Something quiet, inspiring and, most importantly, out of reach

The seed for a literary depiction could take root anywhere. On the proverbial bus, in the sterile setting of a supermarket isle or during that split second between throwing back the bed sheets in the morning and the subsequent realisation that you have just in fact thrown them back the wrong way, because your slippers are on the other side.

No doubt as a writer (aspiring or aspired, though hopefully not expired) you recognise very well just exactly where it is you get your blend of initial thoughts that might herald - one hopes -the start of a successful work. Maybe what does it for you is a walk, the proverbial one along the proverbial beach. But once you've got those initial ideas, and you've brought them through the first stages and some form of a plot begins to show, murder and horror! can you get any peace and quiet?

Without doubt, peace and quiet will be essential. None but the most impervious can command their concentration and patience to the extent of ignoring the world as it goes by - and none of us really would want to most of the time. But for that final act of "bringing it all home", of consolidating your text so that it reads like a richly convincing tail of real folk, an act that will make the difference between your proposal spending 30 seconds or 15 minutes in an editors hands, that act can't be done properly as the world goes by in its usually manner. Some sort of remove is needed, both temporal and spatial; a remove that can bring you face to face even just for a few moments with your own work, with defences down and bias filters up. I think it is then, and only then whence one can view one's work as if from stranger's eyes. All sense of self must be banished. That wicked self that continually asks if this would sell, if people could relate to it so as to find themselves somewhere among the motley crew of characters while reading it. And most importantly whether it will grip the attention of an editor within a micro-second or less, and cause her to fling down everything else and push off for an early lunch happy in the knowledge that she's found something worth publishing.

I dare say that sometimes it is possible to get to that almost trance-like state in which the self is lost and things as they really are, and not as we would like or imagine them to be, seep through to our consciousness. Who was it who said that happiness is being passionately lost in the present moment? Or was it passion is being happily lost in the present?* Which ever way round though, it doesn't matter. But it is my belief that it usually matters very much how one arrives at that state. Drug or alcohol fuelled writing may at times unlock a part of the mind that is otherwise unreachable, but such method of working is not sustainable for any length of time to call it a life of writing. But profound silence, immersed in beauty; or the total contrast of a strange culture feed rather than fuel the mind.

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* It is obvious to all of us that as soon as we become aware of something - for example, that we are having a good time, or that we are indeed happy - something of the lustre of that state is lost. If you are happy and you know it and you clap your hands about it, then it is arguable that you are less happy than you are a buffoon.