I don’t really have a typical writing day. I try and create a space for writing and try to clear the day of other things I have to do. I like to write longhand, so when I’m talking about working on the computer, that’s at a later stage. So it’s quite easy to find a quiet place—you can write anywhere if all you need is a notebook and a pen. Also, I tend to use two notebooks now, copying things from one page of a notebook to another, if the insertions and deletions become too thick. If I can keep that going for a few hours, then that’s a good day. I think a thousand words is a good number to do in a day. You have your writing days and your rewriting days, and there are days where things go more slowly than others.

You do sometimes feel like a bit of a fool if you’re spending all that time working on one sentence, but sometimes that’s what you have to do. I’ve introduced this new thing now into my working regime which is yet another notebook. I have this whole set of notebooks. There’s a notebook for the plan of the book. There’s the notebooks where I’m writing. Also, I now keep a writing diary. If you’re writing, and you come across some problem, some sentence doesn’t seem to be working and you can’t quite think why, and you stop and you think about it and you analyse the sentence, when you’ve reached your conclusion then you make a note in the diary about why it is this might not be working. To stop and break down a sentence or a bit of grammar in that way, I find very useful.

 What do you struggle with and what comes easier to you, in terms of your writing process?

It is strange how the things that people sometimes respond most to are the things that were easiest to write. But also sometimes you can have a felicity in some particular kind of writing that is not necessarily to your advantage. I mean it comes easily, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. I find that there’s a great deal of dialogue in my books, and I would like there to be less. And I think generally speaking, there is too much dialogue in modern fiction. It’s often superfluous, and it gets away from the business of actual storytelling. I feel that I am gradually taking everything out of my books apart from the storytelling. I’ve become wary of lush topographical description, I’ve become wary of dialogue, I’m starting to wonder what comes next. Just action? You have narrative, you have reflection, you have dialogue—it’s pretty easy to break prose up into its constituent varieties. And I think narrative is not hard to write, but it’s very hard to write well. So I’d say I find it easy to write narrative badly, but hard to write it well.

 How do the processes of writing journalism, novels, and short stories differ?

There’s a convergence between fiction and nonfiction as you go on, because when you start your piece of fiction, you can write absolutely anything. When you start a piece of journalism, you can’t, because the world’s already the way the world is. Whereas as you go on in your fiction, you’ve already set some parameters, and those parameters become tighter and tighter as you go on. You start as an architect and you end up as a builder, which is more what a journalist does. But there are so many different kinds of journalism. Most writers are journalists in some way or another. Most writers are not reporters, which is a slightly different kind of thing. It’s about how you are working with reality. It’s a difference between the true and the actual. Because there may be truths which you cannot actualize except by reassembling reality in another shape.

As someone you started writing at an early age, do you have any advice for young writers?

It’s a criticism of writers, especially young writers, that they are self-conscious. You know, when somebody says, ‘I found his writing very self-conscious,’ it’s usually in a pejorative sense. I know what they mean by that, but a more conscious way of writing is I think is actually necessary and beneficial. Think about what you are doing. This is sort of negative advice from my own experience, because I just went on and did it. And I did not think enough about it. And I should have allowed the writers that I admired to be my teachers in a way that I did not. Without losing the inspiration and the flow and the joy of it all—you can write under sustained inspiration for hours— when you look back on what you have done, be very critical and don’t think that just because you’ve done it, it’s done.

Your most recent novel, The Heart Broke In, encompassed so many different themes and characters. What was it like writing something so complex?

 Well, it was difficult. You do have to take practical steps when you have a multi-perspective novel. For The People’s Act of Love, I made a grid. In that book, you have access to the points of view of different characters in turn, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t skewing it one way or another towards a particular character, so I wanted to colour representation of how much time I’d spent with each one. But with The Heart Broke In, the grid was a lot more complicated. It was very useful. I couldn’t really have kept track of it otherwise. And at one point, I really thought, ‘James, you’ve screwed up here, it’s not possible that this can happen before that, but if that happens before that, then it doesn’t make sense!’ I got over it in the end.

