Maybe I really do believe that, as an author, you should should embrace Buddhist simplicity and ‘walk through your professional life with a vague, goofy smile, like Prince Charles visiting an organic farm.’  Certainly the idea of setting light to a bonfire of trivialities (publishers, publicity, reviews etc etc) seems a touch drastic.

Too late to take it back now, so here it is:

*

You may not have noticed, but things have become a little blustery out there recently. Authors are having to work for nothing, or not at all. A mean-spirited government is reducing the microscopic amount they receive from libraries and copying by “rationalising”  PLR and the ALCS. Publishers are in such a state of terminal funk that many of them have actually stopped going out to lunch.

What were midges of annoyance and distraction for authors during easier days CAN become mighty hornets during the bad times. Many of US have contemplated  extreme measures  – drinking, hiding under the duvet,  teaching creative writing –  until the storm passes.

Here, though, is an alternative strategy. Simplify. Downsize spiritually.  Walk through your professional life with a vague, goofy smile, like Prince Charles visiting an organic farm.

The process is not as difficult as it may seem. Once you realise that various aspects of being an author  -  things we have come to assume have to be part of our lives  -   are nothing more than lumber, they can be discarded. Life will be soon be simpler, sunnier, happier.

First on the bonfire of trivialities will be endorsements from other authors. I had not realised, until I recently helped judge a literary award, how feverish, and how pointless, the once-innocent practice of helping  other authors has become. Every book by a newish writer, it seems, is now published with the help of a warm puff from a more experienced colleague on the cover.

There is nothing new in the practice  -  years ago, Auberon Waugh used to respond to requests for quotes  by going wildly over the top, describing  a rather ordinary work in such hilariously effusive terms –  “the best book on this, and possibly any other, subject” – that no sensible person could fail to see the joke.

Today the whole thing is taken more seriously. The familiar, shop-worn  compliments, plucked from the critic’s thesaurus ( “sparkling debut”, “gripping yarn”, “an exciting new voice” and so on) are so ubiquitous that they have ceased to mean anything to writer or reader. Rather than wearily churning out  ‘Step aside, Dan Brown!’, the endorser might just as well write, “I met this person at a dinner-party”, “We share an agent” or “Getting my name on the cover of other people’s books is free publicity”, and have done.

Now that you have started down-sizing, you can go one can go one step further, and recognise that the vast majority of reviews are a waste of an experienced author’s time. After  a few years of writing, you will know what has worked in a book, and what has failed. An opinion expressed on a books page, whether it comes from an exhausted hack or an ambitious literary psycho, may affect sales but there is nothing you can do about that. Reading the review will be a waste of time: compliments are meaningless and insults are either irritatingly unfair or depressingly accurate.

The truly pure in spirit will continue their professional spring cleaning by removing  from their lives any activity undertaken only for reasons of publicity. Now that publishing is largely managed by those with a background in marketing, the ruling myth of PR – that it is an essential part of any author’s success  -  has  become accepted as a sort of holy writ. To suggest that talking to a magazine about your pets or favourite films, appearing on a radio or TV chat shows or trying, like some crazed cult leader, to win “followers” on Twitter will achieve little or nothing in terms of sales, and may eat into the soul of a writer, might be deemed eccentric within publishing, but the wise author will know it is true.

 Some people are born promotable – they emanate mysterious spoors which, for reasons no one truly understands, catch the curiosity of strangers.  Why Jeremy Clarkson? Why Martin Amis? Why Joey Barton? There are other people who are more interesting than them, but who simply lack the publicity gene. Most of us could appear on the Graham Norton Show for three consecutive weeks and still never be recognised, let alone sell books.

The mature author will realise that this is a blessing. A realisation that publicity is a mystical process beyond the understanding of normal people is a huge relief, removing many humiliations and wasted hours.

For those worried that by taking a brisk, grown-up attitude to promotional silliness they might alienate their publishers, the identity of next irrelevance to be dumped will come as good news. It is the publishing industry.

Authors can go mad, worrying about “the trade”, what is up and what is down, forgetting that the way the business works, or fails to work,  is irrelevant to them. It is, metaphorically if not actually, below their pay grade. Publishers march to the beat of a different drum. Trying to become one of their team, earnestly getting yourself introduced to people in production or contracts department, flirting with reps and/or receptionists, sending out Christmas cards on an industrial scale, is actually unhelpful to your career. It will quickly erode what makes you attractive to publishers:  you are not like them.

The very things that embarrass us – tatty clothes, a tendency to express impolitic opinions, a general vagueness about management or the new media   – are what earn us respect within the books industry. We are authors, not would-be entrepreneurs or fame-hungry competitors in a TV reality show.

Without these trivial concerns buzzing  around your head, you will be left with a clutter-free life of direction and clarity. In a state of smiling spiritual calm, you will know that for an author, the world of generalities   -   PR, image, company politics   -  counts for little beside the specific and the personal.

It is the individual which matters: a good editor, a good reader, and, of course, your good self.

My other Endpaper articles for The Author, a comprehensive source of caring advice for those who write – or would like to write – for a living, is to be found in my Writer’s Shed  here.

Here is the problem. As a service to the community (and a pleasure to myself), I have taken to starting the day by posting a couple of “writers’ rules”   similar to those on my Tip of the Day on the home page of this website  –  on Twitter. Brief thoughts on the process and business of writing from authors, past and present, they have been extracted from a great database of writerly wisdom and eccentricity which I have compiled over the years.

