoor exhibition that occupied almost every public space and private courtyard.

It was a delightful event, not least because it allowed us to take a look at many corners of the village usually hidden behind high walls. The art on show was uniformly impressive, and the creators were more than willing to tell us about it.

But I couldn’t help noticing that almost nothing was being sold, although everything was for sale. The event was pure display and self-promotion. Artists, like writers, want their work to be seen and appreciated. The difference is that you can absorb a work of art in a few seconds, but it takes hours to read a book. So we writers don’t have the option of taking our work to the streets in quite the same way. We can and increasingly do self-publish on the web or on paper, which is something because it makes our work available, and I guess we must be satisfied with that. Getting the public to commit time and money to support our genius is at least as hard for us as it is for visual artists.

So on the day of the great pottery exhibition I did my small part to promote the creative lifestyle and bought a few ceramic plates and a jug. You may think that this is not very impressive, and you would be right.