The Heart Broke In is concerned with ideas of morality, where we get our sense of right and wrong in a post-religious world. What guides you in your life to make the right decision?

 It was useful in the writing of that book to come to a deeper understanding of where we get our sense of right and wrong from. Some of the characters in the book come to feel that the nature of our sense of right and wrong is actually the needs of other people. It’s that context that drives us, and our virtue, or lack of it, is a reflection of how sensitive we are, and the kind of sacrifices that we’re prepared to make for other people, and the degree to which we can imagine what other people are experiencing. If you are alone in a moral universe, there is no moral universe.

 Who are the artists who you most admire?

 J. M. Coetzee is an inspiration in a number of ways. He’s a brilliant writer. I like his style very much, his spare, elusive style. You have a feeling that he’s not making any allowances for himself, that he still, in spite of everything, feels a great tenderness towards his characters. There is a great deal of compassion in Coetzee, no matter how incredibly cruel some of his writing can be. But also, he lives a model life of quiet and self-denial, in terms of what he eats, and he doesn’t drink. The third thing about Coetzee is his rigorous analysis of language. His style comes out of a very profound understanding on every level, linguistics, grammar, whatever, of the English language, of the meta-language. To work towards that kind of understanding is something that I intend to do.

I’m a huge admirer of Tolstoy, and I came to realize when I was writing The Heart Broke In what a complex and interesting writer he is, and how mysterious the processes at work in an apparently conventionally-written novel are. While reading Anna Karenina again, and thinking about this, I realized that the modernists in English literature got the wrong end of the stick. Language is already a surreal expressionist form. It doesn’t need to go to a further degree of distortion in order to make it look superficially like a literary Jackson Pollock. It’s already in the nature of language that it is only partly representational and partly symbolic, and partly some other mysterious thing which we haven’t quite grasped or articulated yet. Most of all, it is a means of expressing and storing time, which is its unique capability.

It was a combination of things. The idea took shape in 2005 when I finished a critical book, The Poem and the Journey, which itself followed on from my journeys in Tigers in Red Weather. I read every poem as a journey and in The Poem and the Journey I thought about different sorts of journeys, exile, homecoming, exploration, and related them to the movement of different sorts of poem.

I then thought about the difference between the Odyssey and the Aeneid; how one – which was an imaginative touchstone for the 20th century – is a homecoming; but the other is a forced migration to make a new home when the old one has been razed and lost, which is the experience that is tragically charactising a lot of 21st century. And about my father’s grandfather from whom I inherit my name: a musician who studied in Leipzig and came to Britain as a boy.

But the last poem of my collection Voodoo Shop also uses the image of migrating birds: I think the last poems in each collection often point the way to where you are going to go next.

2. In such a complex and multi-layered work, how (in practical terms) did you go about handling your material and planning the structure and concept? How much did the work change during the writing process?

It took years! The whole process was seven years. The structure grew and changed. At first I thought of alternating prose and prose page by page, which was obviously impossible. I did masses of research on birds, masses of hard writing and false starts. Finally my editors called me in and said to send them what I had. They sat down with me, and a high pile of printed out inchoate stuff, which included poems, and notes, and tryout essays. And my editor said, Ruth, just write the poems! then you can add the prose. There was more of that than my editor had expected, but all the facts, and connections seemed to me so beautiful and important. Everything had to lead up to the all-important political section, the immigrations, detention centres, asylum seekers and how they are treated. But I wanted to let the birds, and other creatures, do the work, showing how dangerous and effortful migration is, so the poems about asylum seekers did not have to be message-laden, could be free to be themselves, to be poems, find out their own inner relationships and where they are going.

3. What is it you enjoy about writing?

Discovery. See pattern, below.

