I live in London, which means that I have limited space, which means that I work at fairly small desk. Perhaps it would be better characterised as a bureau. It is, I guess, eighty centimetres wide, but I can pull out the table surface, which makes it quite deep, perhaps also eighty centimetres. This means I can rest my arms very comfortable on the table as I type or write in my notebook, which is useful.

Sadly, I have had an ongoing notebook crisis: ever since Leuchtturm decided to no longer produce the best notebook in the world, their A4 Jottbook, I have been trying to replace what’s been lost, but with little success. Moleskin has a range of large format softcover notebooks, their Cahier Journals, but they are not A4, or if they are, as their online shop claims (they call this size XXL, as if it wasn’t the only sensible size for a notebook), then Leuchtturm’s Jottbooks were bigger. I need space to think when I write, and it cannot be done in an A5 or A6 format; most thoughts are too big for it. When I lived in Manchester, I used to buy grey exercise books of the type you’d use in school at Blackwell’s on Oxford Road, but the quality of the paper wasn’t quite what I hoped it would be.

I am happy to report that the crisis has been resolved as of this summer, when I travelled to Avignon. I didn’t go to Avignon to resolve my notebook crisis; I went for the Festival d’Avignon, which was spectacular. Including on and off plays, there were 1,000 shows on every day, and I saw only six of them, but all six of them were a delight. My favourite was Frank Hoffmann’s La Peste at the Théâtre du Balcon, closely followed by Ben Duke’s The Last Hamlet, and the most fun was certainly Late Bloomers’ The Bakers, and the coolest was Laura Vazquez‘s performance of her poetry in French, of which I understood maybe fifty percent, or perhaps thirty, but I understood how the language flowed, and that’s very similar to my current experience of reading À la recherche du temps perdu (I’m on book two, and it’s the richest novel I have ever read: like a gift of nectar of the gods.)

As I was strolling through the streets of Avignon, I went into a bookshop, and then a clothes shop, and then a stationary shop, and guess what I discovered in this stationary shop? The perfect notebook! It’s the Conquérant Classique Large Exercise Book, which is bigger than A4 – at least as big as Leuchtturm’s Jottbook – and has a transparent cover, which means that it is white, which means that there is no distraction from what’s inside, and I can even slip things between the sturdy plastic cover and the paper and keep them safe, such as, most recently, a love letter, my Woolwich Works loyalty coffee card, and a receipt that I need to remember to file away for my taxes. They cost 2.60 EUR per notebook, which is beautiful, and I hope they never change. The shopkeepers, who seemed to me to be a mother and daughter duo, although I have nothing to base this on, told me that these are the standard exercise books for French schoolchildren, which is why they are likely to be around for a long time to come, and that they are larger than A4 so that pupils can store exercise sheets in them. France: a civilised country.

Ever since returning to London, I have realised that this means that whenever I run out of notebooks, I will have to go France to buy some new ones. A fatal error, or an ingenious way of making myself go on trips to France? I like to think it’s the latter, and that life can be very good to us sometimes.

I wrote this essay on the occasion of my permanent appointment as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Hamburg on 1 October 2025.

Like many novelists, I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a writer. When I was five, I still thought that I might be a seamstress like my grandmother, but at around the age of eleven I became aware that there were no longer many seamstresses in the Ruhr valley, and that there would be even fewer by the time that I would be a grown-up.

I do not know when precisely I changed my mind, or why. There weren’t many novelists in the Ruhr valley, and certainly none that I knew. When I decided that I wanted to be a writer, it seemed about as plausible as becoming chancellor or prime minister, or ascending a royal throne of some kind. I knew no novelists, journalists, opera singers, actors, poets, university lecturers, publishers, or editors. My grandfather had been a miner. His grandfather had been a miner before him. His wife was my grandmother who had been a seamstress. Within the first ten years of my life, both of these professions would vanish entirely from the Ruhr valley.

In other words, I was used to work that has vanished and acts that have passed but left their mark on the present: the white dress my grandmother made for me when I was twelve, according to my specifications; the cracks in the walls in the basement of my childhood home, never plastered or painted over, because they would simply open up again. They told us that the house was shifting under our feet, swaying this way and that over the mining shafts that ran beneath it.

Perhaps that is what made me want to be a writer: I have always known that there is a world underneath the one we live in day by day, where we go to work, to school, where we buy groceries and celebrate birthdays and weddings and christenings and go to funerals. There is a world beneath that world of rituals and routines. This world is unpredictable, shifting, mysterious. As a child, I thought of it as dangerous, and I was afraid of the cellar, but I would still go down the creaking wooden stairs and walk along the crumbling walls. My hands would trace the tree roots pushing through the mortar as I looked at the cracks in the old brick and shivered with fear and delight. What would I discover behind the wall, beneath the floor?

