I don’t have the attention span to be a novelist. My mind is
too disorganised and given to feeling fractured. I’m most reluctant to commit
to any project which will take longer than a few hours, so something as long
term as a novel doesn’t stand a chance. And I don’t have the planning nous
which novelists need to make their opuses cohesive so that critics and
academics can feel entitled to crow about real and imagined depths. I gather
you even have to know what a plot arc is.
I’m just an inveterate chatterbox. I was told as much as a
child and my informant was right. And I worked in an office once (back in the
bad old days when the office environment was conducive to my undeveloped nature)
where a woman colleague said of me:
‘I do so like to hear him talk.’
Her best friend who just happened to occupy the next desk
retorted:
‘I don’t. I want to punch him on the nose.’
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