Are we nearly there yet?

You know what writing a novel's like? It's like waking up one morning in London and saying to yourself on a whim "hey, I know what'd be fun: walking to China! That sure would be a great place to walk to." And you sit down with your atlas and a ruler and you say "OK, so it's 5,057 miles to Beijing*, let's say I walk 8 miles a day, with one day off a week, that's 105 weeks, so I should be there in just about two years. Awesome!" And you pack up a bag and set off**.

And inevitably, it doesn't go quite as smoothly as you imagined. Some days you just lope along, eating up the miles, but some days you can barely walk at all, and sometimes, horrible desolate times, you discover you've taken a wrong turn and this whole Yemen excursion was a mistake and undoing it is going to take forever. And sometimes the whole thing seems so pointless you just have to sit down for weeks at a time and eat chocolate digestives and watch daytime TV. (My analogy may be breaking down here.)

All in all, it takes more than three years for you to get past Mongolia, and by that time you're barely the same person you were when you started, and just to make yourself get up and walk every morning you've spent the past 18 months just thinking about the next 8 miles and maybe, if you're brave, the 8 miles after that.

And then suddenly, one morning, you're walking along and you realise that you can *see* China. There it is. Maybe you're on a high peak and you take out your binoculars and yup, there's China. There's Beijing***. And the thing is, by that point you have literally almost forgotten that Beijing is actually real. That there was ever going to be an end to the walking. That there was a point to the whole blooming enterprise. But there it is: the end.

And you walk towards it, and you go "huh. China. I walked to China." And then for some reason people keep asking you about China. What do you think about China? What is the meaning of China? What is the reason for China? How should China be changed to make it a better China? What can we say when we are trying to market China? But the truth is, all you really know now is how to walk, not how to be in China or understand it, or appreciate it.

So all you can really think is "I wonder where I'll walk next."

Do you see what I'm saying?

*Actual distance from my house.

**Warning, please do not attempt this.

*** I do not actually know if Beijing is visible from a high peak far away.

Unaccustomed as I am

I went to a wonderful Women Novelist's salon a little while ago, which is the sort of event that always makes me feel that I am Actually a Real Writer, and perhaps not Just Pretending. Much of the chat revolved around horrible evenings giving readings to unappreciative audiences. From what I can tell, I've been lucky: I haven't had any really awful experiences, but I expect they await me eventually.

I also recently had a chat with a friend who's trying to arrange a big education event.
"Can you imagine," she said, "I tried to invite Mr Very Well-Known Writer to speak at my charity event, and he asked for £20,000! For one night!"
The thing my friend failed to understand was: this isn't a way of asking for a lot of money. Really, it's a way (a very English way) of saying "no". Let me break it down for you.

Writers are by nature usually people who are capable of enjoying time in our own company. We often prefer imaginary people to real ones, and get childishly attached to our own chair, our own desk, our own routine. If we'd wanted a life of glamorous foreign travel and meeting new people, we'd have become management consultants.

Admittedly, there are times when it's dead exciting to be asked to speak anywhere. It's the Real Writer thing again: even accumulating horror stories makes you feel more writerly. But then, time goes past and the new novel really does need to be worked on - there's nothing, after all, that makes you feel more like a writer than writing.  And you do reach a point where you've frankly said all that can be said about the old novel not once but many times.

But still you get invitations to do things. I love getting these invitations. Every single one still fills me with happiness that someone actually liked my book enough to ask me to speak. But, *accepting* any invitation means time away from writing, or away from spending relaxing time with friends, or with a book, or at the gym, or with anyone or anything that doesn't ask me the same questions about my book that I've heard so often before. (It's no one's fault - those are the questions everyone wants to know the answer to. But it does get tiring.)

So, I think to myself: is this an interesting event? Will there be interesting people there? Is it somewhere fun? And, more personally: am I really in a mental place where I'll be able to enjoy doing this, or will I, however fun the people are, be longing to get back home? I'm *very much* more likely to do it if it's come via my publisher and has thus already been vetted. If it's far away and would entail staying over, it depends on when it is, what else is going on at that time (I'm not going to do anything over the Jewish holidays, for example), how much I want to go to the place and how much I desperately need to spend concentrated time with my next book.

