I had a year's sabbatical in which to write. Almost six months went by. I edited a couple of issues of my magazine, Areté. I pursued my academic research. I wrote a talk for a Stephen Spender conference. I spent a lot of my time in the cinema during daylight hours. I had no idea how to deal with the disparate materials I had accumulated. I was demoralised. I went skiing on my own in Canezei. The hotel I stayed in was so spartan that the tiny tablet of soap provided disappeared in a couple of days — and a replacement was refused by the management. Four days into the holiday, I experienced an epiphany. I thought of a title that would magnetise the heterogeneous raw materials I had haphazardly gathered. I had been foraging for firewood for over ten years. Now I had a match — a single match, but it was enough to start a blaze. And I didn't even need to strike it. It was more like spontaneous combustion.

I began to write as soon as I returned from Italy — March until mid-June. The pleasures of prose. When you have an idea for a poem, the time between conception and creation can be a couple of hours. Sometimes less. A long poem might take a week. The poet is like an actor performing a play that folds after the first performance. You spend a lot of time "resting". Writing a novel is like being an actor in a long run. It's a proper job. You go to the desk every day. You quickly decide on a quota that is natural to you — in my case, about 500 or 600 words a day. Fewer than 100 words an hour. They quickly pile up.

There were other rules, too. I didn't want to write a typical poet's novel — short on sex and long on description. I wanted plot and I wanted narrative speed. I didn't want fine writing for its own sake. My anti-model was the great Nabokov at his median. In a novel like The Gift, all the satisfaction is in the sumptuous sentences, the clever conceits, while the narrative sulks, becalmed somewhere in the margins. You couldn't care less what happens next, because nothing happens next. Except maybe next month. I thought I could learn from the thriller — without actually reading one, of course. 

So, I wrote slowly and got through a mass of material. Occasionally, I thought of Virginia Woolf on Dickens: "Dickens made his books blaze by throwing another handful of people upon the fire."

Then I had to edit another issue of Areté. Then term and teaching started again. And the novel became a postponed project for my retirement. I envisioned something the size of Ulysses that would keep me out of mischief and see me into the grave. I did nothing to the novel for seven or eight years. Now and again, I would call up the text on my laptop and read a few pages — easily impressed and quietly confident, even complacent, like a man with a pension, until one day, after a longish interlude, I couldn't remember the end of one of my two major plot lines. I felt like a man who has hidden his insurance policy from himself. Then the novel definitely became a retirement project.  (It's curious how important it is to many novelists to know how their books will end. William Boyd plans his novels — all of them brilliantly plotted — for two years before the actual writing. He says he changes very little. My novel, as it happened, went on after its intended conclusion, like a multiple orgasm, partly because I couldn't resist the pleasures of plot.)