As I have spent the whole year reading, a lot of people have said, "I suppose you haven't had time for your own writing at all." In actual fact, even during the really heavy period of
judging the Man Booker Prize, I set aside one day a week to work on my own novel. I knew that if I didn't, I would go stark raving mad. A lot of my fellow novelists say they don't like reading other people's novels when they are working on their own, but that's always struck me as a rather odd attitude. It's a bit like someone who is learning French avoiding speaking the language, or a surgeon not keeping up on new medical developments. I would urge any new writer to read as many new novels as he or she can get hold of — steep yourself in the language of fiction. Lots of people worry that their own writing will become derivative as a result, but it won't if you read widely enough. All good writers are good readers. Quite often, if I have had a period of blockage over a novel, what lifts me out of it is going away and reading other people's. If it's a good novel, it inspires me; if it's a bad one I think,
Hell, I can do better than that...