For a long time I did what Natalie Goldebrg told me to do. Cheap notebooks were the best, she said, not the fancy ones that make you feel precious about your writing. Keep it simple. So for many years I wrote in spiral-bound A5 notebooks. I wrote with a blue biro, and only blue would do. I met people who wrote in other colours: black, green, someone’s husband used a brown pen, and there were those who’d write with whatever was at hand. Some people weren’t picky. I was picky, and pickiness is a form of superstition, a way to ward off dread. For years I wrote like this in notebooks with 80 sheets, ruled lines, some were perforated, but it was bad luck to tear pages out of a notebook. I’m not sure where I got that superstition from. Many of my superstition are of my own making.

I wrote a lot in those years, almost every day, starting from around 2006 when I first came to London. Natalie Goldberg said to finish a notebook a month, so I did. Some months I was close to the end of the month and still had blank pages untouched, so I wrote to fill the pages, because that’s what I’d committed to doing, what I thought one did to hone the craft. When that happened, I allowed my words to get bigger, letters took up two lines, doubled in size, ten words per page. Anything to finish the notebook, to move onto the next one on the first of the month. I liked the freedom of the bold handwriting, something I didn’t give myself much license to do. I stuck to the lines and stuck to my monthly quota. One notebook per 28, 29, 30 or 31 days.

Ryman’s used to make a recycled spiral-bound notebook. It was the perfect notebook, and when they stopped making it, I called up head office to ask if they had any left; I was willing to buy whatever stock remained. It was like my rabbit’s foot, my shark’s tooth, my rusty horseshoe had been stolen. But they had none and I moved on, found something similar and forgot about the Ryman’s 100% Recyled 8″ x 5″ spiral-bound notebook until I sat down to write this.

Time passed and things changed; I got busier, needed more than a month to finish a notebook. But I was loyal to the notebooks with the light green covers, the thin paper, the ruled lines. I bought them in bulk from Viking, the office stationery company. When I look back now it seems strange to me that I wrote on lined paper. Recently, someone commented on how straight my lines were – “typical writer,” she said, though I don’t think she knows any – and perhaps those ten years of writing on straight lines have been absorbed into my system, so that when I shifted to the thin plain pages of the Moleskine, my lines were already ingrained, part of the way I saw the page, like those lined pieces of card we’d put under blue onionskin airmail paper when we’d write to people abroad.

About five years ago, a lover came to stay for a while. He was visiting this island from the island he is from. He brought me Mitsubishi Uni-ball Signo DX UM-151 0.5 gel pens in various colours: pink, green, dark yellow, purple, orange. I’m not sure how it happened or why – maybe I was ready for change, ready to try something new, or I wanted to show him I was using his gift, the way you use a gift to mask your ambivalence in the presence of the giver. This was the type of pen he wrote with in a language that calls for fine-nibbed pens; that, or soft calligraphic brushes. By then I was writing in Moleskine notebooks, though I don’t remember the moment my notebooks changed, when I went from the soft covers of the A5 spiral-bound notebook to hard-backed pocket-sized notebooks with double the amount of pages.

For about 6 years, maybe more, I’ve been writing in black Moleskine notebooks. When a friend gave me a green hard-backed Moleskine notebook last week, I faltered. I couldn’t imagine writing in a notebook other than the exact notebook I’ve been writing in for years. The repetition, using the same notebook over and over, creates a sense that multiple notebooks are one Notebook; after a while, you stop noticing the colour, shape, cover of the notebooks you’re using. Repetition allows you to forget. You don’t have to remember whether it’s the blue one you took to Paris, the yellow one you wrote in while on retreat in Scotland, or the beige one you record your dreams in. On the day he gave me the green notebook, I didn’t have my notebook with me, so I accepted it, cautiously, my superstition unseated.

I’m not always sure exactly when things changed, when I went from spiral-bound to Moleskine, the way I know the precise moment when I moved from blue biro to multi-coloured pens. So now I mark this date, Saturday the 21st of June, the day I ventured into multi-coloured notebooks. I recently started using a black pen, albeit from the same make as the coloured pens. I’ve been experimenting with drawing and black feels like the right colour to do this in. So that’s where things stand at this point in time.

It’s a difficult scene. For a while now, you could tell that it was coming, and then it’s here. Three days you’ve been circling it, jotting down notes, working on what comes afterwards. But you’ve resisted going into the cold hard fire of it – the heart of it. That’s a quote from somewhere, or part of a quote, but you can’t remember who said it. It’s not Kafka’s “cold abyss” of the self, but maybe it is that, too. It’s a violent scene. People get hurt. Do horrible things to the characters who are your friends, characters who are close to the character who is closest to you.

You open a book of Nabokov’s short stories, the one you keep in your desk drawer, the one you use to kickstart a paragraph every now and then, something that’ll take you in an unexpected direction, wake you up. The line is “He had spent all his life in Berlin and its suburbs; had never travelled farther than Peacock Island on a neighbouring lake.” And you get your narrator to say: “I have spent all my life afraid of violence…” And for a while that keeps you going; it’s fuel enough for 5 or 6 lines. The energy of Nabokov’s writing never fails to power your own. But then you run out of steam, or you chicken out.

