ABSTRACT
Perhaps I’m making a couple of over-optimistic assumptions here. The rst is that everyone who is interested enough to have got this far reads other books: novels, poetry, drama, history, biography. The second assumption is that many of my readers have written themselves. I certainly have evidence that many adults do write, though not nearly so much that they read: ‘How do you get your stories / poems published?’ people often ask me after lectures. ‘I have written some, and I think they are quite good . . .’ Or, by email, ‘Please will you tell me how to get these published?’ I often ask, ‘Which poets / novelists do you read?’ and, especially in the case of poets, the answer is often ‘I don’t read poetry, I write it’ or some variant of that. But aching to be published is a di erent thing from writing. It is a form of vanity.
