It starts like a whisper, an idea, something overheard, a faint sound, or like a need, a thing you’ve been meaning to do without first knowing it was there, and then it’s there. And you know that without it you won’t be able to go on. Not properly. You have to write it. The rest of the work depends on it. Oh, you try and skim past it, the way we ignore people who are central to our lives – a neighbour, an old friend, a family member – but we have to talk to them eventually, or forever be aware of their absence. That’s what it’s like with The Scene that Must Be Written.

There are other things you could do instead. You could wash the dishes, clean your desk, do something frivolous like check for responses to your new profile on match [dot] com, or maybe you should have set one up on Guardian Soulmates. Wouldn’t that be more your type, the intellectuals, the successful media people, that sort of thing.

But the scene will still be there tomorrow, so you might as well write it, might as well start, in fragments, in broad brushstrokes, in sketches with a tentative pencil. And there’s that moment before you start writing The Scene that Must Be Written, a scene in which you know more or less what will happen; you know who’s in it, where it takes place, and what the outcome will be. Everything is in your head and you just need to put it down on the page. That’s how it feels. Like standing at a door that is closed, your hand on the doorknob, taking a deep breath.

Often it’s a scene you weren’t planning on, a scene that has appeared because there is a gap in your novel. It’s a kind of bridge, an important moment, a thread. Sometimes it’s okay to jump for A to C, and it can be very satisfying for the audience, the reader, whomever, to imagine what that B is. But sometimes you have to write the B. In Kevin Powers’ beautiful book The Yellow Birds, he had to write the scene of what really happened to Murph, and you can see how the telling keeps getting postponed, avoided in the way painful retellings are, but then it gets told. It got written. Maybe the scene was the first thing to be written. Either way, it had to be written.

When you’re finally writing the scene the rest of the work disappears and all you want is The Scene. It builds up over time, every day. Maybe it takes a week to write, but from the moment you start writing it it begins to feel real, and suddenly you can see the bench they’re sitting on, and you know what the weather’s like, and how close they are and despite their gloves they’re holding hands because they need all the warmth they can get. It’s winter in Glasgow. On day two you can hear what they’re saying to each other. On day three you’re writing the confrontation with the drunken man, the confrontation you’ve been avoiding because you’re not sure you can do it right. Maybe you’ll get the speech wrong, maybe someone in Glasgow wouldn’t talk like that, maybe they wouldn’t respond to him like that.

There are a million ways to avoid a scene.

And only one way to make one: Write it. Risk making a fool of yourself. Write the first thing that comes to mind. Let you characters say whatever they want. It’s just a draft, it’s just you getting to know the scene. Writing a scene is improv on a stage with no audience. If there’s anything harder than improv in front of an audience, it’s improv in front of an empty theatre. That probably isn’t true, but it might be.

Write the scene and forget the rest of the work. Allow the scene to be the only thing that exists. All there is at this moment, for this hour, this week, however long it takes for The Scene that Must Be Written to be written.

Maybe what I mean is that every part of the story has to be written. Whether it stays in or not is up to us. It kind of links to Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory. Once it’s written, once you know what it is, it’ll be in the final story whether you put it in or not. Hemingway believed that sometimes “the omitted part would strengthen the story.” But you can only omit what you know. You can only omit a scene after the scene has been written. Once it’s been written, the knowledge is there in the story.

You’ve neglected your novel. For months you’ve been distracted, done other things, made excuses, promised to come back, until eventually you’re here again, at your desk. You’ve got time and no excuses. You worried that either of you may have lost interest, but neither of you have. Your novel wants to be written. You try to remember why you abandoned it in the first place. Things were going well when you started out, you’d accumulated experiences, anecdotes, scenes based mainly on things that had happened but with quite a bit of fictionalising. There was a light touch to it all, humour, and you liked that; you didn’t want heaviness, or the melancholy and death pervading the last few things you’d written, all that suicide and madness and the horrors of the First World War you’ve been writing about for the past seven years.

