My boundaries are so permeable. If I try to write in a cafe or a pub, noting down overheard conversation soon becomes more interesting–and eventually more attractive–to me than adding to the daily wordcount of a piece of professional work. In the old days, when that would have been a sword & sorcery novel, there was no match between the real & the invented, nothing either context could borrow from the other; because at that time genre writing specifically swept out permeability from both its description of a writer and its definition of “work”.
At that time, the industry definition of “write” was that the author be seen to sit obsessively at a desk from 7am to 7pm, and get up at the end of it with another 10,000 words added to a current project (in addition to inactivity vertigo and a faint weird buzzing in one ear; then later in life an intractable alcoholism &/or coke habit). If you weren’t doing that, you weren’t a “real” writer.
Once I realised, at the end of the 1970s, that I didn’t want to be that kind of real writer, it stopped mattering where I worked–in cafes, in pubs, on trains, in tents, quarries and abandoned buildings, in other people’s workplaces, in posh houses or shonky retail outlets or on sunny if scruffy canalsides–because where I was and what I was doing and what it meant and how it spoke to me had become more and more the stuff I worked with. Permeable boundaries were an advantage in work like Light; and there were, obviously, no boundaries at all for Climbers or Wish I Was Here.
Such a relief to have the brakes taken off, especially for books like The Sunken Land or Empty Space, in which the real and the weird could be overtly encouraged to bleed into one another.
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