4. How conscious are you of ‘writing techniques’ while you are writing? Do you prefer to forget about them in the moment and go back to them in the later editing process once you have written your initial drafts?

I’m not sure I distinguish between technique and anything else. I draft and draft and draft; each time I hope it gets truer. In Maurice Sendak’s children’s book, In the Night Kitchen, the little boy steals dough from bakers in the basement, and kneads it and kneads it, “till it looks ok”. But the illustration shows him making a dough bi-plane, which he hops into and flies around. It’s that process that matters, that feeling of working “till it looks ok.” That’s the drafting, and redrafting. Then you can fly.

5. What do you admire most in other people’s writing? What living or dead writers have been most influential on your own writing?

Freshness – live language, a confident, singular voice that is aware both of language and of the world.

Influences are too many to say: I try and learn from anyone I admire, from Sappho to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I spent a lot of time early on with Greek choral lyic, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and also with Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote a study of them and was influenced by them himself. But I also love Elizabeth Bishop’s directness, her switches from confidentiality to universal insights, to wonderfully crafted description.

6. What is the most difficult part of the writing process for you? What is the easiest part?

Easy? Nothing is. I think it shouldn’t be. But the most difficult part for me is the beginning, the getting into something new. It is also a thrill – but it has to be new, you have to make sure you are not coasting, resting on something you have done before, places you have been before.

7. You mentioned when you spoke to the UEA MA students that pattern is the key thing in writing, that we are all pattern makers trying to make or find a pattern. Could you say a little more about this and how it plays out in your writing?

is it poetry?’

In a Rorschach test, psychologists ask people to say what they see in, or make of, an inkblot. The inkblot is the world, really: poems are what we make of it. The stars are a very ancient Rorschach test: people looked up and saw mythical creatures in them, Orion the Hunter, the Little Bear. Then they saw ellipses, guidance, geometric patterns.

Human beings are hungry for meaning, and find it through pattern. We project our own patterns onto the world: pattern mediates our experience.

All good poets are obsessed with pattern, but differently. Paul Muldoon is a wonderful, very self-aware extreme example: he uses extraordinary patterning to interrogate history, language and experience. I think I’m particularly obsessive about how I pattern vowels.

For me, there is a point in writing a poem, as the poem finds its form, when I try and listen to it, to sense if it wants to be in stanzas or not, because stanzas are a special sort of patterning.

I once read Paul Durcan’s “A Spin in the Rain with Seamus Heaney” to someone who is soaked in 19th century poetry but doesn’t know much contemporary poetry. I was really shocked a week later when he said, ‘Remember that poem you read me: why is it poetry?’

Patterning is one place to start, to answer that.

I’m writing this as I fly over Siberia, on the way home after my visit to Japan as a guest of the Nippon Foundation for the inaugural Tokyo International Literary Festival. Despite working for the British Centre for Literary Translation, my knowledge of Japanese is limited, to say the least. After a couple of days I’d learned:

ume – plum blossom

sakura – cherry blossom

arigato – thank you, a feeble attempt at reciprocating the legendary Japanese politeness

kissa – an old style coffee house with red tins of Caravan coffee and bakelite phones, offering a rare glimpse of the history of the city

I picked up a few more words during my visit, but these first four words summed up for me the themes of the festival and of my stay in Japan: history and memory, destruction and rebirth, gardens and literature, travel, cultural differences, and notions of home.

History and memory

Walking around the Koishikawa Korakuen Botanical Gardens in search of plum blossom, I was struck by the signs explaining that these old teahouses and shrines were in fact replicas, rebuilt either after the Great Kanto earthquake in September 1923 or the firebombing of Tokyo during the Second World War. I couldn’t help but agree with Junot Díaz’s comment that Tokyo is a vulnerable city.

This first festival comes almost exactly two years after the latest disaster to strike Japan, the 11th March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. In our welcome packs, we received a poignant reminder in the form of the anthology March Was Made of Yarn, containing pieces by a number of writers taking part in the festival, raising ideas we continued to discuss throughout the weekend.