The rules reveal one thing above all else. Writers disagree about virtually everything.

This very week, for example,  Louis de Bernières told the Independent:

‘Whatever research I do will give me better ideas than anything I could make up on my own.’

Do other authors agree? I turned to the first letter in my fascinating and comprehensive compendium of quotes (Wake up, publishers!) and find these words from Martin Amis:

‘I keep meaning to research things, to go to prisons and child-abuse centres, but in the end I just make it up. You take a bit of experience and pass it through your psyche.’

This kind of disagreement echoes around the writers’ rules archive. Remarks made with the prescriptive confidence – this is the way to do it, kids  -  which few of those quoted probably felt, the tips and thoughts, taken together, seem less like a lesson than a row.

Research, working methods, thought, language, money, sex, health: there is not the slightest hint of a writerly consensus on any of these subjects.

My problem is that, because Twitter is by its nature chatty and interactive, people become annoyed by what I have posted and take issue with some of the rules. I find myself explaining, sometimes even defending, something which Iris Murdoch, or Lee Child, or Philip Larkin once said.

Perhaps the number one rule for all writers, professional and aspiring, should be that of  William Goldman when considering  Hollywood, in his great book Adventures in the Screen Trade:

‘Nobody knows anything.’

Here, thrown together in a hopelessly anarchic fashion, are just a few of the writers’ rules which have appeared on Twitter over the past few weeks.

Just don’t expect consistency.

*

John  Fowles: ‘I went through all the publicity… as in a bad dream. The people unreal and myself “John Fowles” most unreal of all.’

Nick Hornby: ‘I do construct an ideal reader or listener. I think I’m addressing some quite smart woman in her thirties.’

AL Kennedy: ‘Let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave.’

Ford Madox Ford: ‘I have always had the greatest contempt for novels written with a purpose.’

Don DeLillo: ‘I don’t have a career, I have a typewriter. I’ve never planned anything.’

Anthony Burgess: ‘There is no agony like the agony of writing badly.’

T. Coraghessan Boyle: ‘You learn to write through practice, through writing, over and over, again and again.’

Ernest Hemingway: ‘The farther you go into writing, the more alone you are.’

Garrison Keillor: ‘That’s the thing: to keep on working, to be engrossed in the work, not the outcome.’

David Foster Wallace: ‘Fun is still the whole point, somehow, no? Fun on both sides of the writer/reader exchange?’

Philip Larkin: ‘If I were a “proper writer” I would be a novelist rather than a poet.’

William Wharton: ‘Not thinking of myself as a writer gives me the freedom to be one.’

Hilary Mantel: ‘Sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being.’

David Lodge: ‘You’re always aware of the league table … If you’re not competing, you’re not going to be very good.’

Jack London: ‘I’d rather win a water-fight in a swimming pool …than write the great American novel.’

Doris Lessing: ”Writers are looking in the critics for an alter ego, that other self more intelligent than oneself.’

Stephen King: ‘Fear is at the root of most bad writing.’

Randy Newman: ‘It doesn’t have to be that arduous but it always has been for me. Writing is goddam hard.’

Eugene O’Neill: ‘Writing is my vacation from living.’

Ian McEwan: ‘You cannot underestimate the spite of a certain section of the English middle class.’

David Malouf:  ‘The only thing that’s going to be interesting in the book is what you don’t yet know.’

Iris Murdoch: ‘Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.’

Philip Roth: It is the distance between the writer’s life and his novel that is the most intriguing aspect of his imagination

VS Pritchett: ‘Write every day. Keep office hours. Inspiration comes from the grindstone, not from heaven.’

Will Self: ‘No great book is created by thought power -  it has to be felt.’

Philip Pullman: ‘Make the story itself so interesting that the teller just disappears.’

Virginia Woolf: ‘We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.’

Jules Renard: ‘I read what I write as though I were my mortal enemy.’

Maggie Gee: ‘It is very easy to fall off the tightrope that writers walk; no one is there to catch you.’

Henry Green: ‘If you can make the reader laugh, he is apt to get careless and go on reading.’

Annie Dillard: ‘A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.’

Cyril Connolly: ‘If…a man who is not married is only half a man,  so a man who is very much married is only half a writer.’

Angela Carter: ‘The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an.. urgent deadline in the offing.’

Leonard Cohen: My tiny trouble is that, before I can discard a verse, I have to write it. I can’t discard it before it’s finished.

Zoe Heller: I don’t write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘You write best about yourself. It may even be that it’s impossible to write well about anything else.’

Thomas Mann: ‘A writer is someone who finds writing difficult.’

Jack Kerouac: ‘The first thought is the best thought.’

WH Auden: ‘The innocent eye sees nothing.’

Stephen King: ‘I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.’

Annie Dillard: ‘Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard

Zadie Smith: ‘The most painful thing in the world is an author explaining their own novel.’

*

My address on Twitter is @TerenceBlacker. The hash-tag is #writersrules.

Will there be a respectable turn-out?  Will the quality of the congregation be up to snuff? Too often, funerals are cluttered up by the sort of compassion junkies and drama queens who get a small ghoulish  thrill out of the grief of others. Would it be unseemly to leave a last wish banning the insincere from one’s last gig?