You wonder if your resistance is perhaps a sign that this scene doesn’t need to be written, that it’s not the right scene for the book and maybe you’re just adding high drama because someone said – whose rule was it? – that you should make something bad happen to your character just to see how they’ll deal with it. How they’ll deal with it?! How am I supposed to deal with this level of brutality?

It’s not the first time you’ve questioned where the drama should be in your novel.

Is it really necessary to the story? And if you have this unexpected scene in the book, this scene that has suddenly appeared in your third draft, like bad news, like a skiing accident, then what’s going to happen to the rest of the novel, those 30,000 words that come after the scene?

What you really wrote was: I’ve spent all my life fearing random violence and its consequences.” The consequences of a new and unexpected scene in a novel. The unexpected is not something I cherish. I mean relish. So what exactly are you scared of?

• unnecessary drama
• violence
• the impact on the rest of the book
• that it’ll sound fake
• that I’m being dishonest
• that a violent scene messes with my plan to make this an upbeat book

“So I sighed a little, and decided to go.” Another Nabokov line. A just do it line. And another: “He slept badly the night before the departure.” It’s true. I’ve been blaming it on the full moon. Yesterday I was so jetlagged with exhaustion that I couldn’t bring myself to write, not until almost midnight, but today I am back and sighing a little, dipping in and out of the scene, writing bits of it. threads, patches, things that will – have faith! – eventually get woven and sewn together and whatever the consequences turn out to be, you’ll just have to deal with them. Now, go! Write!

And what’s the worst that can happen? You’ll write it and it’ll be wrong and you’ll start all over again. But at least once you’ve written it, it will have been written.

Unread books wait on our shelves, full of potential, their knowledge imminently ours. Unread books are stories we avoid, gifts we were given, memories sculpted in time. Unread books are objects, the picture on the cover, the words on the spines, the place of purchase. Was it the Bodhi Tree on Melrose, or Housing Works near Broadway, or Skoob Books before Skoob Books moved to the Brunswick Centre, or that place on Ben Yehuda Street, or the bookshop in Sydney when we lived near Nowra and ran out of books to read and they’d mail the books to the post office in town and we’d drive for miles to pick them up? Unread books are in our living rooms and bedrooms, some in the loft or the kitchen. Unread books are a secret; they are who we are. Unread books are partially read. Some are almost-reads. An unread book signed by its author is hard to give away, especially if our name appears in the inscription. For Shaun. With best wishes. Unread books reassure us. Unread books are wishes. They wait. We like to be waited for. Unread books tell us that we have things to do, that we can’t go now, not now and not for a while yet. Unread books ward off death. Unread books are a title and its promise. Unread books are written by friends we wish were better writers than they are. Guilt and duty keep us from discarding those unread books, or taking them to the charity shop where proceeds go to a cat shelter. We’d like to like some unread books more than we do. We would read them if we had more of an open-ended sense of time, an occasional glimpse into infinity. Unread books are who we are in our best moments, mirrors and reflections and badges of erudition and originality. Unread books are by authors who wrote a book that we loved and expected to love this unread book as much as the other. We thought we’d love it when we bought it in another city, but when we got home we found that we no longer loved the book, now we hope that one day we’ll recapture that love and the person we were when we bought the book that is still unread. Unread books hold the past. They are books we want to love. Unread books impress, make us look good, they are the books we want to be thought to have read. Unread books are similar to the books we’re writing, similar in style or subject matter, and so we believe they’ll inspire us, help us broaden the scope of our work, but that’s not what happened. After the first few pages, we balked. Unread books are books we keep regardless. Unread book have something important to tell us, something significant to contribute to our work and our life. Unread books will expand our world, give us insight and greater confidence. An unread book is someone we want to meet, a place we want to go to, a life we want to lead. Unread books are books no one else has, rare books, first editions, books we’ll never get to. An unread books is a guide to something we wanted to learn, but time has passed and that desire has passed, too, and to get rid of the book is to admit that the skill or the knowledge will never be ours. Unread books are evidence of a disappointment. Unread books are big books given to us on special occasions, books we’ve had for years, carried from house to house. Unread books have been places. Unread books are a promise of languid days, written in genres we steer clear of, from points of view that seemed intriguing – a chimpanzee’s perspective, the voice of a dog, or someone who has died. We’d planned to imitate the unread books, study them, devour them, but they proved too challenging or not challenging enough, nor inspiring, yet we didn’t blame them entirely, but ourselves, too, for we are impatient and judgemental. Unread books are gifts from people we dislike, people who angered or hurt us. Whatever they gave us is contaminated with those feelings. They thought we’d like the book and, because they knew us well, they were right. In time, we will extricate the book from their clutches, overcome the memory and enjoy the book just as they knew we would. Unread books are about us and about our people, our race, our profession, our sexuality, our ethnic affiliations, our gods. Unread books are some part of us we’re not ready to see closely. Unread books are too big for bed, too bulky for a bag, too heavy for the sofa. Unread books look good on a shelf. Unread books have interesting titles, like Decent Passions, or The Poetics of Space, or Voices of Time, or The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing. An unread book is sometimes an unfinished book, one we started and abandoned but kept because there have been other books we’ve started and not finished and then revisited and relished. Unread books become read books. Unread books are biographies, letters, diaries. Unread books will validate our choices and misfortunes. Unread books are millions of new sentences and new ways of configuring the order of words. Unread books defy our rules of book-culling. Some have not been read in the past two years nor will they be read in the next two, yet still they remain. Unread books cling. Unread books are not people. Unread books will rock our world. An unread book is the wise person we meet on a journey. Unread books are more than their words. Unread books are the author’s picture and the paper and the font and the dust jacket, and the sticker on the back if we bought it in a second hand bookshop, the markings inside, the highlighted words, the notes in the margins, ours or someone else’s. Unread books were bought with a project in mind, or a friend, or something or other that never materialised. Unread books answer unasked questions, shed light on our stories. Unread books are tarot cards. Unread books are for when the momentous thing happens, the thing that will need the solace that a book can give. Unread books rely on the reading of another book or the seeing of a film or a trip to a certain place. Unread books require another act. Unread books are books we want to have read. Unread books make us look tolerant, erudite, humane, intriguing, original. Unread books are books we will read, or should read, or would read if only we had the time and the urgency. Unread books will make us better people, especially books with titles like Men’s Friendships and Full Catastrophe Living. An unread book would help us if we’d let it. Unread books are a test, proof of an intention. Unread books are thwarted journeys. Unread books are a barricade. Unread books are company. Unread books are individuals and a tribe. Unread books are who we are when we are at our most vast, deep, complex, rich and resilient. Unread books are an echo of the world’s libraries. Unread books are a mating-call. Unread books are life.