This was going to be a joyous novel, and you enjoyed writing it. You thought it would be like this until the end, that finally you’d write a book with a light touch to it, and humour, and something mildly interesting to say about the state of the world at this point in time. You hit 60,000 words, more than you’ve ever managed for one novel in such a short time. Then you abandoned the book.

Now, coming back to it, you see that it is very much an anecdotal book – “But I knew that already!” – and you notice that there’s something missing, that a strong thread is missing to hold it all together. A rope. The way things stand now, there’s nothing stronger to hold it together than the passing of time. Sometimes that is enough, but in the case of the novel it’s not.

You’re back in the novel. You’re turning up at your desk every morning, showing up, seeing that the book is far from finished, that it wants to go deeper, to say things you hadn’t planned on. Time and distance have given you perspective. Your novel is posing a challenge and you can choose to take it on or not. Are you prepared, willing, brave enough to follow it to the murky, complex unsettling places it wants to go to? What do you do with a novel that wants to take you somewhere, to show you something, to demonstrate that perhaps you can do something you’ve never done before.

You think of the word “lure” but that’s not the right word.

“No” is always an option. Force the novel to go somewhere else, impose an agenda, ignore what it’s saying. Walk away. It’s easy to walk away, but the more you become aware of what you’re doing, the more you see it’s a choice, it’s as simple as doing it or not doing it, as simple as turning up and sitting down. At some point you have to meet the novel head on.

You’re always abandoning things. You start something and then at some point you walk away. It’s how you operate. You have a stable of unfinished stories. Some of them want to be novels. Some of them want to go the whole way, but you’ve said stop. They call out to you: Write me. They say: We want to unravel, to unfold, we want to expose the full drama of our stories, and if you let us, you won’t have to keep carrying us around with you, we’ll stop nagging you and reminding you of all your Unfinished Business.

Maybe “neglect” is the wrong word. Maybe “abandon” is the wrong word, too. Maybe that’s how you work, and in the end you always come back. Maybe that’s a rationalisation, but at the moment you’re back and you’re writing and the novel feels good and scary and rich.

Writing is a zone. A physical zone. In the mind. When you sit down to write you enter a real space, a physical space that is invisible to anyone outside of you. What do we look like when we write? Why doesn’t someone make a movie of people writing, of what writers look like, to make a film of writers at work the way you see painters at work, or sculptors, or photographers. At the A Bigger Splash exhibition at Tate Modern, there’s a short film at the entrance of Jackson Pollock at work. There’s a long narrow painting by him that’s lying flat under glass, a bit like they displayed the scroll of Kerouac’s On the Road recently at the British Library, a bit like a dead body at the viewing. But the film. We’re talking about the film. The film of Pollock at work. When we write we enter a space that is entirely internal, the structure of our inner physicality is re-configured. That is, it is if we’re lucky, lucky to find a voice to write in, a tone, a point of view, a performance that is not the voice we use in our day-to-day, but something else, something more vital, perhaps, stranger, a voice we want to follow and see what it has to say.

For that to happen, we need the habit of writing. If we don’t access that voice every day, it gets harder to hear it. Miss a day, and it takes twice as long to really be in that voice. Miss a few days and it takes longer. No, that’s not entirely correct. It might not take longer to access the voice, but it becomes harder to stay with it, to keep it going, to allow it to be stronger than us, to carry us, to use us. We pray for a voice like that. We experiment with different points of view to tell a story until we find one that is intriguing enough, strange enough, magical enough to hold the story.

And then, once we’d found it, we must feed it. Turning up daily is how we feed it. We feed it by letting it speak through us, and in order for it to speak to us, we have to re-imagine our physicality, reshape ourselves in some way as to enable that voice to speak through us. We have to see ourselves differently to what we are in the world. Maybe that’s why writers retreat, so that we can be in that zone, uninterrupted.

Sometimes we have to get the words down before we find the voice, before we find the point of view to carry the story. Sometimes we need the entire story first. Other times it’s the voice that comes first. Like in the first line of Gogol’s short story “How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich.” The line is: “You should see Ivan Ivanovich’s marvellous short fur jacket!”

