While they’re sometimes rambly and odd, I can’t help but enjoy AL Kennedy’s blog posts at the Guardian, ruminating on all things writerly. Here she goes on about her chair and then launches into a bit about researching novels, something near and dear to my heart right now. Encouragingly, she says she thinks and obsesses for a few years before actually writing. I thought that was just procrastination, but apparently I’m doing it just like the pros.

The research I prefer, the type with which I am comfortable, involves me sitting in my study surrounded by a ziggurat of books at which I munch away until they give in. Sadly, if something doesn’t appear to be in any book, anywhere – and many things I seem to need for the next novel are ridiculously arcane – then I have to seek out free-standing human beings and pester them exactly when I am unable to articulate a description of what I don’t have and can’t understand. Would you let a random scribbler into your premises and then put up with them basically describing a void, the dimensions and angles surrounding a nothing, while waving their arms a bit too much? I know I wouldn’t. And I’m only ruining these people’s afternoons because they’re experts – so this isn’t just a theft of time, it’s a theft of expert, well-informed time.. for which I can’t pay, because paying is rude and stops a favour being a favour, but you have to bring them something… but what do you bring someone who earns – say – ridiculously more than you do …? Do you obsess for weeks trying to figure out what they might like …? You’ll then feel slightly grubby if that works… or do you take a flyer and get it wrong…? You’ll then feel thuggish… And if you see them again, should you give them books ? You write books… but what if they don’t like your books, or books at all…? and if you sign the books, that’ll mean people feel bad when they dump them in the Oxfam shop – plus, that’s a bit up yourself, isn’t it, foisting your own signed books on people? But not signing them might seem rude…. And what if they run over the time they said they’d give you…? Do you interrupt, do you let them go on, do you cry? If they really nail something magnificently, are you allowed to kiss them on the forehead? What if you’re bellowing because they’re deaf, but they haven’t said so, but they are… is that rude, or just audible? I have spent a number of fretful hours lately, sitting on patient strangers’ sofas and feeling bad, bad, bad about myself.