This Itch of Writing

The tree of life - and other anecdotes

I've been a tad busy this last few days, so I'm afraid this is a bit of a catch-up post. First, I've actually submitted my PhD! I can't quite believe how happy it's made me, not just because the last stages of a research project are notoriously fiddly and tedious and so I've been dying to get rid of it, but because, finally, I realise that I'm actually really quite proud of it. As well as A Secret Alchemy, which I can enjoy again now that the tooth-pulling process of writing it has faded from my memory, I do think I've found some interesting things to say about historical fiction and how it works. I celebrated with my very long-suffering offspring, who bear the brunt of whatever's happening in my professional life, by opening the last bottle of the fizz which the Hay Festival gives its authors. It seemed appropriate.

And since then I've been in Spain, giving a lecture (twice) on Creative Thinking: the Darwin family in the Arts and Sciences. After the first, in Valencia, the university had organised a dinner cooked from Emma Darwin's recipe book, which was delicious. I was also given the most beautiful edition of The Origin of Species, made by my hosts, biologists Juli Peretó and Andrés Moya, with exquisite illustrations by the scientific illustrator Carles Puche. Carles even drew me an iguana on the title page of my copy: I felt very inferior in only being able to write words in his. Before the second lecture, in Elx, I found myself asked to do a spot of plaque-unveiling, and was very pleased that the image on the plaque wasn't the god-like old man with a beard, but the heart of the matter: Darwin's original sketch of the tree of life. As longstanding readers may know, I still find it odd when the outside world takes me as a representative of the family, but I've got more comfortable with it now: with an actual body of my own work out there, the balance has changed between us. And besides, Elx is now full of people tucking into their signed copies of La aritmética del amor, I'm even more awed by the skill, calm and general niceness of translators both professional and non-professional, and if the journalist from El Pais has his way back at the office, there'll be an interview with yours truly on the back page of one of Spain's national newspapers any day now.

And as I sat in planes and trains and hotel rooms, I started looking back on my PhD. When I first started wondering whether to do one, I was often asked 'Why? You've already got a Masters.' When I signed simultaneously on the dotted line of the Goldsmiths' application form and the dotted line of a two-book publishing contract with Headline Review, the question changed to, 'Are you going to give up the PhD, then, now you've got a deal?' These days, I'm much more likely to be asked what it's like and whether the questioner should be doing one too: Creative Writing PhDs are becoming big business.

I now have lots of answers to Why? Indeed, so many that I've put a page in the new - and as yet small - Resources section of the blog: Creative Writing PhDs: the paradoxical beast. At the moment, Resources has two pieces, the other being on How to get the best out of an editorial service, which you may know. But I'm planning to add to it when I have time and a new topic occurs to me. Next, I hope, will be Show-don't-Tell, or maybe Point-of-View, and I'll be enabling comments, so that I hope others will chip in.

No lines to learn, what's not to like?

So, it's festival time again. That makes me sound like an old hand, which would hardly be true. Having said that, if a festival and publisher have paid for you to fly halfway round the world, they get their money's worth, and in ten days in New Zealand and Australia I did something like five festival sessions complete with post-session gallop down to the bookshop tent to sign things, as well as TV, radio, press, a couple of photos. I've a nasty feeling that real authors are supposed to hate it, to be such tender plants or introverts that standing up in public is agony, or at least to regard it as a terrible waste of good writing time. I'm obviously not a real author, because I enjoy it enormously. Yes, it's more fun talking to 200 festival goers with the Australian sun beaming down outside the marquee, than it is signing 2½ books on a wet Saturday lunchtime that happens to coincide with a European Cup match, but it's still fun. And yes, the actual hour on the platform isn't a waste of good writing time - you could say that it is writing time, if writing is communicating to readers.

What still surprises me is how long I take to get my normal, concentrated, tunnel-visioned, misanthropic, writer's balance back afterwards, and that does often feel like a waste of time. Like a grumpy eight year old, I don't want it to be Monday, or not my birthday, or not Christmas. I scull around the house, a spoilt brat whose audience has left... Or that's how I tell myself off for being so useless. Why not get on with the laundry, the admin, the novel? Wasn't there a point when you couldn't face another bright and friendly conversation with a stranger, another question about The Ancestor, another hotel reception, another caterer's coffee, another train; a moment when all you wanted to do was put your jetlagged head down on the shoulder of the publicist you only met yesterday, and sob? Weren't you incredibly pleased to be home, and to sleep in your own bed?