In Japan disasters take place in the past and in the future, according to Mieko Kawakami; even now, after the earthquake, we’re still living in a pre-disaster age. When a writer responds to disaster, she is bringing both memory of what happened and imagination of what will happen. This theme was echoed by a 22-year old Japanese man in the audience, asking who asked how someone his age can keep alive historical memory for future generations. Junot Díaz said that he learned most about contemporary Japan, and its history, from the work of Naoki Urasawa. In Naoki’s manga, the characters are affected by both World War II and the Cold War. Díaz spoke of the need for contemporary writers to bridge the generation gap by including that history in their work, connecting the chain to carry on the memory. It’s important we try to live – like Naoki’s character Kenji – in three dimensions: past, present and future.

Hideo Furukawa is living and writing in both past and future. Most people come to Tokyo in search of both work and identity, he said. Hideo himself grew up in Fukushima until he was 18, then came to Tokyo, and after 25 years in the city felt like a Tokyoite. But after March 11th, he remembered his old self in Fukushima, and now finds himself writing in two dialects, reflecting his two different homes.

As David Peace wasn’t in Tokyo at the time of the March 11th earthquake, and tsunami he found it difficult to write about the event directly; rather, his story in the anthology is a fictionalised version of another writer’s response to a comparable event – the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s response to the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923. Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy is set in the aftermath of World War II. He is interested in how the city has rebuilt itself twice in the 20th century, retracing old Tokyo through historical maps. Tokyo is not a museum, Peace said. You can’t see the history unless you look deep into its alleyways, or read novels by writers such as Akutagawa, Natsume Sōseki and Dazai Osamu. The city isn’t signposted, so it’s hard to find places mentioned in these novels, or the bars where Dazai drank, but it’s always worth it when you do.

Jonathan Safran Foer compared a walk through a Japanese garden to the reader’s journey through a physical book. The reader doesn’t see everything at the outset, as the contents are concealed by the cover. Foer described reading as a journey of discovery, revelation and surprise; expectations are affirmed or undermined as the reader moves through the pages of the book. Nicole Krauss compared the design of Japanese gardens – off centre, full of empty spaces – to the spaces, silences and imperfections in a novel, which also create beauty. However, Natsuki Ikezawa talked about how Japan is losing its beauty of silence and emptiness; nowadays the country only seems quiet to people coming from noisier places. He spoke of his need to rediscover Japanese features and integrate them into his own work.

Walking around Koishikawa Korakuen, I wasn’t the only visitor to be drawn by the plum blossom as well as the sight of the gardeners rebuilding sections of the garden, digging ponds and creating hills, preparing for spring.

The journey of translation

A parallel and equally fascinating journey through Japan takes place through literature, but if your Japanese is as limited as mine, you can only hear voices from Japan once they are available in English translation. Generally Anglophone writers have a much greater chance of being translated than Japanese writers, but those Japanese voices that do make it into English tend to be distinct.

Lexy Bloom talked about how she decides what to commission for translation. With any literature, whatever its origin, she is looking for great stories told in a different yet beautiful way. In Japanese writing Bloom is struck by the unusual metaphors. In the title story of March Was Made of Yarn by Mieko Kawakami, the opening is an everyday scene of a couple in a hotel, resting. But the story drifts from the real to the fantastical as the pregnant wife dozes off and dreams that everything is made of yarn, a strongly physical image, puzzling, ultimately – but in a good way.

A couple of years ago, at the Worlds festival in Norwich, Alfred Birnbaum explained why English-language readers sometimes find it difficult to fully appreciate Japanese literature, as there are significant differences in literary sensibility between Japan and the UK. Japanese writing is sensual rather than dealing in ideas and concepts; it has an emotional logic and doesn’t need to be conclusive. Writers favour poetic nuance over precision; what is left out is just as important. As a result, good writing in Japanese doesn’t always sound quite so good in English; it can come across as vague, inconclusive and inarticulate, while English writing translated into Japanese can seem forced, petty, harsh and cold.