I might say that the Ruhr valley made me a writer, with its cracks and fissures and abandoned mine shifts under our feet, but I suspect that that isn’t entirely true. Perhaps I simply was a writer, and the cracks I found in the cellar were my way into writing books: the wish to move into a dark, unknown space with a Davy lamp clasped in one hand and a pen in the other. In On Writers and Writing, Margaret Atwood tells us that she asked novelists what it felt like to write, what it was like when ‘they went into a novel.’ She found that none of them wanted to know what she ‘meant by into. One said it was like walking into a labyrinth, without knowing what monster might be inside; another said it was like groping through a tunnel; another said it was like being in a cave – she could see daylight through the opening, but she herself was in darkness.’ Virginia Woolf, Atwood tells us, thought that ‘writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.’ Virginia Woolf grew up in a fine house at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, so I am not surprised that she discovered many beautiful and subtle and sad things. For me, perhaps it has always been like going down a mining shaft, looking for what glitters and what is dangerous in the darkness. Margaret Atwood sums up this idea in her essay when she writes: ‘Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.’

Atwood’s essay is eloquent on the process but silent on the result. What is that something that we bring back out into the light? Does it matter what we find in the darkness, the mine shafts in the Ruhr valley, a cave in Malaysia, a labyrinth in Greece, a dark room in Kensington? And how do we know — especially as we are starting out as writers — whether what we have brought back shines brightly enough? In other words: when we have written a novel, how do we know that we have we illuminated something, rather than groped around in the dark for a fruitless period of between one to twenty years?

There is a philosophy of narrative thought that would say it does not matter. The process is enough or at any rate all we can talk about or examine or understand: making one’s way into the darkness, going into the woods, in the words of John Yorke; approach the inmost cave and face the ordeal before returning with the elixir, like the Hero on his Journey; these narrative patterns have been endlessly recreated by Hollywood storytellers after they were first described by Joseph Campbell and adapted by Christopher Vogler.

But I do not think so. In the Ruhr valley, we sing a song that has no English translation, the Miner’s Hymn or Steigerlied. It opens on Glück auf, Glück auf, which is difficult to translate; when I sing it, I take it to mean, ‘great happiness, great luck, the miners have come back up!’ They have survived their descent into the bowels of the Earth and returned to us. The song continues to tell us that we can see the miners approach because they have lit their bright lamps, announcing their arrival in the darkness of night: Und er hat sein helles Licht bei der Nacht, und er hat sein helles Licht bei der Nacht, schon angezünd, schon angezünd. Note that lamp (Licht) and the lighting of it (angezünd) are repeated: twice we sing about the bright light, twice rejoice that it has been lit.

Writing is not about the darkness in the cave or the room or the labyrinth; it is about the light. This light was not found in the darkness, it was brought along. It was brought into the darkness and back out of it, to guide and protect, and so that others would be able to see us come home. Writing isn’t about the compulsion to go into the darkness — it is about the compulsion to look for the light.

I suspect that we have known this for a long time. In humanity’s oldest surviving poem, the poet Enheduana says that she turns to the light to overcome her writer’s block before approaching the darkness: ‘I went to the light, \ but the light burned \ me; I went to the \ shadow, but it was \ shrouded in storms.’ Enheduana, humanity’s first named author, wrote her poem in around 2600 BCE, some two thousand years before Aristotle and his Poetics, three thousand years before Gustav Freytag’s Dramatic Triangle, and over four thousand years before Campbell would describe the Hero’s Journey.

Why are we looking for that light? It has nothing to do with looking for hope, or optimism, or with ignoring or disregarding the darkness. As George Orwell writes in ‘Writers and Leviathan’ in 1948, and as we might repeat word for word today, we are often compelled to write about terrible things: ‘This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc. are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent write about, even when we do not name them openly.’ Light does not stand in here as a metaphor for pleasant thoughts and feelings. Nor is the lamp merely an instrument of a new littérature engagée, an overtly political literature that instrumentalises fiction for its own purposes; as essayist Rebecca Solnit writes in Orwell’s Roses, ‘art that is not about the politics of this very moment may reinforce a sense of self and society, of values and commitments, or even a capacity to pay attention, that equip a person to meet the crises of the day.’ This essay is no manifesto for writing and thinking only about what makes us feel good or, the reverse, deeply angry and miserable. It is a manifesto for writing about whatever it is that we would like to understand, to throw a light on. Looking for the light means looking to understand something: a person, a relationship, a place, a madness, a grief, a pain, a joy, a hope, a despair, a movement, the past, the present, the future. Writing fiction, specifically, means trying to understand something that cannot be explored or discovered, simulated or understood, through a scientific experiment, an essay, a manifesto, a longitudinal study, a simulation, a virtual environment, a quantitative data set, a piece of a music or a painting.