As for the event itself, there are tricky question of taste to consider. A Christian service for a non-believer adds a touch of bogusness  at the very moment when it is least welcome. Secular efforts tend either to be leaden and bathetic or fey and hippyish.

Who to give the address? Another nightmare. The kind of person who pushes himself forward on these occasions (‘Trust me, I know how to do these things’) is likely to provide an irritating parody of one’s life  – more raffish, dutiful, silly, sane, ordered, shambolic, sexy, sexless, successful or disappointing than the real thing.

As for the music, where does one start? Recognising the fact that choosing funeral tunes is, like preparing for Desert Island Discs, a lifetime’s work, a website called My Last Song now invites people to have an early stab at it, listing five songs by which they would like to be remembered.

Of course, the list changes every week. Contributing my own list recently to My Last Song, I was startled to find that there was no place for Ry Cooder, Willie Nelson or Doc Watson. I also wanted to include Victoria Hart’s astonishing version of my song ‘It’s Only Love’, only to be warned off on grounds of egotism .

And who wants to be thought self-centred at their own funeral?

They reply to criticism, put counter-arguments, soon to be followed by counter-counter-counter-arguments. They either rise above the insults or – a terrible mistake in my view – respond in kind.

How do they do that? Where do they find the time, the patience?  When I write my Independent  column, I feel I have been given enough space to make my case. If I have failed to convince, then that is my problem. Engaging with readers in a further debate or – more likely – slanging match is, I think, unlikely to change anything.

Besides, what could I say to the man who called me a “wispy-haired twat”, to the previously friendly reader who suddenly turned on me and told me I was a “pussy whipped silver spoon prat”? Some accusations are simply too complex to unravel -  if indeed they are accusations.  “Come off it, Blacker,” one reader wrote. “Stop plying your cuntish opinions with panache”?  Wha-wha-what?

When a reader – anonymous, of course – accused me of cutting him dead while filling up my car, a  large, gold 4 x 4, at petrol station in Bury St Edmunds, I suppose I could pointed out that he was wrong in every detail, that he had been grinning at a stranger with a vulgar car in Bury St Edmunds, but, in the end, life is too short for such conversations.

On the other hand, not replying to any messages seems rude. Now and then, I would like to use this blog to reply to some of the general points made to me on the message-boards.

*

Reiner Torheit  Tell us again how we all ought to be in awe of you Oxbridge graduates, Terence.  And swallow your words of wisdom reverentially, and thank you afterwards for sharing them with us proles.

Thank you for this thought, Reiner. Personally I agree that education is neither here nor there when it comes to writing. I don’t think of you as a prole although, between you and me,  I do wonder whether you have one or two self-esteem issues that might need attention.

*

Sylva-MD-Poetry  I could not understand the language you used …Make it simple… make it easy… don’t pull  us crazy…

Apologies, Sylva-MD-Poetry, if this column didn’t work for you. I try to write as clearly as I can, and, if what I have written is difficult to understand, I would normally see that as a failure. I had absolutely no intention to pull you crazy and will make things simpler in the future.

* 

grumpy_old_ben   This is simply a testimony to the extent to which the self-hating, anti-white liberal-left establishment,  have become disconnected from the public as a whole.

You may be right, grumpy_old_ben, I probably am disconnected from the public as a whole. Luckily, I’m a writer not a politician, and disconnection is not necessarily a terrible thing.  When I last checked, I only mildly hated myself and had no particular antipathy to people of my own colour.

*

Jorge Fernandez    As a Hispanic man in the Pornography business in Los Angeles California USA, I make love to a lot of White women pornographic actresses that borders on obsession… US Hispanic men are a TIGER when it comes to making LOVE because WE will make love to a women for hours & hours on end. 

Thanks for sharing these thoughts, Jorge, and apologies for editing your comments. Like your love-making, your writing does tend to hammer on a touch relentlessly. Please keep writing in. Your regular contributions, while they are rather along the same lines, add variety to the message-board.

*

lakevostok   Arrr, oi reckon at be abewt toim too an arl that there wurra stop tawl them there tewenfolk patting us dowen.

That’s terrifically amusing, lakevostok. You noticed that I was writing about the countryside and responded, quick as a flash,  with this pitch-perfect parody. Have you ever considered writing for a living?

 *

tonbo0422   What on God’s green earth was this article about? I swear, I must have read it six times. It LOOKS like English; when read aloud it SOUNDS like English; yet it seems to actually mean nothing at all.

Oh dear, here we go again.  Tonboo42, could I introduce you to Sylva-MD-Poetry?

*

After a while, experienced professional authors learn the importance of the calendar.  They learn that it is not so much which editor  to approach  with what project, as when to do it. Trying to get a publisher to take an interest in a project is as delicate a matter of timing as asking someone to go to bed with you  -   too soon and they find it presumptuous;  too late and their interest has shifted elsewhere.

When to make your move?  All that the Endpaper think-tank can do is to present the publishing calendar, with its seasonal ebbs and flows, so that authors have at least a chance of catching a brief of moment of milky sunlight before the storm clouds gather once more.

January. Nothing ever happens  in January. Everyone is too depressed about Christmas, which was without doubt the most disastrous in living memory.  Mention a future book idea to an editor at this moment, and all you will hear is incredulous laughter. The few books which are actually published in January disappear without trace. Their authors have been told that this is a good month to ‘catch the book token market’, one of publishing’s more hilarious lies.