And that’s it. That’s the voice sorted. That might not be the first line Gogol wrote of the story, but once you hear that line, you know the voice is secure.

Subject matter is not the problem. Finding what to write about is not a problem. It’s not a problem if we honour the habit. The more we write, the more stories will present themselves to us, things we could write about, stories we could tell. The more we write, the more we are awake to what the world is offering us, and to the resources we carry inside us. Ah, yes, we could write an essay about this, a short story about that, maybe a novel based on x, a series of short stories set in y, a blog all about z.

“I’ve got an idea for a novel” becomes interesting and frightening and overwhelming when we start to write it. All we have to do is stick with it. It’s that simple, and that challenging. A writing habit is a form of faith, a way of saying this matters, this is significant, this is worth sticking with. A writing habit is a commitment. But that’s a contradiction. We think of habits as something hard to give up. Writing is easy to give up. Maybe what I’m talking about here is commitment, not habit. Is writing ever a habit? Writing is always a choice. Each day when I go to my desk I choose to go there. It’s easier not to go. It’s much easier to give up the writing habit than it is the habit of chocolate

They write so they won’t have to touch, their hands tethered to the page, hands that keep moving on the page, stuck to it. As long as their hands are moving, writing, jotting down, scribbling, they won’t be able to lift them off the page to touch you, to hold your hand. Their eyes, too, are glued to the page, stuck to it, fixed. They have averted their gaze from you; you cannot make eye contact while their gaze is on the page, following the movement of the pen across paper, the pen that keeps moving and carries the eye with it, carries their scrutiny away from the world.

Inwards? They say: Aren’t we taking the world with us, inwards?

But, more literally, it’s all happening on the surface. But, but, but (oh, listen to them!) the surface is just proof of depth, of something below it, each mark of the pen a slicing that longs to reach below the surface, to beneath the covering that is the page, the manhole in the pavement that wants to be lifted to reveal the ladder to the underworld.

The pen waddles across the surface. The pen tickles the top layer of skin, rushes over parchment. And they like to keep writing, to keep that pen moving, and even more than that, there’s the keyboard, a good excuse to have both hands occupied, both hands moving, both hands not available for touch, and that gaze, that crazed look in their eyes, the frown, the hunched-over posture to protect their heart, guarding it like a new-born thing. Don’t even try to approach them, don’t even think about getting nearer. They’re writing, moving beyond skin, beyond the flesh, typing and scribbling their way inwards, tapping and tapping and tapping as if each letter were the strike of a hammer, bashing away, reaching further inside, deeper, to somewhere more profound, more words, more of everything on the page, on paper, the screen, more of everything to protect them, so crazed that it’s hard to tell whether they’re building walls or breaking them down.

The pen moves forward. The tapping of keys like running on the spot. But, they say, at least I’m getting some exercise!

They wish for the wisdom of blind prophets, for a world where interiority is everything, where imagination is reality. They feed on the world, live like parasites, sucking the blood out of memory and everyday life. That’s the kind of people they are. And when they are done, leaving their trails – their entrails – on the page, they want you to look, for you to be there to shake their hands, to hold them, to clap. They want you to tell them about your day, take them to the theatre, to the South of France, anywhere, anything, just so they can have a reason, fodder, shiny things to scurry with back to the page, so that through their words, through the tapping of their fingertips on keyboards, they can touch you back, touch you in places where normal, surface touch cannot reach. It’s just the way they are.

For the first two thirds of my life I lived by the sea. I grew up with horizons, and now as I’m preparing for a new workshop and course I’m about to run over the next few months, it’s got me thinking about the impact of place on the imagination, my own, a character’s, and in general the place of place in fiction and non-fiction. I like an horizon, and for a large part of those years in which I lived by the sea, I could see the horizon from my window.