Despite these differences, if the translator can get the voice right, the rest will follow, according to Michael Emmerich, who emphasized the need to create a relationship of trust with the reader. When tenses are deliberately misused by the author, it’s accepted as literary style, whereas in translation the reader may suspect that the translator has made a mistake. But if the voice in English is still strong, it’ll carry over any irregularities in the original. Emmerich demonstrated his own flair for distinctive metaphors when asked to differentiate between literary style and voice. According to him, the novel is a runway, and literary style the airplane; when that plane takes off is when you get the voice. Yet that voice isn’t composed of individual words, but is connected to the author by yarn, and stays with the reader long after they’ve finished the book, like the smell of smoke on clothes after a night out in Tokyo.

But what happens to the translator? Should he or she become invisible to the reader’s eye? Koji Toko describes the process of translation as going into zero, achieving a Zen-like state where the self vanishes, allowing the translator to follow another style, beat and music, the breath of the translator’s body exhaling and inhaling at the same time as that of the author. Emmerich disagreed. A poor translation is one through which you can see the original text, he pointed out, whereas a good translation is one in which not the translator but the author – and his or her original text – is transparent.

Travelling with a foreigner’s eyes

Usually Mitsuyo Kakuta thinks that the Japanese way of thinking and behaving is normal. Everyone else is different, and quite possibly wrong. When she goes to other countries, however, she starts to wonder whether it’s she who has things the wrong way round. Yet she becomes even more Japanese when she travels.

In Japan, the relationship to words and verbal expression is very different to other countries, Birnbaum had also explained. Verbal communication is a last resort. When she was abroad, Mitsuyo was struck by how much people talk. The Japanese express themselves by thinking, a silent, staring telepathy. To make matters worse, most people in other countries don’t speak Japanese, so even if she does talk, no-one will understand her. Still she travels as, in her experience, people will always help her out. As she comes from an island nation, like many Japanese Mitsuyo has to overcome certain fears in order to travel. While she is in Japan, Mitsuyo is a rock surrounded by water and can see her limits, but when she travels, she moves away from her limits into shock and newness.

Travelling, talking, reading – these are the ways we learn about other people, other ways of doing things. But what are the ethics of outsiders or foreigners writing about a country they’re not from – an issue in my mind as I write this blog after one brief visit to Japan. Junot Díaz and Natsuki Ikezawa agreed that such writing and sharing is an attempt at communion, at communication. Even if the writer gets things wrong, at least it’s opened up the dialogue between self and other.

Journeying to a new place helps you see yourself, and your own place, differently; on returning home, Pico Iyer walks around and looks at those familiar surroundings with a foreigner’s eyes. Still over Siberia (Japan is a long way away), I’m wondering what I will see when I return to Norwich.

Kate Griffin

www.kategriffin.org

March 2013

Biogs for all the writers mentioned in this piece, as well as details of the festival itself, can be found on the Tokyo International Literary Festival website at www.tokyolitfest.com

The PhD programme I am on at UEA is called Creative and Critical Writing, which suggests that the two types of writing might at least be considered in conjunction, while last year I gave a paper at a conference on the subject of Creative/Critical Writing, which suggests a different, perhaps closer relationship.

In my paper I explored what happens when the two terms are joined together: what happens when Creative and Critical Writing becomes Creative-Critical Writing – my name for that kind of boundary-jumping or boundary-ignoring writing.

In doing so I found myself reaching for metaphors to describe the relationship between the two disciplines. In a way the choice of metaphors was the whole point of the paper. They said everything I wanted to say about the subject. Here, then, sliced out of my academic paper and given a sort of brief, perplexed commentary, are my metaphors:

By Creative-Critical Writing I mean writing that elides the distinction between the two disciplines, or that cosies up to the divide between them, from one side or the other, to peer over the fence, or listen through the wall, and that sometimes, whether accidentally or on purpose, shifts or distorts that barrier, or otherwise disturbs the occupants or atmosphere of the neighbouring room, even if just to the extent of interfering with the television reception.