Yes, but I forget those. Adrenalin is supremely addictive - ask a racing driver - and performing is all about adrenalin: it's a mild case of fight or flight. To someone who spends most of their working life alone, even the amount of social interaction you get with a signing is more in a couple of hours than you might get in a couple of days, and it's strong wine for a teetotaller. Indeed, as Help! I NEED a Publisher blogged recently you have to be careful that you don't end up a performaholic, when it becomes more fun than the writing, and the writing suffers because of it. But standing on a platform with lots of people looking at and listening to you... well, even people to whom it doesn't come naturally always seem to pull something out of the hat, and perform. It's not the most alarming kind of of performing, either: there are no lines to learn, and little risk of bumping into the furniture in any serious way, and on the whole the audience has come to like you, not to criticise. They'll even applaud you at the end. 

More seriously, in a sense this is what we've all been waiting for, isn't it? Writers are trying to say something, wanting to communicate and tell their story like any actor or musician, but for most of our lives that communication is at one remove, by way of the printed page. Even a painter can stand in a gallery and watch. But we don't see people's faces when they read our work, we don't hear shuffles and coughs, we don't see tears or hear laughter, let alone get to take a curtain call. The fact that a festival scheduler thinks that people will actually pay to hear you - you!; a thoughtful question about your work from a total stranger; the hush at the end of your reading... Why wouldn't you want those? It's just a pity that after that, the laundry looks even drearier, and the fridge emptier, than it did before you left home. Even the silence of your novel-in-waiting can seem mute and lacklustre: like an astronomer waiting to get their night vision, it's a while before the dazzle of the day leaves you, and you can see the real stars.

Accept, adapt, ignore

Well, I'd like to pretend that the reason I haven't posted here for so long is something large and amazing - a burst of literary inspiration, a passionate affair, a killing on the stock market - but of course it isn't, it's the usual accumulation of dull but urgent stuff which domestic and freelance life attracts as a drain attracts dead leaves. Most of those leaves are terribly boring (did you think that if the oven door you were trying to mend slipped one inch to touch the floor, it would shatter? No, neither did I, but now a new oven door is one more thing on the To Do List). But a few are interesting:

On Sunday 5th April I'm doing a session at the Oxford Literary Festival, in tandem with Martin Brasier, author of Darwin's Lost World. 10am in Festival Room 2. I've been reading Martin's book and to anyone interested in narrative and creative thinking across the arts and sciences, as I am, it's fascinating stuff. And I've realised that the fun of festivals, as opposed to other events, is that since they're so often held in beautiful places that take forever to get to (yes, even Oxford, if you live in South East London), you always end up spending a night there, and then you can go to other sessions. It doesn't get much better than Simon Schama introducing his film on John Donne, which is on Saturday night. And after my own session, I just might hang around for two novelists discussing truth in historical fiction, about which I hold strong views... 

The UK paperback of A Secret Alchemy is published on 16th April, and there's been a flurry of activity, not just to fit the hardback reviews onto the cover, but also on the marketing front. And it's borne fruit: for the week of the 20th April, if you buy a copy of The Times in W H Smith, you can buy a copy of A Secret Alchemy for less than half the cover price. So if you realise a week late that you've forgotten to get an Easter present for a not very favourite great aunt, it'll be nicely in time to persuade her to write you back into her will. I promise I won't tell her that it only cost you £2.99.

And a few more festival dates, just briefly: on Friday 8th May I'm at the Daphne du Maurier Festival in Fowey, Cornwall; on Monday 11th May I'm at the Swindon Literary Festival; and on Tuesday 26th May I'll be appearing at the Hay Festival together with my cousin the poet Ruth Padel, whose new collection is Darwin: a Life in Poems. And I'll also be appearing in October at the Wimbledon Book Festival, but that's so far ahead I don't think we need worry about it just yet, do we?

