This Itch of Writing

Can you fetch some glasses?

For my talk at Goldsmiths this evening I've been digging out extracts from the new novel which illustrate what I'm saying. I'd been slightly regretting saying I'd do the talk, though it's being very interesting to work on, simply because I'm so busy. But a nice side-effect is that, because of it, I've fallen in love with the novel again. That must sound a) very soppy and b) dangerously starry-eyed. Certainly it doesn't sound like the cool, rigorous self-editor, murdering darlings with relish, that all writers have to learn to be. Equally, it doesn't sound like that other cliché: the passionate author pouring heart and soul raw onto the page.

The thing is, you see, that I have felt quite often as if this novel and I are opponents, and all too often it's had the upper hand. It's partly because I set myself a huge challenge: two real historical characters, a famous historical mystery, three strands to weave together, and because my writing always seems to be about how the past exists in the present, each of the strands has a Now and a Then, and the story grows from the interaction between the two. It's also because I was writing it while The Mathematics of Love was being marketed, publicised, published, reviewed, read, talked about, put on prize shortlists... So it's been almost impossible not to judge what I do with the new novel through the lens of TMoL and everything that's happened to it. The result of these two complications is that quite often the novel has seemed to be resisting me, even fighting back. And because it's so substantial, because the need/desire to write it has loomed over every single day for the last two and a half years, because it's not actually possible to hold and control a whole novel in your head at once, often it's seemed to be bigger than me.

But it isn't: I'm bigger than it. It has its independent life, it has input from others, it tells me by resisting the detail that an idea of mine won't work, but I'm its master. What I wanted to do I have done, and what I have done works. It really does. In fact - forgive a moment of authorial self-indulgence here, if you'd be so kind - I think it's really rather good.

So that's all right. I can wave it off to university at my editor's with a light heart, even a glow of pride. Now my only task (apart from the little matter of agreeing a title, and two scenes which still need a big tweak...) is to hold on to that sense of mastery. One of the last-ditch efforts of the Inner Critic is to make sure that you don't have pleasure in your achievements. 'Okay, so you did it,' it says. 'That's gone. You only did what you set out to do - nothing so amazing about that. You're a writer, aren't you? You just did your job. And it doesn't deserve a whole blog post to itself. Now, what's your next job? Don't go thinking that'll be easy.'

Well, actually it does deserve a blog post, because I am a writer. Finishing a novel to my satisfaction is the biggest, best, most important part of the job. It's also the hardest. And if that doesn't deserve a glass of champagne (thank you to the reading group I gave a talk to the other day for a most suitable bottle), I don't know what does. If you get the glasses, I'll start easing the cork out...

It's been a bloggy kind of week

You turn your back for a moment, and half a week slips by without a post. There's nothing like the relief of having v-e-r-y  n-e-a-r-l-y  f-i-n-i-s-h-e-d the new novel (not quite, but we're getting there, fiddle by fiddle, tweak by tweak) for making me sit back and relax, disastrously. Here it is, Tuesday already, and all I've got to show for it is... well, quite a lot, really, and most of it to do with writing.

First there was Essay Clinic on Friday. I sit in a room high up in the tower at Goldsmiths, from which I can see from west of the London Eye to east of the Millennium Dome, so that the slave ship weather vane on Deptford Town Hall skims the dome of St Paul's and bisects Hampstead Heath. I line up my cup of coffee and Department Handbook and wait for English Department students to knock on the door and ask for help with their essays. And knock they do. I hope I usually manage to help. What's interesting is that if I ask the right questions, they so often turn out to know the answer to the problem they came in with after all. I'm sure there's another ruminative blog post in there, but it's not my week for ruminations: so much to do, and in so many different places...