February.  The returns are back from Christmas. They are far worse than anyone feared. Even the celebrity books flopped, and it is widely agreed that the industry must return to publishing real books by real authors.  The sales department merely insists that authors of these real books should be  well known. Editors start hanging out at film premières and in TV chat-show audiences.

March. It was such a disastrous Christmas that publishers have had to ‘re-structure’, which is trade-speak for sacking a lot of people. February is a month of strategy meetings, at which words like ‘synergy’, ‘digital’ , ‘platform’ and ‘holistic’ fill the air. Occasionally, for light relief, the entire corporation goes to a hotel for a team-building weekend, from which staff will return hating each other  even more than before.  At the Bologna Book Fair, children’s publishers take their annual works outing.

April. Sexual yearning has publishing in its grip throughout the year but, for obvious reasons, it is particularly acute as Spring does its cruel work. Publishers meet at the London Book Fair and hungrily negotiate with one another, only occasionally mentioning books.  Only the bravest or most foolish of authors will attempt to interrupt these vernal  rituals.

May. We are now well into the year, and publishers suddenly discover that there is a hole in the autumn schedule where their Christmas bestseller should be. They decide that maybe they do need a ghosted celebrity book after all. Surely there must be a comedian or chef who has not been published. Editors are ordered to  stop reading manuscripts and to watch The X Factor and Celebrity Big Brother instead. The ghost-writing industry is now in overdrive; everyone else has stalled.

 June. Editors fly to America  for the big BookExpo conference,  and return gloomier than ever. They have discovered that the American book trade is in a far worse state than the British, or far better. Either way, it is depressing. In the UK bookshops, it  is quieter than in living memory. If you happen to have a book published this month, editors will look at you with a one-word message in their eyes: remainder. They are clearing their desks in preparation for holidays, and so no new project is welcome.

July.  They found their big Christmas book! A comedian who had written a couple of memoirs thinks he can dictate enough for a third if the price is right.  There are meetings about marketing and packaging the big book. Meanwhile, a  few new titles are dolefully released into the market under the pretence that they will be “picked up in reviewers’ holiday round-ups”,  another of publishing’s  hilarious lies.

August. Holidays. Nothing happens.  Editors, sitting by a swimming-pool, try to write the novel they have promised themselves. They return, three chapters done, in a foul mood.

September. It is the busiest time of the year. There is the post-holiday catch-up, the pre- Frankfurt Book Fair panic. Unless you are Stephen Fry, Alan Titchmarsh or Dawn French , it is pointless to publish a book now. The word in the trade is that this year’s celebrity books are better than last year’s. It is a bad time to talk to an editor about ideas; in the current climate, ideas are the last thing she needs.

October. There is anticipation, tension and clammy excitement in the air. Meetings, drinks, lunches and dinners are being organised  – time, place, items on the agenda. It is the Frankfurt Bok Fair, the event where by tradition the British book trade finds its annual sexual relief in desperate, doomed adulterous affairs, conducted in German hotels. Pre- or post-Frankfurt, it will be impossible to get any sense out of publishers. The code-word  for this mating frenzy is that ‘foreign publishers are in town’.

November. There were reports that Christmas came early, but they proved optimistic. The atmosphere in the trade is gloomier than it has been since June. The affair which your publisher started  at Frankfurt has ended, as it always does, in guilt, regret and self-loathing. The big celebrity book is piled high in the shops but the public seems to think that, because the comedian has written two bad memoirs before, a third one will be no better. At Christmas parties, resentment hangs in the air like stale farts. It is generally agreed that there is one cause for the current problem: authors like you.

December. It is the worst Christmas ever. No, seriously, if you thought last year was bad, you should see the disaster unfolding in the shops right now. Obviously, it would be absurd for publishers to consider your ideas now. Besides, they are about to take their holiday. When should you try? Maybe some time next year.

More invaluable insights into the literary and publishing life are to be found in my Writer’s Shed

The Author is the house magazine of the Society of Authors and appears four times a year.

Some are wise, a few are funny, some are quite frankly bonkers. The views can be from the classic (Flaubert) or the populist (Lee Child), the great (Philip Roth) to the small (Martin Amis). All are posted without commet.

There is no hint of a consensus here. Writers will always disagreee with one another, particularly about writing.

Here, in no particular order are some of the Writers’ Rules that now inhabit the Twittersphere:

John Fowles: ‘I no more want to see myself in print now than a monk wants to do a vaudeville act.’

 EM Forster: ‘We all like to pretend we don’t use real people, but one does actually.’

 Don DeLillo: ‘Being called a “bad citizen” is a compliment to a novelist. ..If we’re bad citizens, we’re doing our job.’

 VS Naipaul: ‘The novel form has done its work. The true novelists today are people like Edwina Currie, Jeffrey Archer.’

 Harold Brodkey: ‘I’m not famous. My image is famous. It’s a shadow I don’t even cast.’

Maxwell Perkins on writing a novel: ‘If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do.’

Eugene O’Neill: ‘Writing is my vacation from living.’

Arthur Miller: ‘I get up in the morning and write. Then I tear it up. That’s the routine.’

Redmond O’Hanlon: ‘The point of heterosexual male literature, art, music, science and rugby is to win the love of women.’

Toni Morrison: ‘If you’re blocked, you probably ought to be.’