Such an approach requires integrity and honesty. It also requires the ability to look and write carefully and deeply and patiently about a light that can be too bright, and that can burn you, and to still insist to look at it. It requires us not to give into the darkness, which always wants to tempt and seduce us. Words do not automatically illuminate, as Deborah Levy tells us in The Cost of Living. ‘Words can cover up everything that matters,’ she says and picks up a warning formulated many years previously by George Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language.’ It is our foremost tasks as serious writers not to allow language to become a veil, a curtain drawn against the light, or a justification of or precursor to terrible acts, as Hannah Arendt noted it became for Adolf Eichmann during the Shoah in ‘Eichmann and the Holocaust.’ Himmler, she writes, ‘coined slogans’ to solving ‘problems of conscience’ that Eichmann ‘called “winged words” .. and kept repeating’ to justify his crimes against humanity.

This type of writing requires skill, craft and discipline, which can be taught and has to be learned through patient practice. Haruki Murakami writes in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running that he could not go running for any longer than twenty or thirty minutes a day when he started out, because the exercise would leave him ‘panting, my heart pounding, my legs shaky.’ He persevered until he acquired some form, and his ‘body started to accept the fact it was running.’ What he talks about when he talks about running is, of course, writing.

So serious writing has much to do with discipline and experimentation and bravery, but we must also remain ‘open to receive, greedy even,’ as Jennifer Dawson writes in The Ha-Ha. Or, in the words of Olga Tokarczuk, writers may have to be people ‘who have lots of empty space inside, so everything they see and hear echoes within them like a bell.’ It has only very little to do with following preconceived patterns, regurgitating existing material, or producing a text that follows the rules of convention or statistical probability. As Simon Okotie writes in The Future of the Novel, it is the writers who try out new forms, who experiment with form and style and thinking, and who are demanding of themselves and their art, who will make the novel ‘the infinite art form of the future.’ Large Language Models are good and useful for many things, but serious writing is not one of them. Writing becomes serious precisely where we leave behind the well-established order of narrative, where we change the story, where we find new ways to combine words, scenes, ideas, to experiment with language and form and style until we can light a lamp, until we can show it to others. The result of serious writing is asking a question that has never been asked before; discovering an answer that has never been thought of before; or offering something up for understanding and examination that that has not been examined in the past. This process is the opposite of producing a text with an LLM, which may be best described as convenience writing; serious writing is difficult, and can take an awfully long time, and it needs plenty of practice and a great deal of courage.

The result may not live forever. It is not the task of the novel, or of serious writing, to buy its creator immortality. As Enheduana knew, the rewards for creating may be short-lived. ‘I carried the basket \ of offerings, I sang \ the hymns of joy. \ Now they bring me \ funeral gifts—am I \ no longer living?’ she writes. Ironically, these words have survived her by nearly five thousand years, but as a writer, you will never know whether your œuvre will be forgotten or remembered; in fact, it is very likely that it will disappear. To add insult to injury, you are always competing with writers whose work has already outlived yours by several centuries. As novelist Daniel Kehlmann writes in ‘Shakespeare und Talent,’ no writer can help but wonder whether they truly have anything to add to the canon of world literature whenever they read or see one of William Shakespeare’s plays: ‘Shakespeare ist so absurd gut, dass das eigene Literatendasein gemessen an ihm sofort fraglich erscheint … und man wider Willen darüber nachdenkt, ob der Welt das Geingste fehlen würde, hätte man einen anderen Berufsweg eingeschlagen. Dagegen hilft nichts, da half nie etwas.’ This cannot be helped, but it does not make serious writing any less daunting.

