address book. The great majority of my characters -- and I would guess this is true for most writers of fiction -- are "inventions". They emerge, quickly or slowly, shyly or boisterously, in the writing. They are members of that shifting population of men, women and children (not to mention cats, horses, etc) who inhabit our inner worlds. Where they come from, whether they are curious versions of ourselves, figures out of the collective unconscious, reconfigurings of those we did indeed once know but have now forgotten, or a mix of all such, no one, to my knowledge, has ever convincingly answered. It does not matter. No one writes for long without understanding that they are entering mystery and will never leave it. What matters is that we can, through unnamed processes, secrete these figures who will loom and mouth off in our fictions. It is not, I think, too much to say that it is a "natural" process, that we are, all of us, geared up for it, and that without this propensity, writing would be impossibly complex. We could not do it. There is, of course, another great reservoir of characters: those ready-made for us in books. It is not that we intend to steal Mr Tulkinghorn from Dickens or Ursula Brangwen from Lawrence, but that such characters show us the dimensions of the possible. A painter who wants to paint a tree needs to do two things: look at trees and look at paintings of trees. The