So, I admit, I've been short of time to grapple properly with a decent-sized thought. But the Starting Your Novel session Debi Alper and I ran on Saturday for Writer's Workshop got me thinking. 17 aspiring writers in a room at the top of Waterstone's Picadilly, some new to the whole workshop thing, some old hands, and a lot to cover in the day. It's been a while since I've been in a workshop setting, and I found myself thinking about the whole business of feedback. We've all spent so much of our lives in education that I think we don't always think about what's going on when someone says something about our writing. Learning to deal with feedback is a central part of becoming a writer: a particular process all on its own, a meta-process operating above the process of learning to write better. I've seen writers angrily refuse to change a word, I've seen writers in tears, I've seen writers meekly cut a terrific character which one single person doesn't like, I've seen writers paralysed with self-consciousness for weeks. And I've been most of those writers at one time or another. It's complicated by the issue of the standing of the person making the comment: how does a friend rank against a stranger, a published writer against a really good teacher, a fan of the genre against someone who's never read any of that genre before; an experienced reviewer with an excess of bile against a fan who says you've shown them that contemporary fiction need not after all be a closed book to them? (and yes, both of those two last have happened to me too.)

What it comes down to, I realised recently, is that when you're given feedback, you have three possibilites: accept, adapt, or ignore. Accept is obvious: all along you knew that it didn't really work, you just hoped no one else would notice, but they have, so get to work. Adapt is the most interesting, because what it means is that you accept that there's something wrong, but you don't agree about what exactly, or why, or what to do about it. You're going to have to think laterally, talk/draw/sing, or go back to the roots of why that bit's there. Could you get the same effect, or a different effect with as much symbolic or thematic weight, by another means? Ignore is when they're just plain wrong: they didn't get it, they haven't read the whole thing, it's not their genre, they're not calibrated for thumping good stories, or baroque literary excess. Ignore is not for those times when you realise that there's something wrong but it's a regrettable necessity given all sorts of other things. If it's wrong, it's wrong, and you're going to have to think round it till you find a solution. (What do you mean, but the solution's re-writing the whole novel? Okay, re-write it then!)

Which you do will have something to do with how you weigh the feeder-back's opinions, and that highlights an important truth about working in the arts. They're not a democracy or an equal opportunities environment: not all opinions are equal to you when you're working. You're utterly entitled to make your own decision as to what's worth listening to. If it's an experienced editor of novels like your own, you'd be completely barking not to listen to every word and weigh it extremely carefully, but it has been known. If it's someone who only reads Michael Chrichton commenting on your highly experimental literary fiction, you're not morally or creatively obliged to do more than say thank you. If it's someone who only reads highly experimental literary fiction commenting on your heart-warming romance-with-a-twist, ditto. Accept, adapt, ignore: it's your choice.

Telling stories and feeling the not-knowing

On Monday I was at the Royal Society, as Pepys might have said, always being at the cutting edge of the establishment of his day, for the launch of a book co-written by a friend of mine, Nicholas Beale, with the particle physicist Professor John Polkinghorne. I've not often been to that wonderfully grand, white building in Carlton House Terrace, but I never cease to be awed - once I've recovered from entering under the gaze of its founder, one of my favourite monarchs, Charles II - at the history of science which surrounds you: Newton looking mad, Faraday looking sensible, Wren, Hooke, Davy, Huxley, Kelvin, Rutherford, and so on, portrait after portrait, room after room. The book, Questions of Truth, is about the interface between two belief systems which attempt to make sense of the universe: religion and science. And the launch took the form of a fascinating panel discussion between distinguished scientists, none of whom had any difficulty in reconciling the two by virtue of having thought long and hard and clearly about what that reconciliation consisted of. There were then questions from the floor, which were, for the most part, civilised and scholarly versions (as befitted a room and a platform full of FRSs) of the usual debates.

But one answer really caught my interest. The question concerned the reductiveness of a certain kind of science, which believes that everything which matters about the world and human experience can - or will be - explained, if we can only break things down into small enough particles. And one of the speakers described how biologist Denis Noble, in his book The Music of Life has said that science has spent the last forty years doing just that, and now it's time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again: to reassemble everything that we now understand so much better, and try to see what we've actually got, and how it explains the world we experience. And I was instantly and irrestistibly reminded not only of the A Level history which made me give up a lifetime's ambition to be a historian, because history, too, got smaller and smaller in the middle of the 20th Century, and then of the philosopher Richard Kearney. In On Stories he describes how narrative is formed from 'the bits and pieces of experience'. Fiction and, say, history-writing, make different claims as to the kind of truth they represent: history (like science) makes a narrative that presents the probable and the likely, while fiction presents the possible, the 'memories we don't have'. But, essentially, narrative is how we understand these things, because as Kearney puts it, 'we are storied creatures.' And narrative is how we understand science, too. It needn't be the rolling periods of Herschell or thick modern jargon describing an experiment, because even an equation is, fundamentally, a narrative: a series of bits and pieces which are put together to describe a relationship, a story with a beginning and a middle and an end, written in a language so it can be communicated. An equation is not what actually happens inside a quark (do quarks have insides?), any more than a book on your shelves is what actually happened during the Dark Ages, or in Brick Lane. And more than one narrative can be made from any set of bits and pieces, whether it's my research into Elizabeth Woodville or someone else's into the funny habits of E. Coli. But we have no other way of making sense of it.