So it's when I get invitations to speak in places that are far away, that are at inconvenient times, that would mean at least a week of disruption (and it is a week, at least, with planning, packing, unpacking, exhaustion, organisation, re-entry into normal life) that I find myself thinking, in a rather cowardly way: "I don't want to have to say no. It's a privilege to be asked. But... I don't want to go. So how much money would make it OK to spend time doing things I really don't want to do, going places I don't want to go, realising that my novel was growing cold again? How much would make it really OK?"

And so, though I've never asked for £20,000 (or anything in any way like it), I can understand that that's when you do it. Perhaps Mr Very Well-known Writer regularly gets £20,000 a night. But perhaps he asks for it because he knows it's ridiculous, that no one would ever pay it, and that this lets him get back to his tricky next chapter. And if someone turns out to have much deeper pockets than he expected... well, at least he knows when he's on the plane facing the jetlag that he can pay for a writing holiday somewhere sunnier to make up for it.

but no one's yet asked whether I write with a pen or a pencil

My paperback's going to be published next month, so I'm back into readings-mode: going places, reading from my novel (which I finished almost two years ago now, I've pretty much forgotten what it's about, all I have is the memory of the other times I've described it), answering questions. Which leads me to this rather uncharitable but psychologically necessary act: a list of the bizarrest questions I've been asked in the past year. I may come back and add to it if more return to my memory, but for now my top favourites are:

• As an author, do you call for more compassion in the world? (A: Yes? I expect so?)
• How has your childhood affected the person you've become as an adult? (A: See the works of Sigmund Freud.)
• Out of 10, how many marks would you give yourself for this novel? (A: Out of 10, how many marks would you give yourself for that question?)
• In what ways has being Jewish influenced your personality? (A: It's made me more miserly, conniving and inclined to control the world through the twin weapons of communism and capitalism, obviously.)
• (Not so much a question, but anyway....) I liked the story, but your book had too much detail in it! I got bored reading about all these details of Jewish practice! You should have put less in! (A: Um. Skip over those bits then?)

Friday, November 3, 2006 at 01:27 PM

Spent last night in Dublin at the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award, for which I had been nominated in the 'fiction' category but did not win. It's interesting, not winning - it felt different to how I expected. I would have thought I'd've been disappointed, at least a bit, but in fact I wasn't really. I had a good, if slightly bizarre, night, the best part of which I spent moaning to my fellow nominees Rodge Glass, James Scudamore and Philip O'Ceallaigh (the winner) about my New Book. I'm currently at the 'it's the *worst book in the world*' stage with it, and seem to have got very vocal, shouting at everyone about how incredibly bad my book is. I went through this with Disobedience too, though, so I think it'll pass.

The evening made me think about the nature of prizes. In general, authors don't have to apply for literary prizes. Someone at the publishers keeps an eye on what we're eligible for and submits our manuscripts, or is asked to submit. We only hear about being part of that process at the point when we're longlisted or shortlisted. So, it's strange. After the award was announced, several people commiserated with me on not having won as if I must be disappointed but the truth is (money aside; money is always nice) that you can't be that disappointed about not getting something you never asked for or decided you wanted.

I suppose it's all about how much you wrote the book (or made whatever creative work it was) with the aim of winning the award. Which, unlike Kanye West apparently, I didn't. I did, however, have hopes of writing not-the-worst-novel-in-the-world as my second book. Sigh. Back to work.

And another thing

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/openbook/openbook.shtml

in which I appear in a discussion about The Short Story. I'd had a terrible day before we taped this, there'd been a huge accident on the North Circular which jammed up most of north west London and meant that 10-minute journeys suddenly took two hours. (Although, to be fair, I'm sure I'd had nowhere near as bad a day as the people involved in the crash, and I hope they're OK.) It was a very irritating day, though, and when I taped this programme I thought I did really badly, coming across as an over-enthusiastic A-level English student next to Andrew O'Hagan's sensible, intelligent thoughts. The editors have done a marvellous job of making me sound as if I had something more to say than "OMG! Short stories! Squeeee!" Which just goes to show why one should always be nice to editors.