It’s full of paragraphs from novels I will never complete, or hardly start. Those kind of dabblings I always set down in a green, ring-bound A4 notebook. Sometimes I experimentally write out a first paragraph – or middle paragraph, even – of a novel which I feel no obligation to write. And in that rather dreamy, floating kind of mental state (one which I long for once I’ve started a book and can no longer have it) I go where my reading and thoughts and travels take me. I think there’s nothing wrong with pausing when you’re not sure how to proceed. I don’t have anxieties about writer’s block either – I don’t even believe in the concept – but I’m a great believer in hesitation. I tend to leave long gaps between novels I’m quite happy not to write for months on end. How does the germ of an idea evolve into a novel for you? They’ve just helped shape my thoughts on certain matters, and those matters have emerged one way or another, sometimes in a very submerged or indistinct form, in the fiction I’ve been writing.

These books weren’t read for research or for any specific purpose. I think of my writing, reading and thinking as all part of one continuous activity. What impact do the books you read have on your own writing?

Foreign Policy & International Relationsīefore we discuss the books that have influenced your work, I want to ask about your creative process.

Ian mcewan machines like me summary