Unfortunately, this thought only came to me as I was sitting there; I was just thinking it out, when the other face of this storiedness intruded, and complicated things still more, and I wish I could go back and say it all better: the ghosts of six generations of my FRS grandfathers were perhaps not terribly impressed. To me, intimately connected with our storied nature is the need for us to tolerate what poet and novelist Philip Gross calls not-knowing, (and it's relevant to that evening because it seems to me that the human fear of not-knowing is what drives fundamentalism among both religious and scientific communities) as much as it does learning. I know there's a connection between narrative and not-knowing: I can feel it. Is it the sense of all those other narratives one might make which is so familiar to short story writers, in particular, so that we have to live with the impossibility of any one narrative being definitive? Is it simply the realisation that we cannot, in a way, apprehend more than one bit or piece at once, rather as the human eye (unlike a camera) can only focus on one spot: in humans an image is built up in the brain from a particular sequence of such focussings, just that day, in that light? Yes, I can feel there's a connection but I'm damned if I can put it into words. I shall have to live with feeling it, but not knowing it.

One frosty-misty evening

There have been times in the last few days I've thought that my head - my writing head, that is - would explode.

Somehow, in just over a month, I've written longhand two first-draft chapters of Kindred & Affinity and after sixteen hours' sorting-out-and-typing of Chapter Two at the weekend, discovered that I've got 31,500 words. By the plan (which, of course, is never set in stone) that's a fifth of the whole thing, which would make it 10,000 words longer than The Mathematics of Love. Yes, there are already 150 separate notes that will take anything from a minute to a day to resolve. Yes, I don't know how it ends, not exactly, though I know who will be there at the end, and I'm not even thinking about the fine-polishing, not least because I'm still not convinced by one of the voices. But it's there, and I'm reasonably sure that the big bones, the architecture, is right. And because it's there, the remaining four-fifths are feeling much more distinct and substantial in my mind too.

To that end, in lunchtimes, in bed, in the bath, on the train, I'm reading Roy Porter's Flesh in the Age of Reason, which is so brilliantly written (you don't know how witty and erudite can be combined till you've read Porter at his best) that it's only when you sit back that you realise just how densely argued and swift-moving it is. My desk has four piles of reference books - food, maps, London, costume, crafts, politics, art, religion, thesaurus, manners, morals, sex, love, marriage - ten or twelve deep, and that's only what's accumulated since I last chased them back onto their shelves a couple of weeks ago.

Next week is packed with writing, or at least book-trade things. For my reading at the University of Surrey next Tuesday I must go back to both The Mathematics of Love and A Secret Alchemy, decide on a theme, choose the right extracts to read and work out how to link them. Less writerly are the launch of In Bed With on Wednesday and the launch of Ruth Padel's new book, Darwin: a life in poems on Thursday 12th, Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. Ruth is my third cousin, and by way of our two publicists I've got an advance copy, but have I had to chance to open it? I don't really like reading handsome new hardbacks in the bath.

I've agreed to lead some writing workshops for - well - Writer's Workshop. They're all-day affairs, the first on Getting Started with Your Novel, and the next on Self-editing Your Novel, upstairs at Waterstones in Picadilly. The basic shape of the course is settled, but I've still got to think hard about the details. This is, after all, where it really happens, in the ship's engine room of writing: hot, grubby, noisy, liable to crush your fingers, and if you get it wrong, it might, just might, roll over and drown you. By comparison, readings are like steering a well-built cruiser down the river on a summer's day, and launches are just the bunting flippeting in the breeze.