Iris Murdoch: ‘Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.’

AN Wilson on literary parties: ‘The duds you see all around you,with hate in their faces, had started out hoping to be Keats.’

Gustave Flaubert: ‘Once our work is printed – farewell! It belongs to everyone..It is the height of prostitution, and the vilest kind.’  

Hanif Kureishi: ‘How do I like to write? With a soft pencil and a hard dick – not the other way round.’

Christopher Hitchens: ‘Write as if it’s your last words.’

Russell Hoban: ‘Children are in contact with the deep things which people tend to close off as they get older.’

Russell Hoban: ‘I never have a plan when I start a novel. If I did, it would be half dead before it started.’

William Hazlitt: ‘All who have to live by their labours have their potboilers.’

Elizabeth Smart: ‘Writers have to construct an importance, a sacred vocation, not to feel fiddling.’

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘There is no such thing as a political laugh or a moral laugh. A laugh is a very pure thing.’ 

Charles Dickens on literary journalists: ‘the lice of literature’.

Simone Weill: ‘Fictional good is boring…fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm.’

Carol Shields: ‘When you write happy endings, you are not taken seriously.’

 Janet Hobhouse: The purposeful deprivation that allows you to work,the cultivation of dullness so that writing can be an escape.

 Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘You write best about yourself. It may even be that it’s impossible to write well about anything else.’

 Ted Hughes: ‘It is fatally easy to acquire, through other people, a view of one’s work from the outside.’

 Anton Chekov: ‘A man of letters should be as objective as a chemist; he has to renounce ordinary subjectivity.’

 Jonathan Carroll: ‘Writers nowadays don’t have any courage. They have cleverness but they are clevering themselves to death.’

 John Banville: ‘I’ve always likened writing a novel to a very powerful dream that you know is going to haunt you for days.’

 Paul Theroux: ‘Sometimes you see two people walking along holding hands. You think – that man’s not writing a book.’

 Jack London: ‘You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.’

Mark Lawson: ‘If a critic wants to put down a serious novel, he will call it unputdownable.’

Ford Madox Ford on agents: ‘…a sort of bar loafer who hangs around, finding what publisher, magazine or paper wants what.’

PG Wodehouse: ‘It isn’t a bad sort of life if you have a novel to write.’

Richard Price: ‘As soon as you start a second book, you’re in competition with yourself.’

Cole Porter: ‘The moment the curtain rises on the opening night,I say to myself “There she goes” and I’ve bid goodbye to my baby.’

Rudyard Kipling: ‘Few lips would be moved to song if they would find a sufficiency of kissing.’

Ernest Hemingway: ‘The better the writers, the less they will speak about what they have written themselves.’

Somerset Maugham: ‘The novelist is dead in the man who has become aware of the triviality of human affairs.’

Norman Mailer: Plot is equal to a drug..Sooner or later, plot presents its bill, and dire exigencies come down upon the writer.

Albert Camus: ‘It is in order to shine sooner that authors refuse to re-write. Despicable. Begin again.’

Arnold Bennett: ‘The single motive that should govern the choice of a principal figure is the motive of love for that figure.’

Paul Auster: ‘I don’t know how to explain the work I do. I can’t defend it. I can’t do anything but do it.

Salma Rushdie: ‘A writer’s injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.’

Milan Kundera: ‘We write books because our children aren’t interested in us.’

George Gissing: ‘What an insane thing it is to make literature one’s only means of support!…To make a trade of art!’

Philip Roth: ‘Let the book take care of itself. Someone smarter than I am will have to tell me what it’s all about.’

Julian Evans: ‘Evil is a reality. Evil happens….If evil happens, then evil is a story that needs to be told.’

Martin Amis: ‘I would certainly sacrifice any psychological or realistic truth for a phrase.’

Robert Macfarlane: ‘All good writing either works against the grain of its genre, or transcends it altogether.’

Elmore Leonard: ‘If I have to stop and think about a word as if it was holy, I am interrupting my character.’

Sir Francis Bacon: ‘The Noblest workes and Foundations have proceeded from chilldlesse men.’

Franz Kafka: ‘Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness, the truth, out of everything I think.’

Frederick Forsyth: ‘I don’t like writing, I have never liked it. It’s extremely solitary, very boring and just a job.

Alan Garner: ‘I can’t think my work. I have to feel it, hear it, find it…I wait for the word, the hard-edged word.’

Eric Ambler: ‘The words don’t come fluently – if it comes readily I get very suspicious.’

AN Wilson on literary gatherings: ‘Faustian experiences, in which lost souls are adrift among the cheap wine and peanuts.’

Zadie Smith: ‘Fail better… It is literature in its imperfect aspect that I find most beautiful and most human.

Charles Baudelaire: ‘Travail immédiat, meme mauvais, vaut mieux que la réverie.

Kingsley Amis: ‘If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.’

Paul Theroux: ‘Sometimes you see two people walking along holding hands. You think – that man’s not writing a book.’

Anthony Trollope: ‘As for conceit, what man will do any good who is not conceited?’

John Cheever: ‘The rivalry among novelists is quite as intense as that among sopranos.’

Martin Amis: ‘The sexual act is a very weird thing in that it is indescribable. Literature has got nowhere with it in centuries.

Albert Camus: ‘The moment when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.’

Virginia Woolf: ‘We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.’