The idea here is clearly one of a divide as physical barrier, a wall or a fence, which immediately brings up the question of dimensions and materials. A garden fence that can be seen over, or leaned on and chatted over, and that might let through stray stems of a blackberry bush, or goose grass, or nettles, is very different to a 8-metre-high wall or fence – or, okay, ‘separation barrier’ – that would permit none of this.

When I wrote that the barrier might actually get shifted or distorted, I suppose I was thinking of cheap motel rooms, where you can hear the person next door, and so know they can hear you.  The point being, in the end, that Creative and Critical are, under the terms of this metaphor, very much open to each other’s influence, whether positive or malign, while always remaining entirely themselves, and that all of this is made possible by the barrier that separates them. (“Good fences make good neighbours.”)

It is debatable writing, as the land that once stood between Scotland and England, where one might have expected a strict border, was the Debatable Lands.

Here, in fact, the barrier is expanded, or dissolved, or exploded, to become a zone (interzone, demilitarized zone, no man’s land) where no rules apply, or different rules apply, or the rules are pending further definition, perhaps permanently so. I’m not sure that this metaphor helps us much: it is too temporary, too historically determined. History teaches us that one side or the other of such a zone will eventually prevail.

The discourse of Creative Writing, what I write when I write my novel, is confined to its pages, under what might be termed, in a slightly laboured analogy, laboratory conditions. Nothing that I write there can break out of its discourse to infect the wider, superordinate and dominant critical discourse of the department in which we sit, scribbling and squabbling.

The move from the physical or geopolitical metaphor to the medical, the corporeal, the intimate, is always going to raise the stakes of an argument. And yet there are paradoxes here. After all, what is the virus doing in the laboratory in the first place? It is being studied, and controlled, for the greater good of the community. (Is this what the Academy did when it let Creative Writing into its hallowed space?)

…the department, and my supervisors, were quite happy for us to think of those terms as not mutually exclusive, but as possible subjects for hybridization, without ever going into specifics about how that hybridization, or cross-fertilization, might take place – and now I’m put in mind of another reasonably current analogy: of genetically modified crops accidentally fertilizing ‘natural’ crops, though here I’m not sure which crop might be which, which I might be naïve enough to want to call ‘natural’.

An interesting scientific point: hybridizing two species to produce a ‘better’, ‘healthier’ hybrid can damage biodiversity, by driving out both original species, and thus diminishing the gene pool. Hybridization leads to homogenization. Nobody would want all writing to be Creative-Critical, every essay to be lyric, every novel to carry non-fictional under- or overtones.

In his poem ‘Meeting Austerlitz’ George Szirtes characterizes Sebald’s writing process as the use of “double exposure: He would unwind the world of memory and wind it up again a little off-centre as though it were a blind or hedge against bad luck”.

This is a lovely metaphor, though not particularly germane to our current discussion. The whole point of double exposure – whether it is two superposed images of the same subject, or of two different subjects – is that the lens through which they are seen, and the film on which their images are exposed, is the same. The double exposure is a concretisation of the Heraclitan same river twice, whereas the Creative-Critical dichotomy, or synthesis, or whatever it is, is about two different ways of looking, or seeing, or thinking, or writing, at one thing. To stay true to the metaphor, it would be like taking photos of the same subject, at the same moment, on two different cameras: an SLR and a Polaroid; or perhaps taking a photo and painting a watercolour.

‘Living On: Border Lines’ explores, or explodes, the idea of the edges or borders of a text, describing the text “[overrunning] the limits assigned to it”. Throughout the piece Derrida uses a specifically watery set of metaphors – that overrunning is ‘débordement’ – that makes one think of breached sea walls and flooded land.