Sometime before the end of May I must write a talk for The Playful Paradox, a conference on Creative Writing on Campus, which I went to last year. I came away with some very strong feelings both good and bad about what goes on in that world, so when the organisers asked me back as one of the keynote speakers and said I could be as controversial as I liked, how could I resist? Indeed, as I work my way closer to the end of my PhD, I find myself looking back and thinking about how it's shaped my writing life, and wondering what would have been different if I hadn't chosen that - context, I suppose you'd call it, in which to write A Secret Alchemy.

Then there's the PhD commentary itself. One of the things it's taken me till my present great age to realise is that just because there's a clichéd way to feel about something, doesn't mean you can stop yourself feeling like it. Everyone gets weary, bored, stale, flat and unprofitable about their PhD. It's the nature of the beast. So why can't I stop myself feeling like that? It won't be over till it's over, so I'd better just get on with it. I know that when I roll up my sleeves there'll be solid, craftsmanly pleasure to be got from doing it properly. But compared to the drunken obsessiveness of writing fiction it's journeyman stuff.

And finally, there's - yes - oh, horrors, help! - a new novel in my head, at least half a first-draft too early. It arrived at Christmas: on a walk one frosty-misty evening I saw across the valley a house I've known vaguely all my life, and that moment, that vision, suddenly melted together with two people I already had in my head. And now everywhere I turn I see or smell or think or hear something with that little flickery glow about it which means it matters. A scrap of a piece on Radio Three about Fay Godwin, a flash of a memory of something in Dickens, something about Puccini. Three pages of scraps and bits and thoughts in my big moleskin, and growing. Is it 'just' a short story? I don't know - I suspect not, though I might write one to pin down that moment I saw. It's Suffolk, I know, and maybe, just maybe, there are echoes of The Mathematics of Love about it, in place and other things. I've always said I have no impulse to write a sequel, and I'm sure (almost sure) I never will, not about those characters. But there are things in it I want to explore more, to find out further. And what's going on in that house? Why is there a man, trudging up the path across the field to the front door (to this day there's no road to it). Is it even a man? Maybe not. I'll just have to find out, won't I?

How to make a newish author happy, part two

You might remember that as a postscript (or should it be a postpost?) to a post about covers and blurbs, I linked to Musings from a Muddy Island, which is a booky-writey blog I enjoy, about one thing which makes authors happy: seeing people reading their book. A few other things which have made this particular author happy this week are:

1) A few months ago one of my longest-standing writing friends - let's call her Marguerite - whose beautifully built, beautifully written short stories I admire enormously, asked my advice about arranging and submitting a collection to agents, and as I've never done that I passed the query on to all my short-fiction-writing friends at Glamorgan, who came back with all sorts of helpful advice. We all know that it's next-to-impossible (though not completely impossible) to make your publishing debut with a short fiction collection. But Marguerite sent them off, and settled back to wait. Meanwhile, I happened to mention NaNoWriMo, which she'd never heard of, but dived straight into, and a couple of weeks later I got an ecstatic email about the joys of being able to unfurl huge bolts of story-cloth, and see where they flew. Then Excellent Agent got in touch, talked perceptively and lovingly about her work, said that, yes, the collection would be next-to-impossible to sell, but the longest story felt more like part of a novel, and had she ever thought about expanding it? And Marguerite said yes, she had and in some detail, because she and her trusted readers had always thought the same. And now, with NaNoWriMo behind her, she's suddenly feeling that it's not so hard to write at novel-length and breadth at all. So she's signed with Excellent Agent, with a carte blanche to ask for as much or as little of that perceptive editorial help as suits her. I'll be the one raising a glass for the deal...

2) I've accepted an invitation to speak - along the lines of my Mexico lecture - at the Second World Summit on Evolution, in the Galapagos Islands, in August. Quite apart from the shameless ego-massage of my inviters being embarrassingly pleased that I've said yes, apparently you have to step over the sea lions between the hotel and the conference centre, and if I can wangle a couple of extra days beforehand I can spend them riding in the Ecuadorean highlands.