Then there was a nice browse in the National Gallery, choosing postcards to get my seminar group writing in voices. Thirty faces I spread out for them to choose one each, and I got my reward when one student pounced on a quirky-looking eighteenth century man, murmuring, 'He looks interesting.' Pity I didn't have time to actually see any pictures, though I'm longing to get to Renaissance Siena. When I was doing Art History we moved briskly on from traditionalist Siena to clever Florence, then sexy Venice, but the reviews I've read suggest there's a lot more to it than that, and I can't wait to find out. When I got home I had to sort out what we were going to do in our seminar: it has to be a mixture of following on from the lecture (Chekov, Defoe, Gogol) and, well, Something Else.

And once I'd got that sorted out, I set to on a paper I rather rashly said I'd read at the weekly English Department postgrad seminar at Goldsmiths: they had a cancellation, and could anyone help? As regular readers might have picked up, I don't always find that proper academic habits sit terribly easily with the slapdash, follow-your-nose, suck-it-and-see, magpie habits of this novelist, at least. What, you mean I have to remember where I got this idea, and then go and check I got it right, and then do a proper reference not only for the author but the page number? Seriously? And the commas in the right place? But that's, like, Hard Work...

No hard work at all involved in Sunday lunch with one of my oldest friends. It's a long time since I saw such a gorgeous joint of roast beef.

Then home, and back to my paper. It actually jumps off from the piece I wrote a while back here, My true love hath my heart. The title is 'Writing in the Body: senses, metaphors and pseudo-synaesthesia in a fiction writer's practice'. Yes, I know. There's something comic about the way academic titles try to sound sexy while also having to tell you enough for you to decide whether it's worth trundling along to New Cross Gate on a Thursday evening. Voice being one of the most important things to me in writing, I've got that aspect of academe nailed, if nothing else.

Then I went to the lecture, discovered I had a really gruesome cold, led the seminar, and hopped on a Tube (cursing that the East London Line's closing in exactly a month until 2010!) in order to meet Jacqui Lofthouse at the British Library for a sandwich. We talked about writing, teaching, mentoring, agents, editors and back to writing again. When I got home I put the cold to bed, but not before I'd picked up various email messages, including several to-ings and fro-ings about the title of the new novel, and one from my editor with a small piece of nice news which is embargoed for the moment.

I haven't bothered to put in all the dull domesticity that had to be squeezed into the gaps, but everything else I've done in the last few days has been at least interesting and positive, and some was definitely fun. So why do I feel faintly frazzled? I think it's the fragmentation that I find hard to cope with: as a novelist I'm used to having one, overriding project that everything else gives way to, however reluctantly. Yes, the pressure's relentless, as I discover when I send the latest draft to my editor, and have Some Time Off, but I always know where my priorities lie. Whereas this? Maybe that's why I can't wait to start a new novel. And if you're thinking I must be mad, you'd be right. But no one ever said writers were entirely sane, did they?

More than just letters

My friend and stablemate at Headline Review, Rosy Thornton, has started a discussion on WriteWords about epistolary novels. Her own first novel More than Love Letters is entirely made up of letters, emails and diaries, as well all the other documents we generate without even realising it - newspaper reports, minutes of meetings and extracts from Hansard. (Well, I don't personally generate extracts from Hansard, but you get the idea.). TMoL isn't epistolary in that sense, but the letters - written in one century, read in another - were the origin of the novel, and are one of its building blocks, and for some of the same reason as Rosy's used them and A S Byatt uses them in Possession: things like letters invite the reader to imagine what they're not saying, to put the 'real' story together from these partial (in both senses) fragments. There's potential for comedy in people's different views on the same events, there's potential tragedy and irony in, again, how things are read wrongly or differently, or never read at all. Romeo and Juliet would have had a happy ending if a letter hadn't gone astray.

But, as Rosy says in the thread, one difficulty of an epistolary novel is that you can't put actual sex in it. At least, not in hers, with her characters. Not that that's necessarily a disadvantage: both TMoL's two stories are really powered by sexual tension, for example, and so are swathes of Western literature. But, yes, I found myself posting, that is a built-in problem. And in helping others with their novels, I find that more often than not, at some point I usually write, 'You've given yourself a built-in problem by deciding to do it like this...' Whether the solution lies in changing the way they're doing the novel, or in sticking to it but coming up with ways to overcome the problem, has to be their decision, not mine.

