I have amplified the advice in my mind: just serve your subject. Don’t try to cater to an audience you think may not be keeping up with you-find the audience who will. Don’t write out of anyone’s need except your own. It’s the only way to work-don’t write to what you perceive as a market. I never again asked the question, of myself or anyone else. You have to trust this process is happening.

A great deal happens in the dark, as it were work goes on half-consciously. Writing is a long game and you have to be patient with yourself and your material. Sometimes a project goes into an incubation period as I’ve said very often, the moment you have a good idea isn’t always the moment to see it through. Sometimes people claim they are blocked when they have nothing to say, or they have, temporarily anyway, exhausted their subject this is not pathology. I am dubious about the existence of blocks or frustrations peculiar to writers. You must recognize, though, that once you enter this life, you are at the disposal of your book around the clock. Your best days are sometimes those when you end up with less on the page than when you started. Unoriginally, I call these “the golden hours.” It doesn’t much matter where I find them, as long as I do. I feel shy of saying this, because to non-writers it sounds so lazy-but if, seven days a week, you can cut out two hours for yourself, when you are undistracted and on-song, you will soon have a book. I get my admin done by noon if I can, and push it out of my mind so I can do some real work. Unless it’s on screen, if course-but then there is usually a strict time limit, and constraint and self-consciousness. It may have been transcribed exactly, but it still misses the bit where you rolled your eyes. When you read an interview back, you seldom recognize it as a true account of what passed. I just want to get through without being quoted out of context. And for my part, I don’t feel I am providing value. In press interviews the author feels guarded and wary. You have witnesses, and parity, and might discover something even as you speak. You get to see the shadows moving behind the substance.ĭiscussions with an audience are often more enlightening than interviews. You point to a sentence, and say, “How did that get there?” Then a tale unfolds, the book’s hinterland. I once heard Salman Rushdie in discussion on stage in St Louis, and he said that there’s only one question to ask an author. Or “Why did you write this book?” It isn’t enough to say that you wrote it because it’s your job and you thought readers would like it. “What did you mean when you said….?” etc. You are invited to rehash your material, saying it again in worse words. Interviews seldom offer the chance to say anything worth hearing, no matter how well-prepared the interviewer.

Undistracted writing