Interestingly, Derrida’s metaphor moves in the opposite direction to my ones. In my medical scenario, for instance, the subject is a body that fears encroachment from outside, just as the motel guest worries about the stranger in the next-door room. In Derrida, however, it is the text that is the active force, breaching its walls and flooding the neighbouring fields. Which is not necessarily a destructive action.

If there is a sense of disturbance at the Creative and Critical discourses being brought into close proximity – angrily humming and growling at each other, like rival cats in a garden, or similarly charged magnets – then the least we can say is that particular sea wall is still partly intact.

As with the television reception in the cheap motel, what I like about these metaphors is the idea two things affecting each another simply by being brought into proximity. After all, all those medical and scientific metaphors insist on the actual, physical comingling of different substances, whether at the biological, molecular or genetic level, which is not something that happens with literature. There is no gene in a sentence, or paragraph, that makes it creative or critical, fictional or non.

Sebald, who called his medium not the novel, but prose, could be said to approach the lyric essay from the direction of the novel, cosy up to it and pull the hat from its head and put it on its own. Sebald is the lyric essay, the ‘non-fiction artwork’, in drag, or perhaps ventriloquised.

One category of writing masquerading as another is, I think, one of the least interesting manifestations of this tendency. Think of titles: how vogueish it is for novels to go out into the world with a non-fictional hat on. This is cross-dressing at its crudest. The chances of a book called A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian containing real actual knowledge on that subject are about the same as those of Lily Savage having a pair of X chromosomes.  That said, the title here does aspire to the blissful irony of the double bluff: it so clearly doesn’t do what it says on the tin that the reader is bound to step closer, intrigued, convinced that it must contain some interesting knowledge, if only because it so clearly semaphores the fact that it doesn’t, by pretending it does.

Conversely, think of the non-fiction title, whether of book, essay or thesis, that relies on its subtitle – that which comes after the inevitable colon – to say what it does, first drawing you in with the showier, flouncier, fictional-ier pre-colonic title.

Ventriloquised is better, subtler. We learn not to trust the clothing, but we do trust the voice. Close your eyes, and the crudest ventriloquist’s dummy resolves to his or her character, the dialogue between it and its master becomes a ‘true’ one.

Fence, virus, sea wall, drag act… the wider point to be made here about my increasingly frantic search for metaphors for that central relationship between the creative and the critical, is that this very action pulls me down firmly on one side of the divide. Metaphor is creative, not critical, by its very nature. It is anti-scientific. Where science tries to increase knowledge of a subject by measurement and analysis, literature – or, more traditionally, poetry – tries to know by describing, by comparing.

Science brings its object of study into the lab, out of the world, banishes the world in fact, from its investigations. Poetry, given an object of study, immediately casts around for something else to lay alongside it, drape over it, throw at it. It roots through the bin, tips out its handbag, opens wide the doors and windows of the lab in the hope of something wandering in that is different yet somehow the same.

By trying to pin down the difference between creative and critical writing through metaphor, I do anything but… for of course pinning down itself is a metaphor, borrowed in this instance from science – pinning down butterflies, the better to study them. Metaphor is the mark of the creative in the critical: the mark, the trace, the spoor, the taint… pick your metaphor.

The Wrong Beginning

One

As ever, I’m probably staring out of the window, at flowers, at foliage anyway – a few straggly roses, clematis possibly, ferns perhaps, a vine maybe, and plenty of other stuff, weeds notably. Or I’m looking at the sky through the long, slim, slightly grimy panes above the French windows – watching clouds build and threaten, while urging my mind to race off elsewhere.

Or I’m just looking at my screen, my chapped, chubby hands hovering lamely over the keyboard. Perhaps I’m glancing at the books and paperwork stacked up on my desk, the mounds of receipts and bills, invoices and remittance slips, contracts and invitations, the odd bit of fan mail too, having arrived the old-fashioned way via my publishers and through the letter box. I like to hang on to these cards, these letters. Some, I guess, have been sitting there for a while.