Arthur Ransome: ‘Unless I am writing that is good fun FOR ME, not for somebody else, I cannot write at all.

Redmond O’Hanlon: ‘The point of heterosexual male literature, art, music, science and rugby is to win the love of women.’

Hilary Mantel: ‘I often comfort myself that the worse life gets the better it gets, because suffering can feed writing.’

Norman Mailer: ‘I would say I’m wasting my substance completely when I’m not writing.’

John Updike: ‘A fiction writer’s life is his treasure, his ore, his savings account, his jungle gym.’

Georges Simenon: ‘A novelist is a man who does not like his mother, or who never received mother-love.’

Stephen King: ‘I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.’

F Scott Fitzgerald: ‘You never cut anything out of a book you regret later.’

Marguerite Duras: ‘A happy book is indecent, unseemly. We ought to wear mourning as a sign of civilisation.’

Neil Gaiman: ‘When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong or how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.’

Neil Gaiman: ‘When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right.’

 Lorrie Moore: ‘I think that all the best writing, like the best music, has a sadness to it.

VS Naipaul on teaching creative writing: ‘I would take poison rather than do this for a living.’

WB Yeats: ‘All that is personal soon rots.’

Gustave Flaubert: ‘I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it. ‘

Cyril Connolly: ‘It is the novelist who finds it hard to create character who indulges in fine writing.’ 

GK Chesterton: ‘I have a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife; what more can a man want on a honeymoon?’

Martin Amis: ‘Cynics don’t write novels.’

Jules Renard: ‘You will not have made real progress until you have lost the desire to prove your talent.’

Zadie Smith: ‘Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better.’

Lionel Shriver: ‘Complacency kills a lot of writers. They end up imitating themselves.’

 Peter Ackroyd: ‘It can hardly be stressed too often that the good writer is rarely, if ever, a good man.’

John Fowles: ‘All writers are difficult to live with. It is an inexorable law of mankind.’

Anthony Burgess: ‘Plot is only a bone you throw at the dog that feeds on narrative while the real work of literature proceeds.’

Vera Brittain: ‘I would not sacrifice one successful article to a night of physical relationship.’

Rose Tremain: ‘Never begin a book when you feel you want to begin it, but hold off a while longer.’

Auberon Waugh: ‘All you’ve got to do is tickle things up a bit. I think that’s your only role as a writer.’

Irvine Welsh: ‘There’s fuck all to say about my books other than what’s written in them.

Simon Gray: ‘Writer’s block is an obscenity invented by 20th century writers who want an excuse for not working.’

Max Beerbohm: ‘An author with a grievance is of all God’s creatures the most tedious.

My Twitter username is @TerenceBlacker

These days, when reading a column or blog on-line, he said, he tended to scroll first of all down the page to the message-boards. It was the debate among readers which told him whether what was written above it in the article itself was worth reading.

That would seem to be the way things are going. We all love a ruckus. A piece which has provoked passionate support or disagreement among readers is likely, the thinking goes, to be more compelling and of the moment than one which has merely been read.

How devastatingly depressing that is. Some of the columns I have been most pleased with have failed this test. Until now, I had hoped that they had been quietly appreciated, that a message was redundant. The fact that they had raised no matter for general discussion did not detract, I thought, from their value.

The general movement, though, is towards ruckus journalism. In a lecture about Twitter and citizen journalism, the Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger argued for what he called “the power of collaborative media”.  An article today should arrive at a consensus view, thanks to the input of readers and their varying opinions, the argument went.

I distrust this idea to the point of hatred. As I wrote during a piece about Twitter in The Author:

“It seems to me that the last thing any serious-minded author needs is a conversation. The idea that writing can be a communal activity, often encouraged on creative writing courses,  is a recipe for banality. The case made for Twitter may sound fair, consensual and democratic, but writing is not like chairing a committee of different opinions and then summarising the majority view. It is a dictatorship.”

To understand the weakness of the collaborative argument, one needs to visit a message-board. Among the sensible comments, and almost always outnumbering them, are rants and jokes and messages of varying degrees of nastiness. Some are simply bonkers.

It is said that the problem of graffiti has declined since the social media provided an alternative outlet for abuse, insult and exhibitionism, and one can see why. The combination of anonymity and the chance to hurt or show off is powerfully attractive.

It is unwise for a columnist to worry too much about what is written under his column, and to answer back, or  become involved in the debate, as some columnists do, is even more rash.

I was briefly tempted last week.  I had written a column about Hugh Grant’s early celebrity, as seen from the perspective of someone who used to play foot ball with him, and on the message-board a pseudonymous reader had pointed up my own snottiness in the form of an anecdote.

He had seen me filling up “an impressive-looking gold 4 x 4” at a petrol station in Bury St Edmunds. When he (or she, but somehow it seems like a he) had been friendly towards me, I had seemed bewildered and hostile.

Wha-what-what? Not one item about this story is true (except, perhaps, the bewilderment of a gold 4 x 4 owner) but there it is on-line, joining the vast mountain-range of fictional bilge on the internet.

My article about fame and someone with who I used to play football was not profound, but a glance at the messages that appeared below it hardly supports the Rusbridger case for collaborative media.

Once the message-board shouters begin to have a real influence on what is being read and written, it is not just the quality of the writing and argument which will suffer.