3) The last heavy-going stage of my PhD is being very heavy going indeed, and on Sunday I admitted defeat and emailed my supervisor to postpone meeting her, because there was no way I could get something to her that would be worth her time. This did not make me happy, though she was as kind and calmly understanding as she always is. And then, like taking a cork out of a bottle, on Monday I sat down, turned off the computer, stared into space for half an hour, rooted out one of the big notebooks I use for first drafts and my favourite biro, and wrote the first two pages of each of the two main voices in my new novel. It's three years since I last began a novel and, unlike either A Secret Alchemy or The Mathematics of Love, this one - working title Kindred and Affinity - is all unknown territory, in characters, period and plot. I've felt like a singer, waiting in the wings: I'm as prepared as I can be, and yet I have no guarantee that when I walk on stage and open my mouth, anything will happen at all. Only it has. I've decided that my self-imposed deadline of submitting the PhD by Christmas is not only impossible, it's also not important. I will do it, but it has to take its place alongside the even more important work. And, yes, I opened my mouth and something came out which does sound like a first, slightly hesitant song.

4) Before meeting Marguerite for tea and getting her great news, I dropped into my favourite bookshop in the world, Foyles, for a bit of Christmas shopping. And this is what made me happy, with apologies for the poor image. (One of the drawbacks of having once taken photography seriously is that I don't take the quality of my phone's camera seriously enough). Thirteen copies of A Secret Alchemy in the New Hardback Fiction section - yes, I'm afraid I did count - and I even allowed myself to wonder if the fact that one face-out pile had a copy less than the other, and there's a space on the right-hand side, meant that once there were fifteen, which is a nice, round number, after all: the kind of number you order. (Of course, all these are on sale-or-return, so they could all trundle back to Headline. And of course the right-hand space could be left by selling a different book, but still...) No copy of The Mathematics of Love in the main fiction section, which, paradoxically, also makes me happy, because they do routinely have a copy, (yes, I'm afraid I do check) so I can allow myself to think that, too, has been bought. Since The Mathematics of Love was first published in June 2006, it's good to know that it's still routinely in stock not just in Foyles, but also in Waterstones.

Have a happy weekend!

Doughnuts, Dickens and utter silence

One of the many moments which made me lose my heart to my Mexican hosts happened just after I'd finished my second lecture, in Cuernavaca. It was packed: a 150 seat lecture theatre had another fifty people sitting on the floor and in the aisles. I'd talked, pointed, edited as I read to suit the audience, even got a few laughs, ended with a suitably uplifting idea, smiled sweetly at the applause, answered long and interesting questions, signed posters, shaken hands, been stood next to, smiled again at mobile phone cameras, answered more questions, shaken more hands, retrieved my notes and my memory stick, and departed in company with my host, Leonor. And there, coming the other way, was her assistant, with a large, flat box. 'When you've been lecturing,'  Leonor said, 'You need sugar.' And in the box were doughnuts.

How right she was: I don't think a doughnut has ever tasted so good. But why? All I'd been doing was standing up and talking for an hour or so. The talking bit, as you can imagine, comes very naturally, as does the standing up since the demons in my lumbar vertebrae have been reduced to manageability. And I'd given the same lecture to the best part of 400 people a few days before, so I knew how it went, and I only realised how tired I was when I realised how much I'd needed the sugar hit. No, giving your fifty-minute pre-written lecture isn't up there with giving your Hamlet eight times a week, but performing is tiring, whether it's seminar of fifteen undergraduates, or a hundred plus people including five Fellows of the Royal Society, as I later learnt was true of the talk I gave in Birmingham back in February. It's not just big lectures or academic subjects, either. A nice little bookshop reading, a pre-publication dinner, a signing, asking a question in someone else's reading: they're all times when you have to be someone for people who, however fleetingly, become your audience. You present yourself in a particular form, a persona which isn't so much not you, as one part of your personality enlarged to fill the whole of you. And to do that, to fill a whole person with only part of a person, you need energy: adrenalin.

I used to wonder why I felt so hyper when I'd finished even small events, but it is adrenalin, isn't it? Your metabolism speeds up, because you'll need all that energy (aka blood sugar) for escaping the sabre-tooth tiger: the cunning runner in you needs to enlarge to take over the rest of you. And in the wake of the sugar-rush and the end of the performance comes hypoglycaemia, and the need for doughnuts (hm, chocolate or jam?). The other effects of adrenalin (raised blood-pressure, tunnel vision, shaking hands, dry mouth, need to pee) are many and complex, and the total effect is a high at once disconcerting, and, for actors for example, irresistible. It's hard on writers though, who by definition spend a lot of their lives alone and not performing for anyone, who choose to communicate at two removes (thoughts to page, page to shop, page to reader), when they suddenly have to stand up and be... watched and listened to.