So in many ways, while trying to avoid these things that’ll never get properly dealt with or filed, and trying to concentrate, trying to think about what I do best, while panicking a little because a deadline is looming, more bills have to be paid and my brand enhanced, an image appears as if from nowhere. Thank God – not, of course, that I believe in one. In my game?

This, then, is how I’m going to begin it.

* * *

First light Christmas morning. A thin, freezing fog was drifting in from the sea, across the tideline, the frosted dunes, and curling around the decrepit hotels and guesthouses, the long-since-shut and boarded arcades and amusements. A funfair from another era lost further up the Golden Mile.

He crossed the road, his dog trotting obediently by his side. Out of habit he looked behind him, in front again, scanned every which way – not that he could see far. But far enough to tell he was the only fool about at this time and in this place. Why he liked it.

His grey Hugo Boss puffa was zipped tight, his orange beanie pulled low, yet still the air was getting straight to his bones.

Once on the sand, Baz, his black-and-tan Boxer, immediately bounded out of view.

Increasing his pace, not because he was worried about the dog, but to try to generate some warmth, he headed straight towards the sea on a faint path. They always went the same way, across this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. How it had been designated as such was a mystery.

‘Baz,’ he shouted at last. ‘Where the hell are you?’

What is it with Christmas? Why did I have to say it’s Christmas morning? The added pathos? No, that’s not the real reason. Normally I’d run a mile from anything to do with Christmas. The expectation, never truly met. The expense – actually that more than anything nowadays, with Maggie and the children, and their increasing appetites for posh consumer goods. It was because Christmas was the deadline I’d set myself to begin this book. The very last deadline I’d set myself. Now we’re well into February. I’m weeks behind already – I don’t want to think about the other deadline, the one to finish it. Funny how deadlines, my deadlines, used to be all about finishing things. Now I can’t even make deadlines to start things. But at least here it is. Something.

I’m on my feet, which are cold in their knackered slippers, and am now standing behind my desk, having pushed back my chair. With the excitement? The adrenalin rush? Relief more like. I stretch, doing a sort of doubled-armed Olympic salute, arch my back, pull my dressing gown tighter around me, then sit again. Shut my eyes for a moment. I could have done with more sleep. I could always do with more sleep. But it seldom comes, of course – not long, restorative bouts of undisturbed unconsciousness. Not for a while.

Perhaps I should start knocking myself out. Maggie would probably have it that I already do, courtesy of Majestic. Or more recently, because even Majestic’s bulk-buying bargain prices seem to be less of a bargain, the Co-op. Specifically their house claret. It’s OK, when you get used to it.

I stare at my beginning some more. It’ll do. It’ll have to do. But what next? All cannot be what it seems. This middle-aged man out walking his dog on Christmas morning: a man who’s happy to be in such a deserted place, though he’s not so happy about the cold, or the fact his dog’s run off.

Middle age. Despite being warned, it still creeps up on you. And then it does your head in. Maggie might say that’s also the claret – diminishing your powers, making you fat – but it’s not. It’s the simple, physical (and mental) lack of youth, of vigour, of being attractive and original, of being a new-ish thing. But this man out there in the freezing cold might be middle-aged, though he is not me.

While my feet are cold – bad circulation – the rest of me is pretty warm; there’s quite a layer or two of fat nowadays. And I don’t have a Hugo Boss puffa; it’s not my style. Nor do we have a dog. Yes, the children have begged for one, keep begging for one. Though fortunately Maggie and I have remained resolute on the issue. We don’t have the time. I certainly don’t have the time – being the one who’s at home, working from home, most days. It would have fallen to me to walk the thing. To keep it exercised and entertained.

Perhaps the company would be good. What I’ve needed.

Though I am not lonely, surely. And no more distractions, please.

* * *