One of the reasons that it's been longer than I like since my last post here is because I've been hammering away at revisions to the new novel. It took much longer than I expected to find a new name for the fine printing firm which is the centre of it.  Here was my own built-in problem: the whole novel is about storytelling, and through it run chains of references to many of the basic stories: King Arthur, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Puss-in-Boots. And could I find a name for the Press which echoed one of these, but had never been used in real life? (Like all publishers', Headline's warnings about not treading on any 'real' organisation's toes are understandably fierce. Litigation is very expensive.) Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised that printers are a literate, classically/medievally/new-ageily minded lot, but I found myself wishing they weren't. Everything that would have worked has been used, from the Fleece Press to the Gawain Press.

But I found one at last, thanks (not for the first time) to that vade-mecum and general life-saver of historical fiction writers, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. In fact, it's a better name for the press than any so far, one which doesn't just echo one of the most important themes, but actually adds something - a different take on that theme - and brings in the only great European storytelling tradition I'd so far not referred to. So I'm wondering if what I call a built-in problem is actually what the HE teacher training I'm doing calls a 'desirable difficulty'. If something makes you try harder, look further (not that Brewer's is very far, because I keep it ready to hand) or think more laterally, and the result is better, it may still be have been a problem, but the solution becomes part of a greater creative whole.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not clutching my brow and murmuring heroically that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, or that what's written without pain is read without pleasure. Writing novels is hard enough work as it is, and I'm all for low cunning in making your writing life easier where you can. But I do think a fundamental part of the creative process is setting up problems and then solving them. I said in This reading-writing-wordsmithing thing that 'Can I pull it off?' is one of the main motors of my writing, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I haven't asked her - maybe she'll drop by here and tell us - but I should imagine that Rosy must have had a fair few moments of thinking, 'Oh, help! Why did I ever decide to do it this way?' But if you read the book, you'll know why.

How many novelists want to change a lightbulb?

Last night I listened to Lavinia Greenlaw's Sunday Feature on Elizabeth Bishop, a great poet about whom I knew almost nothing, though after hearing some read a Collected Poems has now gone straight to the top of my Christmas list. It was on Radio 3 but, shame on them, there's no Listen Again facility, or I'd put the link here. Anyway, in passing Lavinia made the point that after an extremely damaged and damaging childhood, for Bishop writing was therapy. And yet, said the programme (I hope I'm quoting right), she knew that it isn't enough for writing to be therapy. It has to be shaped and worked with craft, to become art.

Writing can be used in a therapeutic setting, of course. And, more informally, anyone from a child writing a story about finding a scary monster in her mother's bed to an old man writing a poem to be read at the funeral of his wife knows that feelings beyond a certain intensity demand heightened and perhaps metaphorical expression. But for writers it's a very different thing, and far more complicated than simply relieving feelings by expressing them. The fact that some of the mainsprings of what we write lie in our own damaged interiors isn't surprising, any more than our other mainsprings are surprising: the times we live in, or human behaviour as observed in our neighbours, or the intoxication of words, or the need to go on making a living.

What's surprising, you could say, is what we do with this stuff next. How do we stop it seeming tiresomely self-reflexive, self-centred, or simply baffling? How do we make our personal damage into something that links in to others' lives, and illuminates them? A good story or poem doesn't just give pleasure: it makes the reader see the world very slightly differently, with something added to it, as if a new and very different family has moved into their familiar cul-de-sac. Working outwards from ourselves to express something wider and deeper that will connect with others takes craft, and art, and a certain cold-blooded objectivity. If the lightbulb has to want to change, then the writer has to want to - need to - get outside their own damage.

