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Matthew wrote: >Beckett was not in thrall to a stifling realism, but surely to *something* >stifling. There are moments in Beckett I find moving, but on the whole he >isn't for me. Sometimes I think reading Beckett might be exactly like going mad. But you can imagine his prose as a complete obsessive kind of realism, perhaps. >The trouble I have when writing novels is not so much plot but character. I >find myself wondering what I really know about other people and whether I >dare to invent them. Character and plot are things which seem to take care of themselves, or maybe are better abandoned: surely they're 19thC inventions? I wrote a narrative-driven novel last year, and just sketched out a plan and then as it were followed my pen. The other novel, which seems to want to encompass everything (perhaps the difference between poetry and prose is simply one of amplitude) is a different kettle entirely; I really am not interested in plot, although I'm intrigued to see what happens next: my narrator is amorphous, but at the same time when I write him (her?) I feel enormous sympathy for him, compounded by a kind of sadism: he/she seems quite real to me. It seems like a mysterious business to me, this thing of looking at blankness and making something. I've always written secondly for a few friends, and firstly out of some desire to articulate something for myself. Yes, it is surprising if anyone else is interested. Best Alison