The poets, of course, know it's their fate from the beginning: their audience is as often on the far side of the mic as it is on the far side of a mag subscription and far more often than on the far side of a real, actual book. Most would agree that poetry has changed because of it. Even short fiction writers have their slams and mags. But we novelists work away, for years, in the silence and darkness of our studies. The only time our words are aired is when we say them aloud to hear them for ourselves, and we write on the assumption that reading silently (a skill which only developed in the 17th century, after all) is how our words will be experienced. And then, suddenly, we're expected to stand up in the limelight, be seen and heard, be entertaining or heart-breaking, to hold real, wriggly, even ticket-paying people enthralled: to be, in short Dickens.

Well, I'm not Dickens (I don't think the beard would suit me, for a start), and I completely understand that for some writers it's agony from start to finish, from being heard to feeling judged. And I'm nervous, of course, though not in the paralysing way I used to be when I was playing other people's characters. But fundamentally I enjoy it. Yes, sometimes I read better than others, and there are dozens of other variables which can make or mar an event. And yes, I'm a writer, and what happens on the page in my study is the core and reason for my existing. But removing the removes, as it were, and telling the story I have to tell direct to the audience, is a high like no other: the quiet in a hall when it's going well, a laugh, a murmur of understanding or, best of all, the total, utter silence at the end.

Still processing: please wait...

Who was it who said that poetry was emotion recollected in tranquillity? It's not just emotion, though, is it? Nor is it simply a process of recollection. (Tranquillity usually helps, though I'm typing this while eavesdropping on, among others, a full-on Yiddish conversation, complete with assimilated American vocabulary...) The thing about experience, as every writing teacher has to explain, gently or forcefully, according to (you hope) the temperament of the beginner writer, or (more likely) the temperament of themselves, is that it isn't enough. What makes experience craft or even art is the business of putting it through the sieves of memory, of experience before and experience after, the pitch and rhythm of words, their images and associations.

So, though I've got nothing much better to do at Newark NJ airport for the next hour or so, I can't turn in some nice philosophical point about the last ten days, nor a funny or heartfelt story. At the moment the best I can do is this:

aeroplanes: 6

non-duty books read: 5

pages of random notebook notes: 10

delectable, brilliantly painted little animals bought: 4

American copy-edits of A Secret Alchemy fine tooth-combed: 1

spectacular drives over mountains: 2

pyramids climbed: 2

delicious lunches/dinners with kind hosts: 10

taxis and lifts organised by same: too many to count

hotels slept in: 3

books signed to new friends: 10s

minutes of BBC World News watched: too many

press interviews: 3

lectures given: 2

really interesting literary/cultural TV interviews: 2

people lectured too: 600

life-saving post-lecture doughnuts consumed: 1

skeletons dancing: 100s

skulls grinning: 1000s

Dios de Muertos altars pondered over: 10

astounding, astonishing national museums of anthropology which have gone straight into my top ten of cultural experiences ever: 1

Blood for Breakfast

Settle down now, everyone, settle down.

Right, now, as you know, I´m giving two big lectures this week. (What did you say, George? Well, they´re important to me, and there were a lot of people there at the first one. No, not just idiots. Now that´s enough, George, or I´ll send you to sit outside the Head Mistress´s office...)

Where was I. Oh, yes? I´m going to have to leave you to be very sensible and quiet while I´m away. And what I´d like you to do is think about the relationship of symbols to reality. (What´s that, Alicia? Yes, I know Theory says they´re the same thing, but they´re not. Just because they´re not. Well, go and read Barthes and Saussure from cover to cover, and then you can come back and explain it to me. I´d certainly like someone to do that.)

Where was I? Yes, symbols and reality. I haven´t got time to go into it now, but I´ll just give you a few things to think about, to get you started, and then when I come back I expect you all to have worked something out. So get your pens out (Yes, Ben, a pencil will do. Or a quill pen. Yes, your iPhone if you must.)

The Day of The Dead, dancing, top hatted, bustle skirted skeletons and all.

A Roman Catholic church, with a statue or a flaming heart or a tree of Jesse or a steel helmetted conquistador in every cranny.

Creationism as a manifestation of a terrified insecurity, and mostly found in Evangelical Protestans.