The range of successful outcomes, as a therapist might say, for writing-as-so-much-more-than-therapy is wide, from Antonia White's miraculous but nakedly autobiographical  novels from Frost in May onwards, to work where only a perceptive biographer - Leon Edel on Henry James, perhaps - will be able to illuminate the link. And many writers resist such efforts to expose their mainsprings, because it can be so reductive of the work. Like theatre goers who assume that great passion on stage is the result of great passion off it, too many readers assume that the interesting thing about our work is what it says about us, and that knowing more about us will illuminate the work. Whereas to a writer the interesting thing is what it says about everything else except us.

We are egomaniacs, of course. No one who tries to get a book or a poem published can pretend they don't want others to take notice, can pretend that they're not asking to be heard. But what is heard, and what we do and don't think is worth hearing, is another matter.

This reading-writing-wordsmithing thing

As everyone reading this blog probably knows, it's next-to-impossible to earn a living solely by sitting down and writing the books you want to write, let alone the stories or the poems. There are probably only a handful or two of authors in the UK who can, and failing a higher-earning partner the rest of us have to keep the roof over the family's head with other work. Much of the time that's teaching of one sort or another: running workshops freelance, landing a part-time staff job in a college or university, doing editorial reports, one-to-one mentoring, and so on. Because it uses up the same kind of energy as one's own writing, as well as making life more complicated, sometimes I dream of not having to do it, or wonder if I'd be better off doing something completely unrelated.

But actually I've realised that even if I could, I don't think I'd want to give up this side of the writing life. My sister teaches singing, and used to teach A Level Chemistry. She pointed out that, at the risk of sounding unbearably smug, when you're teaching you know more than your students do, and you're dealing with ideas and practices that are familiar, that you can explain, combine, use and jump off from. Whereas in your own work, she said, you're always trying to do something that's at the far end of what you can do, a new thing you've only just thought of, the hardest thing you're capable of.

It's certainly true of my writing. So many of the ideas whizzing around in the back of my head are 'What if... How would it work if I... Could I make that work? Could I?...' So I've never begun a novel being at all sure that I'm going to be able to pull it off. Sometimes I discover it'll probably work by the end of the first draft, and sometimes I have to change my plans. But that uncertainty's what I need, that nervous excitement, because only that will keep the urge to write it burning hot enough: can I really plait and weave and stitch all these things together to make them one whole?

It takes too bloody long to write a novel, I often find myself thinking. Keeping my courage up for months and years, keeping alive my faith that I can pull it off, isn't easy. It helps when I get emails from people who've read TMoL and loved it, because it reminds me that once upon a time I did pull it off, so it's not impossible that I'll do it this time too. Which is just as well because it's a long haul. I research it. And write it. And re-write it. And revise it. And do all the new research I hoped I'd get away without doing. And revise it. And read it aloud. And edit it. And send it to my editor. And revise it again... As they almost say in the recipe books, repeat until you have used up all the ingredients, finishing with a layer of copy-editing.

Somewhere, round about the second editor-sees-it stage - which is the stage I'm at now with the new novel - I start to know that I have pulled it of. Sort of. I think. Maybe. But who knows? Will the rest of my publishers like it? Will they transmit that to Waterstones, Tesco (yes, they did buy TMoL), The Bookseller Preview, the magazines, the newspaper reviewers, the book groups, the festival artistic directors? Am I in the right job? Am I a fool to think people will listen when I speak or write? Look at it one way, after all, and it's a monstrous act of egotism to write a novel.

So to be asked by a student for advice on how to go about starting a short story; to have someone else's manuscript land on my desk and know what doesn't work, what does, and how to describe the difference; to read a set text and think 'Yes, I know what I want to say about this,' is wonderfully re-fuelling. This is something I can do. Yes, it takes work, it goes wrong, and I usually think I could have done it better. But still, I know this stuff. This is my work, this writing-reading-wordsmithing-communicating thing, whatever it is. I'm in the right job.

The contemplative wolf

I've been having an interesting interchange with David Morley on his blog (and thanks to Nik at WriteWords for pointing me there in the first place). If you scroll down past the dead Chatterton and a very alive and gorgeous wolf, you'll see that David's post 'The Creative Writing Industry' or The Company of Wolves is about creative writing teaching. In it, he makes the distinction between learning to write creatively, which can be fun, and becoming a writer, which is a much scarier and wilder thing. You can't teach that wildness, but you can teach the craft which shapes and expresses it.