Tracy wrote about a silver birch story, Blake Morrison chose the chestnut, Ali Smith the Scots pine, Susan Elderkin the blackthorn, William Fiennes the ash., and so on.

My choice was the elm, and here it is:

As any carpenter knows, elm is a tricky wood to work – robust and beautiful, but also recalcitrant and unpredictable. Even when it has been dried, it will continue to move, rebelling against the role the craftsman has given it.

There is a reason for this excess of individuality. All trees in the forest are proud but, with the elm, pride tips – some would say unacceptably –  into arrogance.

It took several millennia for other trees to acknowledge that the attitude of the elm was becoming a problem. The forest is a tolerant, live-and-let-live sort of place, where there is a general sense that trees should not judge one another but concentrate on their own growing.

The arrogance of the elm, though, eventually became impossible to ignore. There were murmurings among the trees. Eventually it was agreed that the ash, which has an easygoing sort of authority about it, would address the issue.

‘The thing is this,’ the ash said to the elm. ‘All of the trees in the forest have individual strengths, and we all get along pretty well. The alder provides wood that hardens with water. The blackthorn protects animals with its spiky branches. The oak provides the mighty timber for ships and houses. In my own modest way, I produce wood which I believe is rather useful for firewood.’

‘Your point being?’ asked the elm.

‘It’s simply that all trees have their functions. To be candid, we’ve been wondering what gives you the right to behave as if you are superior to the rest of us.’

‘I am elm,’ said the elm.

This reply did not go down well in the forest.

‘What kind of answer is that?’ muttered the hazel.

‘I am hornbeam,’ said the hornbeam. ‘So what? Statement of identity hardly constitutes a reason.’

The elm seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. When it did reply, it was in a tone of weary contempt.

‘I am elm.’

The matter was dropped for a few centuries, but discontent grew among the other trees. It was the willow who one day suggested that something had to be done.

‘But what?’ sighed the ash. ‘It is elm. End of story.’

‘I have friends – don’t press me for details,’ said the willow. ‘I could have a word.’

The trees agreed that little no harm could come from the willow talking to its friends, and thought no more about it.

The willow knew a beetle that had recently travelled from Asia. When the willow explained its problems, the beetle seemed interested.

‘When does the elm start misbehaving?’ it asked.

‘When it becomes an adult tree,’ said the willow. ‘It’s quite reasonable when it is young, but as soon as it starts appearing above the hawthorn, the rowan, the hazel and the other small trees, its behaviour becomes impossible.’

‘I think I may be able to help,’ said the beetle.

A few years later, the trees began to notice that something unexpected was happening. As soon as young elms reached a certain height, above the hawthorn, the rowan, the hazel and other small trees, their bark became clogged with fungus and, quite soon afterwards, they died.

It was upsetting.

‘I think the elm has learned its lesson,’ the ash said one day to the willow. ‘Maybe you could have another word with your friends.’

The beetle was surprisingly unhelpful.

‘These things are cyclical.,’ it said. ‘One day, the elm will develop resistance to the fungus. Give it a few centuries and it will be back up there with the big boys. Thank you very much for the gig, by the way.’

To its credit, the elm has never complained about its fate. Every years, its roots spread, and its suckers burst through the earth. It grows and grows, knowing full well that, at the very moment when other trees reach their most useful years, it will inevitably wither and die.

In woodland, even now, you can hear its refrain – hopeful, defiant, despairing, quieter than it once was.

I am elm.

I am elm.

I am elm.

Why Willows Weep, edited b y Tracy Chevalier and Simon Prosser, published by IndieBooks, is availabler here  from the Woodland Trust for £12.95

It was a casual enough enquiry, following the broadcast of a two-part radio programme. Who, I was asked online, had been my researcher for the programme? With a small touch of pride, I replied that all the research had been done by me. And what, my questioner then asked, had given me the idea of talking to  – and she  mentioned two of the twelve or so people interviewed for the programme? Was it just a coincidence that she had happened to have written about both of them in her blog?

I began to see the direction in which she was heading. My correspondent thought that I had ripped her off. I looked at her other correspondence on Twitter, the social network site where this kind of gossip is traded, and found that she had been poking around, complaining mildly about me and asking where I had found my material. The trails led nowhere, and the backchat quickly fizzled out.

It was trivial enough episode, more a niggle than an outright accusation, but it was interesting how it unsettled me. At worst, the suggestion had been that I had taken a short-cut with my research. It was inaccurate but, even if it had been true, it was hardly the most grievous of sins.

 A tip to the vengeful: there is nothing more de-stabilising to authors, more likely to send us clean around the bend, than a suggestion that our work is second-hand, borrowed, or even stolen. Words and ideas are our only professional asset. If people begin to think some of them have been nicked, our identity as authors – a quaking, fragile little thing at the best of times  – is likely to crumble.

Plagiarism, whether imagined or real  – and this society has dealt with cases which proved to be all too real  -  is a nasty, destructive business. Writers who have come to believe that someone else has stolen their plots, characters or prose will find that the suspicion eats into the soul. If, as is often the case, they belong to the great tribe of the slightly disappointed,  and the perceived thief is more successful than they are, then his every glowing review, her every appearance in the bestseller list will be a nagging form of torture.

Authors who become convinced that their work has been plagiarised have this in common: the sense of injustice within them bogs them down and holds them back. Because the key to survival as a writer is to look forward, to treat the work currently in progress as the only one that matters, they are being doubly punished. Their grievance traps them  in the past.