For the past seven years I have lived in a flat in London that looks out onto a sort of horizon. And by horizon I mean a lot of sky and the ability to see into the distance, to the point where it feels like the sky meets the earth. I remember a friend who was into astrology said something once about horizons and Sagittarians. I like being a Sagittarian. It sometimes feels like a stroke of luck, like being born with some talent! I like that Lucian Freud is a Sagittarian, and that the three painters I’ve been writing about (more or less since I moved into this flat with an horizon), are also Sagittarians. My friend said that we are people focused on horizons, that we reach for one, get it, and then look for the next one. Like we always need an horizon in sight, always need to strive, reach, or almost reach, because you can never really reach the horizon, and then we aim for the next one. Maybe that’s why I prefer to write short stories, or maybe not prefer, but do. Maybe that’s why I do write short stories, those creations of manageable horizons (or do I mean boundaries). My characters never want grand things. As Kurt Vonnegut says: every character has to want something, even if it’s just a glass of water. Although maybe my characters pursue love as if it was water. And they were in the desert.

I spent quite a bit of time in the desert in the 1980s. Not a huge amount of time; probably about six months, day after day of rust-red horizons, burning sand, an horizon that if you stood still long enough would blow towards you and bury you.

Thinking about place, I think about outdoor stories and indoor stories. A quick run through of some of my stories in my head and I realise that even when the stories don’t happen at home, they happen inside a room, a lover’s room, a café, a bar, a kitchen. Some happen in parks. A couple on the beach. And suddenly that bit of advice I once got from the poet Ann Stephenson about my work: too much sex, she said, and not enough geography. And sex is, on the whole, an indoor story. But I know that what she meant by “geography” was really a sense of place rather than the great outdoors. I have always loved writing description, but I think she shocked me into loving it even more.

The question is, how often do stories happen outside enclosed spaces. Outside the confines of a room, a car, a cabin on a cruise liner, a hut in the woods? Even of the story is outside, isn’t it more often than not happening between four walls? I’m excited about exploring this questions, looking for stories that are completely in the outdoors, in a forest, on a raft, in places where there is nowhere to retreat to, at least not for the duration of the telling.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Tim Winton’s brilliant novel Breath and I was thinking how this scene is so much about writing, about taking on the big scary story, about writing alone in your room and loving it because you have gone somewhere you never thought you could or would, discovered things about yourself or your characters. Pikelet and Loonie and Sando have just been surfing the big waves at Barney’s.

from Tim Winton’s Breath

Heading home from the first day at Barney’s, bone-sore and lit up, we relived the morning wave by wave, shoring it up against our own disbelief. By common assent, Loonie had caught the wave of the day. It was a smoker. I was paddling back out through the channel when he got to his feet. The wave reared up, pitched itself forward and simply swallowed him. I heard him scream for joy or terror and could only see him intermittently as he navigated a path beneath the warping fold of water. He was a blur in there, ghostly. When finally he shot out and passed me, he looked back at the weird, dilating eye of the wave and gave it the finger.

Geez, I wish we had a camera, he said afterwards, as we chugged back through the forest. It was too good. Shoulda got a photo.

Nah, said Sando. You don’t need any photo.

But just to show, to prove it, sorta thing.

You don’t have to prove it, said Sando. You were there.

Well, least you blokes saw it.

My oath, I said.

But it’s not even about us, said Sando. It’s about you. You and the sea, you and the planet.

Loonie groaned. Hippy-shit, mate.

Is that right? said Sando indulgently.

Orright for you. You got plenty of shots to prove what you done. Honolulu Bay, man. Fuckin A.

All that’s just horseshit, said Sando. It’s wallpaper.

Easy for you to say.

Sando was quiet for moment. You’ll learn, he said in the end.

Loonie beat his chest there in the confines of the Kombi cab.

Learn? Mate, I bloody know!

I laughed but Sando was unmoved.

Son, he said. Eventually there’s just you and it. You’re too busy stayin alive to give a damn about who’s watchin.

Mate, said Loonie, straining to maintain his bravado. I don’t know what language you’re talkin.

