What happened to Saturday? It evaporated, and happened sublimely upwards before we tethered it with conscious endeavour. I have been writing in this way, by which I also mean sitting in an armchair at a short distance back from my desk, for over a year. Isn’t it time to let the characters who are not Leigh and my dad and Walter and Mouse back in? Haven’t I said what’s sayable in this directly indirect way, which might be becoming a manner? (That last sentence proves it.) If I return to novel Q, a novel that became another novel, then a play, then again became itself – is it finishable? Or hasn’t it accepted it is just R? These are private matters, but I have been thinking of the photograph Julia Bell posted across her social media: a pile of books by Birkbeck Creative Writing graduates. Since seeing it, and feeling especial pride over Vanessa Onweuemezi – though she wasn’t in one of my workshops – I thought of the previous generations: McEwan, Amis, Barnes, Rushdie. How ungenerous they have been. How little they passed on that they’d gathered in. Maybe they each felt there wasn’t enough of them to do anything but that day’s not-yet-specific-sentences. They blurbed books by younger writers, rarely. There were friendships. But they might as well have been in a nuclear bunker. The ability to earn a living just from advances separated them from the curious, the aspirant, the heir and the outdoer. And I moved towards teaching before I had to, out of vocation, but I have kept at it because of lack of choice With half a million pounds, I would want more writing time, less for marking, second marking, providing references, completing the feedback loop.
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