I was once contacted by a man who had become obsessed – possessed, even  -   by the idea that a well-known novelist, aided and abetted by his publisher, had stolen scenes, sentences and names from his own rejected novel.

At first glance, he seemed to have a case. The carefully-typed list of alleged overlaps, echoes and borrowings which he had compiled ran to many pages. Once I began to read the evidence, though, the extent of his paranoia became clear. I felt sorry for him. Being a writer was clearly all he wanted to do but, instead of doing it, he was engaged in a futile, soul-scouring  campaign of revenge. I pointed out that, on the whole, plagiarists do not give their characters similar names to those of the original, that the references to contemporary life were common currency in our society. In the end, anyone writing a novel about middle-class Britain at a particular moment is drawing on the same small well of cultural experience. The claim made against this particularly novel, I concluded, could be just as well made against my own first novel Fixx.

It was a big mistake. Weeks later, I received a long list of ideas which I too, my correspondent alleged, had stolen from him.

In the plagiarism game, there are no winners. For those on the receiving end of allegations of theft, self-protection is curiously difficult.  Almost the worst moment in the disaster-strewn literary career of my friend Willie Donaldson was when, after the success of The Henry Root Letters, he found himself in the High Court, trying to prove that he had not stolen from a fellow-writer.

It was a bizarre claim, made by someone with whom he had once co-written a TV treatment, and the judge found firmly in his favour, but it rattled Willie more than any other of the many setbacks in his career as a writer. A master of anti-spin, he normally took a perverse delight in scuppering his own projects and blackening  his own name, but this dispute truly upset him. The problem was not that, if he lost the case, he would be bankrupt   -  he was used to that  –  but something more profound. Writing was what kept him going.  He would own up to any kind of immorality, but not  literary theft.

Another writer-friend, also talented,  peculiar and likeable,  was less lucky. In 1982, Jerzy Kosinski was the subject  of a devastating profile in the New York magazine, the Village Voice.  The article suggested that the terrible wartime experiences recounted in his  early work The Painted Bird were invented, that another successful book  Being There was based on a Polish novel written in 1932, and that subsequent novels had essentially been ghostwritten by others.

There was some truth in the claims, but nothing which should have truly threatened his reputation. If The Painted Bird was fiction, it was still extraordinary. Being There  was a novel incontrovertibly of its time. The style and imaginative power of his novels remained consistent throughout his life. The accusation of plagiarism, though, had  finished off his career long before he committed suicide in 1991.

Perhaps the accusation of plagiarism is so deadly because all authors are edgily aware of how much re-cycling is part of the writing process.  “Influence is bliss,” the American author Michael Chabon once said.  It is in the grey area between influence and something altogether more malign that  lawyers’ fortunes are made,  and authors’ hearts broken.

Other Endpaper columns about life as an author can be found in the Writer’s Shed.

Remembering my little arboreal adventure, I realised how important trees are to my daily life, past, present and future. Is this a sign of age?

Here, anyway is the article:

Ten years ago, we  planted a wood in the corner of a field in south Norfolk.

We were a relatively new couple, Angela and I, and we had been living in a caravan while, nearby,  a shed which had once been a hatchery for geese was converted into a house. The land around  seemed a little agricultural and sparse. It needed the life and variety that trees can bring.

Today the new house has grown up and, in the way of these things,  we take it for granted. The trees, on the other hand, have retained their capacity to surprise, excite and, just occasionally, disappoint.

Can there be anything more satisfying than planting a wood? The original impulse may have  a touch of vanity to it – you are about to make your own little mark on the landscape – but nature soon puts you in your place. If the species you choose are wrong for the area, they either quickly die  or, worse, look ridiculous. If you have chosen well, they are soon nothing to do you but belong to the landscape.

We planted trees which seem to like this part of East Anglia: alder, hornbeam, oak and hazel, a couple of walnuts. Buying stock was a special pleasure because our supplier, Eddie Krutysza of the nearby village of Metfield, brings such love and knowledge to his work, takes such care in selecting saplings from his field of growing trees that, even though money changes hands, the trees feel like a gift.

Then there were real presents.  Family and friends took to giving us trees. They turn out to be the perfect present – the gift, as the cliché goes, that keeps on giving. To the pleasure of watching each tree grow is added a daily reminder of the person who gave it to you.

In our little wood, there are some wild cherries given to us by my mother in what turned out to be the last year of her life. A wild pear was donated by my good friend and neighbour Roger Deakin who wrote so brilliantly about our relationship to trees in Wildwood. An 18 inch oak was rescued by another good friend  from her allotment in Hammersmith. In the manner of Londoners, it has quickly made itself at home and is dominating its surroundings.

Over the years, we have added to the wood. Elms, which grow defiantly in all the wrong places, are relocated and shoot skywards in a doomed, live-fast-die-young way. We have planted some holly, a particular favourite of hares and rabbits, to provide an under-storey when the wood grows up.

Saplings have become trees. The alders and some of the hornbeams are now over 30 foot high. We tour our little wood every day, taking pleasure in how the trees are growing and changing.

 In the dry early summer of this year, the first seedling from  the alders and my mother’s wild cherries have begun to appear. The next generation is on its way.

To join the Woodland Trust, here is the place.