People sometimes say, 'Oh, I couldn't be a writer, I haven't done anything,' and though the implication is complimentary, I can't say I've done much of the kind of thing they mean either, wild or tame. (Mind you, it makes a change from the ones who say they've always wanted to write a novel, they just never get a chance to sit down.) But undeniably you have to have experienced something, and be conscious that you have, before you can be a writer. And after you've learnt to write that, you have to learn to write things you haven't experienced in such a way that readers could believe you have. In fact, much of writing is a process of finding out what you don't know, and writing your way inside it till you do.

But if acquiring experience, turning not-knowing into knowing, is much of being a writer, is there a place or time for staying with the not-knowing? The term 'negative capability', which crops up, sounds like management jargon for not having profits to spend, or a physiotherapist's way of describing a child who can't ride a bike. But actually it was coined by Keats. As embodied in Shakespeare, Keats said, negative capability is, 'when a man [sic] is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' For Keats this extends into accepting artistic beauty as truth without any further analysis, which is perhaps an easier principle for a lyric poet than a novelist: what we do has to be too firmly anchored in the facts and reason of human interaction.

But this idea of staying with not-knowing continues to - well - stay with me. I can feel it moving across to show itself in all sorts of other states: the pure 'being' you seek in meditation; the abstraction of great instrumental music; the picture in the exhibition which seems to makes your mind melt till you're nothing but eyes; the moment when the sobbing child tells its woe, and you don't produce a solution or a sweet or a reason why it's not so bad, but just hold them quietly.

I don't know how these map onto writing, except that in writing I hate cold-bloodedly thinking something out. Cudgelling my brains into producing a reasonable answer is the opposite of such 'being' states. And the process I love most - or I would, except that I hardly know it's happening when it is - is what psychologists call 'flow' and writers 'the zone'. Its purest form happens in free-writing, once you're through the ten-minute boredom barrier, but even in the more self-conscious business of shaping a novel, it's still a magical state of fluency: a-reasonable, un-analytical, the true creative state. From somewhere unknown comes something new and always strange. Wild, if you like.

And that writing, I find, needs the least revising. New, and strange, yes, but absolutely right for the scene and the story and the novel as a whole. And often, even when it's written, I don't know why it's so right: why this word, voice, metaphor, rhythm, sound, and not the other possibilities. Maybe a literary critic could tell me, but for now I'll stay with this state of complete rightness: it just is.

Starting from the hilltop

I've been reading Edgar Allan Poe. Having met him for years in anthologies of detective fiction, but only known by reputation his more gothic and grotesque tales of terror, madness, and strange other worlds, it's been fascinating to see how he takes the same elements, the same concerns (obsessions?), and reconceives and rearranges them to completely different effect. Poe was a disappointed poet, writing short stories for money and to newspaper deadlines. But despite that (or maybe because of it) he set out to claim high literary status for the new form which he was more or less inventing, which has the unity and totality of the poem, but in prose: "In the brief tale... the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the [reader's] soul is at the writer's control."

I am primarily a novelist, but I do write short stories and this, it seems to me, is at the heart of the joys of writing and reading short fiction. I remember discovering that I could spread all the pages of a story out across the floor, and actually, physically, see how the narrative was spaced and paced. Most poets, quite rightly, get very exercised about how their work appears on the page, but with novels you have to make substitutes for that bird's-eye view in charts and maps and diagrams. And I'm aware that my own sense of the proportions of a novel I'm reading is partly shaped by the times when I've had to put the book down. Something else that Poe wrote, though, intrigues me. To achieve that unity and totality, he says, the writer

'If wise, ... has not fashioned his [sic] thoughts to accomodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberated care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents - he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing the preconceived effect.'

