It's hard to sum up the voices of a discussion, to reflect the texture of an argument that has been sometimes robust and clear and at other times inchoate and pained. Elif Shafak, in her opening remarks at this Conference, gave us the metaphor of the orchestra -- that we might all play our own notes, loud or soft, on our own instruments. "We are multitudes" said Ali Smith on Day Two, paraphrasing Whitman and making us more multitudinous in the process. And indeed sometimes this tent has felt like the Tower of Babel as all of us clamour and strive to defend that thing we do and the way we do it. Of course this is hard. Yet all the time, though it often seemed that we writers were inhabiting more of a business world than an literary one, as we talked more often about publicity and publishing and marketing than we did about our craft, and though we are all of us different, with different aims and methods, working within different constraints and with different ideas about what good writing is, still we are all of us united in our real business -- that of conveying from our minds to the page the sometimes burdensome contents of our imagination. "This novel, this something" said Laszlo Krasznahorkai last night, when discussing his work. Well, that "something" has been the subject of our discussion this afternoon. China Miville gave us an acidly intelligent, hilarious and deeply provocative account of how