Twenty minutes is about all L can manage. And that’s on a good day. Sometimes twenty seconds is a triumph. When he’s having a boxing lesson at the gym, 20 seconds is a lot. He worries about what people around him are saying. He worries that he’s not very good and that he looks ridiculous and what made him think he’d ever be able to box. He used to fantasise about being able to dance, learning ballet, and when he looks at the boxers training – sparring, not fighting – they look like ballet dancers. The grace, the speed, the control that seems effortless. That’s how L wants to move, and with the added perk of being able to protect himself. Every fighting art seems to have that grace, capoera, tai chi, karate, all seem linked to ballet, or all on the same continuum. Is that what dancing is, a way of protecting yourself? Are those the roots of dance, of speaking to the higher powers, the gods? As if to say: If I can protect myself then god will protect me. Or something like that. Is that the logic of it all?

So C is teaching L how to punch. The jab, the hook, the upper cut, and because they’re doing kick boxing, it’s the knees, too. Very rarely does it feel easy. L’s body feels awkward, rigid, and then when C demonstrates, L is in awe. He thinks: What will it take to be like that? Of course, there is also the distraction of C’s good looks. And people are watching. And the music is loud and L’s coordination is all wrong. How does one step and punch at the same time, or step, then punch. Focus, C says. Just focus.

C tells him that sometimes when he’s in a fight he’s so focused he can’t even hear the crowds, and when he watches a video of the match afterwards, he’s surprised at the level of noise in the place.

But every now and then L gets into a groove and everything disappears except the writing (weren’t we talking about boxing?). Nothing else matters. One moment you’re at point a, then you’re at point b and it feels like a miracle; you can’t remember how you got there! The strange thing about focus is that we do it to let go, to disappear. What C means when he says focus is to let go of everything else around you, to just be in the moment. Food doesn’t matter, nor fame, not even the bank balance, or love. Focus away from distractions, away from other people. He makes focus sounds like a precious thing, a transcendent state. Maybe that’s why L has never been a religious person. Faith is a type of focus.

Focus is a movement outwards into something bigger, stronger, a place where secret knowledge is kept, and it’s a feeling of moving out of your body, of dissolving into something, becoming diffuse. There is no whining in focus, no need and please. Focus is clear of whining. Focus is being in the place you’re meant to be in, not wanting to be somewhere else, not wanting more than there is at this moment in time. Focus is now. Focus is when the thing just keeps going and you don’t know where it’s going to take you and you don’t worry where it’s going to take you because you’ve let go and wherever you land is good. Your hands move and your feet move and there is grace and wonder and elation and smoothness and dancing and you’re floating and flying and diving deep and breathing without thinking about, like that moment at the end of The Big Blue when he finally goes into the water and swims deeper into the sea until there is just a spec of him in the distance.

Focus is letting the cake burn. Focus is not hearing the doorbell ring. Focus is not hearing when your name is called, when you head is buried in a book or in a story or in a game, buried so that you can’t hear the shouting or the laughing and maybe there isn’t any because everyone is so focused on doing what they’re doing, in the moment, in the running and jumping and boxing and lifting and writing and singing and dancing and shooting and grabbing and flying and floating until the very last second.