Great minds, great minds...

Posted by Katy Regan at 20:44 on 10 Sep 2009

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I went to a literary event on Tuesday. (Oh yes, this is the sort of high-brow thing I do alone of a mid-week night..) It was “Nick Hornby in conversation”  at the Bloomsbury Hotel in London - basically the man himself, reading from his new novel: Juliet, Naked and then being interviewed about it by journalist Rachel Cooke.

He was lovely: down to earth, self-deprecating, funny, a lot smaller in person that I’d imagined but then famous people always are and I hearted him still.

 It was funny, there was a real specific crowd at this event, I’d call it ‘London Literary’: The men, all swept lustrous hair and thick-framed glasses and cardigans; the girls, no make-up (apart from me who had it troweled it on..) tasteful floral vintage dresses and silky, bohemian up-dos. Practically everyone had their head burrowed in a book in the fifteen minutes before it started.

Aside from a couple seated just in front of me who insisted on gazing into each-other’s eyes and touching noses every five seconds so that I kept on having to crane my neck to hear and see Mr. Hornby, I had a great time. In the Q&A session at the end, I even asked a question. I felt very brave, since there were about a hundred and twenty people there and everybody who had asked a question before me was a) a man b) a very intellectual one who seemed to have done a Phd in Nick Hornby’s novels.

My question referred to something Nick (I shall just call him Nick, since we’ve met now and so we are practically friends) said during his talk which was: “I feel like I have wasted a lot of time in my life and continue to feel like I waste a lot of time during the day, too, but this seems to be what I need to do to write.”

This was interesting, I thought, since I too feel like I have to waste time to write! No, let’s re-phrase that, I just waste time. You know, hanging out washing, seeing to that urgent re-cycling. I like to think it’s all ‘thinking time’ but in reality, my mind is more often than not blank during these times since I find the business of actually writing excruciatingly taxing involving all the brain power I possess (it’s all used up by about midday)  so that the rest of the time, I am virtually brain-dead.

“You say you need to waste time to write” I tentatively asked, raising my hand above the snogging couple. “Can I ask, is this thinking time? Could you elaborate?”

He laughed a little at this, oh no, I thought, this was a question a buffoon would ask! Why did I ask that! But no, it turned out he was just sort of laughing at himself, because he said. “No, it’s not thinking time at all! I play a lot of computer games. Watch TV. In fact I seem only able to concentrate for about ten minutes before I find myself playing solitaire. My ambition, every day” her continued, “is to write for three or four un-interrupted hours at optimum concentration, but I never, ever manage it.”

Oh this was music to my ears! So it wasn’t just me who could only concentrate for ten minutes at a time before I was embroiled in clearing up stray peas from my desk (cum-dining-table-cum-landfill…) and other very pressing matters. I was in good company – the Master of contemporary fiction suffered this affliction too!  And it got better. “I only really think about my book and the characters when I am actually writing” he said. “The rest of the time my mind is generally blank.”

Brilliant. We were practically writing soul-mates, me and Nick, great minds and all that, I thought, great minds… I returned to Berkhamsted from London with a spring in my step and an overwhelming desire to go for a drink but who would join me? I passed Matt Black’s house and it all fitted into place. I told him about the event as we walked to the pub, about how I felt like I’d had an epiphany, was experiencing a new found confidence and sense of reassurance tha Nick Hornby suffered from time-wasting too, that in fact he found it essential, it actually helped him to write!! “Yes” he said. “But he’s a multi-million pound earning national treasure with several novels and film adaptations under his belt.  He can afford to waste time…”

 Do you think he has a point?   

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