This is true especially as we start out. The novelist Elena Ferrante explains that she spent much of her younger years worrying about how to write, until ‘I shook off theoretical preoccupations and readings, and began to write without asking myself what I should be.’ Until we reach that stage, serious writing is rather like imitating, copying someone else’s drawings or paintings or architectural drawings, and may make us feel that we will never express anything worthy or unique or even interesting and intriguing: ‘Wenn ich las, was ich am Tag zuvor auf Papier gebracht hatte,’ writes the novelist Edouard Louis, who I am quoting from the German translation of his book Changer: méthode, ‘fühlte ich mich schmutzig, lächerlich. Alles, was ich schrieb, las sich wie ein billiger Abklatsch von Autorinnen und Autoren, die ich bewunderte.’ Louis felt ridiculous, at times desperate, because he felt he produced nothing but cheap imitations of writers he admired.

Louis is France’s most successful young novelist, which tells us that even when you do succeed, you may not necessarily have a very pleasant time as you do so. Writing does not always involve desperation and shame, but it is not precisely going to be all exaltation and pleasure, either. As the novelist Leïla Slimani explains in Le parfum des fleurs la nuit, writing mostly leaves you feeling cold and wearing too many jumpers: ‘Le matin, une fois mes enfants à l’école, je monte dans mon bureau et je n’en sors pas avant le soir. … Je finis toujours pas avoir froid et à mesure que les heures passent, j’enfile un pull, puis un deuxième, pour finalement m’enrouler dans une couverture.’ Rewards within your lifetime may be quite humble, too, as my friend, the poet Charlotte Wetton tells us in ‘The Painter:’ ‘They come each day to take his paintings away, \ then leave him a tray of food.’ A tray of food, of course, isn’t so bad, but it is not eternal glory.

That is because it is really quite odd to think it is the purpose of a novel to bestow immortal fame on its author in the first place; the novel does not remember, it imagines. The two may be related — as we discover in Complicité’s Mnemonic, ‘we are alive as long as we are remembered, and we are remembered as long as we can be imagined’ — but that is not, in any case, why we write. Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux teaches us in The Years that ‘everything will be erased in a second,’ ‘the dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed.’ But she also knows that, even as ‘I’ vanishes, ‘Language will continue to put the world into words.’ An LLM is a model, and the only worlds it puts into words are those we already know. The novel, on the other hand, is a method we have invented to think together, deeply and privately and bravely, so that we may come up with new questions, new answers, and new insights. We examine these lights over and over again, in dialogue with times past and places far away and minds so very different than our own. When writing seriously, we are trying to understand the dazzling, saddening, maddening ways of humanity and the world we are a part of, one book at a time.

Works cited

Arendt, Hannah (2005 [1963]): Eichmann and the Holocaust. London: Penguin.

Atwood, Margaret (2015 [2003]): On Writers and Writing. London: Virago.

Complicité (artistic director Simon McBurney) (2024 [1999]): Mnemonic. Co-produced with Salzburg Festival.

Dawson, Jennifer (2025 [1961]): The Ha-Ha. London: Faber.

Enheduana (c. 2600 BCE): ‘The Exaltation of Inana.’ Translated from the Sumerian by Sophus Helle. In: Helle, Sophus (ed.)The Complete Poems of Enheduana. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Ernaux, Annie (2017 [2008 as Les Années]): The Years. Translated from the French by Alison L Strayer. London: Fitzcarraldo.

Ferrante, Elena (2024 [2003]): ‘Afterword.’ Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. In Alba de Céspedes’s Her Side of the Story, translated from the Italian by Jill Foulston. London: Pushkin Press.

Kehlmann, Daniel (2011 [2010]): Lob. Über Literatur, including ‘Shakespeare und Talent.’ Hamburg: Rowohlt.

Le Guin, Ursula (2024 [1998]): Steering the Craft. London: Silver Press.

Levy, Deborah (2019 [2018]): The Cost of Living. London: Penguin.

Louis, Edouard (2022 [2021 as Change: méthode]): Anleitung ein anderer zu werden. Translated from the French by Sonja Finck. Berlin: Aufbau.

Murakami, Haruki (2009): What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. London: Vintage.

Okotie, Simon (2025): The Future of the Novel. London: Melville House UK.

Orwell, George (2025 [1931-1948]): Can Socialists Be Happy? including ‘Writers and Leviathan.’ London: Penguin.

Slimani, Leïla (2021): Le parfum des fleurs la nuit. Paris: Stock.

Solnit, Rebecca (2021): Orwell’s Roses. London: Granta.

Tokarczuk, Olga (2025, [1998 as Dom dzienny, dom nocny]): House of Day, House of Night. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London: Fitzcarraldo.

Wetton, Charlotte (2017): I Refuse to Turn into a Hatstand, including ‘The Painter.’ Cleckheaton: Calder Valley Poetry.