What rules or principles would you add to, or subtract from, Vonnegut’s list?

He was very funny, Vonnegut, and part of his funniness was to do with the laughter of recognition. His rules for good writing are entirely bogus – he knew it, too – but they are not un-useful. Rules are just a bunch of things someone adorned into precepts while they were on the way to getting it wrong, but Vonnegut got it right now and then so we’d do well to listen. His points are quite sensible, especially about sentences moving character and action, but I’d take out the one about starting as close to the end as possible. That’s a bit un-Freudian for me, and it wouldn’t do for Proust: action can become dictatorial to a novelist, and I’m just as interested in inaction. I’m also interested in absence – from life, from the page – and I’d counsel against the tyranny of manifestation that can turn every paragraph some novelists write into a piece of colour for the New Yorker. The past is a force for some characters and is not just preamble: whole lives can be shaped by it, whole nations, by the unknown qualities the past brings to bear on a person’s story. I agree with Vonnegut that every character should want something, though – even if what they really want is to really have something to want, which is an Evelyn Waugh kind of problem.

Has anybody ever given you a particularly useful trick or constructive piece of advice about writing?

Yes, Norman Mailer once told me that being a novelist is like being an actor, drawing on similar intellectual energies. He said he thought he was a bit like Warren Beatty, which I thought a compliment to Warren Beatty. (Norman thought it was a compliment to himself, but I don’t think he was thinking about art.) At its most basic, fiction-writing is like acting in the following way: if one is required to write from the point of view of a 10-year-old boy, one has to learn to think like the boy, experience the world like him, sound like him, feel like him. When writers achieve this it’s everything. Even with the most minor characters, a maid delivering a cup of tea, you have to know how to feel the saucer in her fingers, or you’re no good.

When did you start writing?

My brothers were incredibly boyish and they liked football. I liked post office sets for Christmas and the first writing I did was to send very socially elaborate letters to my grandmothers and aunts. They were filled with the kind of stuff that would give my mother the horrors, which is perfect training for a novelist. They also had this thing in school called the ‘News Book’ – we wrote it every day, and mine was like a diary by Thomas Mann. I don’t mean the quality, naturally, I mean the horror. But if you mean professionally, I started to write when I was a student and realised I was more serious about it than anybody I’d ever met.

What caused you to realise you had talent?

The feeling it gave me. I could see that other student writers weren’t getting that – they didn’t in any sense seem inhabited by what they were writing. But I was engulfed by it and the rhythm of the stuff was different. I could also see that much of what I wrote wasn’t by anybody else: it had its own voice, as they say, and that was the case from quite early on. Talent is such a strange thing – it is not democratic, but you begin to know it when it’s there and others begin to tell you.

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