I can’t imagine Maxwell saying that. Did he really say that?

Yes, he did. Someone edited a book of pieces from the New Yorker called The Fun of Getting it Right, and it was his coinage.

Do you avoid talking about your writing (before, during of after a work-in-progress) or do you find being interrogated (or interrogating yourself) useful?

You can lose a book if you talk it out too much. It’s fine to mention things and give indications, but not much more. It’s such a private job being a novelist that you can blow your energy very easily by treating it like gossip. Publicity and prizes and all that jazz are fun enough but they’re not your work: you have to go back into the room and know that what you’re doing has a preserved essence.

What do you mean by ‘preserved essence’?

I mean it has a secret about its nature, a secret that will drive you into creativity when you return to it again. I know novelists who have publicised their novels long before writing them, and so, when they got into the study, what they were writing was a kind of commentary on the book they’ve talked about. This is a disaster, exactly the sort of disaster that killed the talent of Truman Capote. I’m saying, therefore, that a good book’s essence must be a fulfilment of the author’s discretion.

Do bad reviews bother you?

I don’t read them. I’ve been in this business long enough to know that having a bunch of lovely reviews is nice but immaterial, and that having a bunch of duff reviews is not nice but immaterial. After a while, for good or for ill, people are reviewing your reputation as much as the book in front of them, and you just have to smile and get on with what you’re doing. I enjoy proper essays a great deal and will read them – even if it’s about me – knowing that at least the writer has gifts.

Have you ever been surprised by anything in a review?

Nope.

Are there things you haven’t yet done as a writer; things you’d still like to do?

Heaps of things. That’s why I keep working.

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