You’ll be out there, thinking: am I gunna die? Am I fit enough for this? Do I know what I’m doin? Am I solid? Or am I just… ordinary?

I stared, breathless, through the broken light of trees.

That’s what you deal with in the end, said Sando. When it’s gnarly.

How does it feel? I murmured.

How does what feel?

When it’s that serious.

You’ll find out.

Like, I mean, twenty feet, said Loonie subdued now.

Well, you’re glad there’s no stupid photo. When you make it, when you’re still alive and standin at the end, you get this tingly-electric rush. You feel alive, completely awake and in your body. Man, it’s like you’ve felt the hand of God. The rest of it’s just sport’n recreation, mate. Give me the hand of God any day.

Shoulder to shoulder in the cab, Loonie and I exchanged furtive looks. There was something of the classroom about Sando, the stink of chalk on him when he got going, but my mind was racing. I’d already begun to pose those questions to myself and feel the undertow of their logic. Was I serious? Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? I’ll bet my life that despite his scorn Loonie was doing likewise. We didn’t know it yet, but we’d already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. Our minds had already gone out to meet it and we’d left the ordinary in our wake.

The old voice that keeps barking on in your head: THE NOVEL! THE NOVEL! so persistent and doglike that you have to shut your mind to it, close the door and walk away. That’s what it’s like sometimes. Another voice will tell you to ignore the barking and keep writing; all that matters is the novel, the novel. Like three notes on the piano, thumb, index finger, middle finger, like the beginning of what in our house was called “Chopsticks” but isn’t, a tune that went: THE NO-VEL, tum tum, THE NO-VEL, tum tum. And on it goes, that easy tune. If only the novel worked like that.

And then, if you manage to walk away from the barking, something else might appear, maybe a story or a short essay, or just another idea to explore and like a dog you want to follow that scent, to scratch for the bone, to keep digging and digging until you have found it. Ugh, I can feel I’m going to be mixing my metaphors all over the place in this one. But yesterday it happened to me, the scent of something different, unrelated to the novel, tum tum, and I spent a good chunk of the day writing about it, exploring it. I even did a little plan and followed it. It was just a short essay about my year of poetry, when in 2007 I decided to explore what writing poems was all about and I went to classes and wrote poems and hung out with more poets. I wrote about that and it was delicious.

It was a bit like coming out of hibernation and being hungry for something and everything I came across was yum. Wild berries, baby seals, you name it. Everything fell into place, like the piece, the essay, the story was just waiting to be written. It didn’t come totally unbidden, out of nowhere. I’d come across a short piece in Evening Will Come, an online journal of poetics, and so I read a few more of the short essays and loved what I read and wanted to write something, too. I wanted to write for them even if they didn’t know I was doing that, even if they didn’t want what I wrote. This is what I’ve been thinking about, this writing for someone else, only it feels much less stressful when the other “person” doesn’t know that you’re doing it for them. Isn’t that what all love letters are about?! And even if they don’t want it – because, really, at the end of the day, they don’t matter – there will be a piece completed and you will have written something, whole.

You have created a gift, and in creating that gift you have created a gift for yourself, the process of creating the gift is a gift in itself, the time you give to yourself, the moments of stillness and complete absorption in your own pleasure of remembering and inventing. You forget everything, forgive everything. You forget who it’s for because it isn’t really for anyone except yourself, for your own delight. You stop being self-conscious. You stop analysing and criticising and doubting. As Lewis Hyde says in The Gift:

To count, mea­sure, reckon value, or seek the cause of a thing, is to step out­side the cir­cle, to cease being ‘all of a piece’ with the flow of gifts and become, instead, one part of the whole reflect­ing on another part.

And when you are done, the gift is sweet. It is something made in innocence and honesty and vulnerability. You have been open to the story, the essay, the poem. And you are ready to pass it on.

I’ve probably been thinking about barking because I received a birthday package from my brother in the mail with some Peppermint Bark (a first, for me) in it. It definitely quietens THE NOVEL, THE NOVEL noises!