Now this makes sense for detective-type stories, where everything is revealed at the end and all the preceding events and clues must fit it. But it seems to me to be the opposite of the way that most writing-teaching sets about things. Start with observation, we're told, and then see what you get; let characters have their heads; you won't know what you think till you see what you say. Only after that stage, when we know what's 'really' going on, do we revise and rewrite to bring out the desired effect - the intention - more clearly.

And then I thought that though I'll suck-it-and-see with short stories, I do always know where my novels will end, because I can't start till I do. That 'where' may not be a physical place, and I may not know whether he gets the girl (or boy) until I reach that 'where'. But in terms of the characters, I know how they will be different, I know what will have happened to them, though not the incidents which casued that change. Writing the novel's then a bit like making for a clearly-seen hilltop without knowing the lanes and turns in between. I do think Poe's right that the unity of effect - which he claims for short story, but our Poe seminar group this morning agreed is also necessary to novels - is best gained thus. As he says, 'It is only with the dénoument constantly in view that we can give a plot its indespensable air of consequence, of causation...'

Maybe a short story, with its smaller cast and comprehensible length, will hold together naturally as we write and/or read, while it's the sprawling, un-comprehensible bulk of a novel that needs as much help from our process as possible. I suspect that we're all different, though. What do you think?

My true love hath my heart...

It's been my week for metaphors. We think of them as sophisticated, a step further than a simile in literary cleverness, something we have to explain before children see them in their English set texts. Anna in The Mathematics of Love is intelligent and articulate, but young and not highly educated or well read. I decided in finding her voice that she doesn't use metaphors but similes, where the disjuncture between the actual object and the image is made clear: 'the light was like gold and blue velvet,' she says, not 'the velvet light.'

But in Music and the Mind Anthony Storr talks about how metaphorical language perhaps came before objective, scientific ways of describing things: "When human beings [first] looked upon the external world and tried to describe it, it was natural that they did so in terms of their own subjectve, physical experience". Hence 'the mouth of the river', 'a neck of land', 'veins of minerals', 'murmuring waves'.

And then I heard Ros Barber talking at Goldsmiths about the novel she's writing. She's seized Shakespeare's Sonnets, and seen how all descriptions of exile, disgrace, journeying and despair, that we're told to read as metaphors for his love affairs, might be read as a true, non-metaphorical reflection of a life in exile, as letters home from Northern Italy. Suddenly all the more strained readings of these 'metaphors', the puzzle-pieces that don't fit, the scholarly squabbles about ordering the poems, are resolved. Is this unsophisticated? Reductive? Only if you insist that words must be either 'facts' or 'images', but can't be both. Apart from anything else, such a failure to understand that they can be 'both' is at the root of the excesses of fundamentalist religion.

I've also been chewing on some of the ways that psychotherapy works. Normally therapists take dreams and images as symbols of what's 'really' going on, metaphorical ways of expressing hidden or hard-to-get-at reality. But can it work in the other direction? If I have nightmares of drowning when real life's getting too overwhelming, can I cope with real life by offering my waking, all-but-overwhelmed self an image of breathing underwater: an oxygen tank, gills, a diving bell? I certainly breathe more easily when I've thought that thought: here, indeed, what my subconscious expressed as images becomes physical truth again. Physical reality and metaphorical ways of dealing with it are much more closely, neurologically related than we give them credit for. As any enlightened physiologist will tell you, and so will someone who's falling in love, mind and body are not two things, but one.

And just when I was winding down for the weekend, I found myself posting this in another forum:

...a novel is only a set of black marks on a page till someone reads them, or, as some would say, decodes them. A novel doesn't exist of itself, except as a physical object. Printed words are a set of instructions by the writer for the reader to construct the story, and what we mean by a novel is really a joint operation by writer and reader.

If you take this (to me) self-evident fact about writing and reading, then metaphors become only one kind of instruction. What's unique about them, though, is that they engage our most primitive understanding: instead of using the abstractness of 'red' or 'wet road' or 'fear', the writer engages the reader's own physical memory of blood or snake or heart-in-the-mouth. The best writing, you could say, is the writing that takes place in the reader's head.