Old fashioned courtesies to women meant as pure goodwill and goodmanners, and furious feminist reactions to them.

Now I´ll be back soon, so settle down and get writing. I´ll expect at least a page from everyone. And Mr Brown is right next door, and if I hear you´ve disturbed him there´ll be Blood for Breakfast. No, even if we were talking about symbols I didn´t mean Early Mass. I meant trouble. Mind you, you get offered just about everything else for desayuno in Mexico. You should taste the seriously grown up hot chocolate...

Pure noticing and the slippery double

One of my Darwin cousins who I've not yet met (there are a lot of us) is the poet Ruth Padel. Her mother was a biologist, and her grandmother Nora was a botanist in the days when botany was more or less the only acceptable science for women. Apparently Ruth took her mother to a poetry reading, and afterwards her mother said, 'I see the point of poets now. They notice things.'

Don't laugh - though poets are allowed a wry chuckle before they open the email which tells them their publisher has gone bust because their Arts Council funding is now paying for a few seats of one of the Olympic Stadia - because it's actually very important. It's the same idea as Gwen Raverat's 'losing experience'. If you spend as much time around poets as I do, you know that no one observes better, athough people don't think of it as part of the training as they do of visual artists like Gwen. And when it comes to novels, let's face it, people first notice the plot. But that capacity to observe is so important. I don't think I'm the only writer who doesn't read on buses or have an MP3 player because I'm too busy eavesdropping. And I can particularly recommend the cafeteria of the Croydon IKEA, for truly bizarre conversations.

When you say that you spend time observing, non-artists (there, I've managed it, obliquely) think that you're going to start putting the things and people you've observed into your work, but it's not as simple as that. Partly, listening and touching and smelling is just exercise, as artists draw to keep their eye-mind-hand-muscle systems in trim: pure noticing. But when I move on from that I don't sit there dressing the people I'm watching in breeches, I'm thinking about why they might be how they are, wondering how they are at home, imagining them in some more extreme situation, or in conversation with one of my characters.

And, of course, pure noticing is the foundation of scientific thought. Non-scientists think that it's all about facts. It is, of course, and the consequences of getting those wrong are much graver than if I get the facts about Richard III wrong in A Secret Alchemy (well I hope so, anyway, though Richard's fans have a fearsome reputation.). But it's about so much more than that, because while looking for facts you have to be able to see the things you weren't looking for; make connections which no one's made before; persevere with ideas that received wisdom tells you are nonsense; like the doctor who discovered helicobacter pylori. There's the purity, if you like: that it can set its preconceptions to one side.

I've been thinking about this again because last night I was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, hearing John LeCarré speak. Resisting the impulse to kneel and kiss the hem of his mantle, I settled back to listen, and heard a bit of his biography I didn't know. At nineteen, speaking perfect German and doing his National Service in military intelligence, in 1948 he found himself interviewing refugees in Austria when the Cold War was still hot. Some hardly knew whom they were fleeing any more, others had known the concentration camps: few had more than the clothes they stood up in, or slept without nightmares. He was a year older than my son, and his job was to work out who was genuine, who was a Nazi or a Soviet spy in disguise. What had they seen that might be useful? What did they know? Who back home knew they were there, or might they be turned and sent back as a spy? Were they someone who could stand up to that? Were they someone who was telling the truth? What were they witholding? You don't have to read much LeCarré to know that everyone witholds something.

It's hard to think of better training for a novelist, and it's hard to call anything about that world pure. But the observer's mindset must still be so. Or must it? Here are people who don't know what they know, and probably mustn't ever realise. None of it will be any use unless you observe enough to make the right judgement about them and the world they're in. To understand them you must observe coolly but also empathise as novelists do, and as Feynman did as he revolutionised quantum physics by asking himself things like 'If I were an electron, what would I do?'. You must do two things which most people consider incompatible: think, and feel. Good puppeteers peer down onto their little stages, watch the show and manipulate it, but their body sense - their proprioception - is also with the puppet, feeling what they feel and seeing what they see. All creative thought needs this duality of attention. It's an essential element of our necessary capacity to experience where the wild things are and to write about them. It's the essential nature of the artist to observe reality in order to create stories of monsters or genes: the dual nature which Margaret Atwood describes so well in Negotiating with the Dead: the ordinary person, and their slippery double.