I’ve got a great idea for a novel. It’s about a group of friends in their early twenties, who were all at Oxford together and are now having to make their way in the confusing adult world of Work, Serious Relationships and the (post-7/7, natch) Metropolis. There’ll be tears! There’ll be laughter! There’ll be dialogue (lots of)! I was at Oxford myself, you see, so I know all about that sort of thing. D’you reckon I could find a publisher?

Well, OK, I confess: shortly after leaving Oxford, as a person in his early twenties, I started hacking away at something fairly novel-like myself. The protagonist, one “William Reynard”, sort of drifted around experiencing a variety of neuroses and epiphanies, feeling lost and dissociated and cultivating a sort of split identity as “The Double Agent”, an ambiguous instrument of anonymous powers. I think the major question in my mind, from one sentence to the next, was whether to go for Burroughsian or Kafkaesque. In any case, the result was an appalling solipsistic tarpit of anorectic angst; after a few chapters I slunk away from the thing, resolving never to go back until I actually had something to write about.

I don’t think I really understand how fiction works. There are all sorts of things at work in fiction that I feel I understand pretty well, but not fiction itself. It’s a bit like the almost-infinitely-improbable scenario in which all of the atoms in a vase spontaneously move three feet in the same direction at the same time: how does that kind of co-ordination happen?