Message for Allison

I don't usually post two days running, but this is something I've been meaning to do ever since I started this blog.

One of the strange things about being a novelist is that your whole drive is to tell a story that will be heard and yet, in the nature of things, for most of the time it's like singing in a soundproof room. One small proof that you're heard is your Amazon ranking, and the contact form on your website is another. I've had some lovely mails by that route, which brightened the day and made its quota of writing seem more worth while.

And then one day this September I got a mail by that route which made me cry. I can't quote it, it's too personal, but I so wanted to tell the writer how much it moved me, and I still do. I tried, but my reply bounced back. I tried from my other email, but the same happened, and I tried all over again with both, a few weeks later. Nothing works, and yet I so want to get in touch.

So, Allison, who wrote on the 10th September, if you read this, please know how important your mail was to me. You told me how much - how exactly - The Mathematics of Love resonated with your experience: experience which is far closer to what I was writing about than I've ever been. To be told I've touched a life I didn't know was there, that my words are understood better than I understand them myself, is deeply moving. Allison, if you're there, please mail through my site, or comment here. I'd so love to know you're somewhere out there still. 

The Mathematics of Love

I'm writing this to Laurie Anderson's album Big Science (those of you who were around in the early eighties may remember a weird and amazing piece called 'Superman' reaching the charts...). I know I'm not alone among writers in preferring to write to music, but one of the pleasures of blogging, surfing or getting hooked on some ridiculous online puzzle is that I can do it to music with words: Madeleine Peyroux is a current favourite, and Steely Dan an old one, while I clean the house and drive to Queen and Eric Clapton very, very loud.

Real musicians can't treat music as background in that way. Equally, I can't treat words as background to words: I have to write to instrumental music, or words I don't really understand. I can understand the Latin of a mass, but the words don't snag my ears, so that's okay. And it has to be familiar music too, so that I don't get too interested. Radio 3 is one of civilisation's great achievements, but just because of that, it's no use to me in a working morning.

There's something about the patterns in the music that makes my mind work better and more clearly. Baroque and classical (in the strict, Mozart-date sense) music seem to suit particularly well, and the big oratorios conveniently cover two or three CDs before you have to choose something new. Piazzola - Bach dancing Tango - is another favourite, and I'll forever associate him with Theo and Eva in TMoL. I've written much of the new novel to Purcell's Music for Queen Mary, though it's two hundred years too late for my fifteenth century people. His funeral music for her must be some of the most magnificently sad ever written. Matching the tune to the scene sounds a bit trite, a bit like some silly online quiz, or even, perhaps, like a cheap trick to get myself in the mood. But it's not silly to take seriously what you need in order to write. I'm enough of a professional to sit down and write at 8.30 every morning, so I need to make sure the mood - the emotional connection - is waiting for me, because I can't afford to wait for it.

And there's something else. As my sister said, 'Perhaps it shuts up the censor.' I'm sure this is right. Somehow, like a physiotherapist's TENS machine blocking the bio-electrical pain signals whizzing through your nerves from injury or childbirth to brain, music - the pure maths of frequency and overtones - blocks the wandering electrics of my mind. They're the signals I don't need for writing, that aren't engaged when the rest of me is, the idle stuff which the Anti-Writing Demon finds so easy to use. Left to themselves, without music, these little electrical charges of boredom, fear, criticism or despair scatter through me, spread into the rest of my brain, and suddenly writing becomes postponeable, unnecessary, impossible.

A delightful bonus of my habit is that even without listening to them 'properly' I've got to know certain pieces of music incredibly well: Chopin, Schubert, The Penguin Café Orchestra. I know nothing about music in the technical sense, though I've played instruments and sung in choirs. And yet these pieces I know from the inside: know intuitively, understand emotionally though not at all musicologically. And it's occurred to me, writing this, that when you're reading, or sometimes even writing, that's the zone you're in. In that place rhythms can make you laugh, tones and timbres shiver over your skin, patterns make you cry. It's music, in the end, which is the mathematics of love.