any huge sensitivity to language, though this is the other quality that really matters in writing; it is also, perhaps, the most resistant to any kind of formal teaching. So having insisted so immoderately on the central importance of character, how in God's name is it done? Luckily, the raw material is close to hand. For every writer, it is his own enigmatic being that constitutes the focus of his research. Year after year, he sits on a kind of umpire's chair watching the antics of his body, listening to the bubbling of his thoughts, sifting the material of his dreams. And when he wants more -- other bodies, other thoughts -- he simply looks up at those around him. Think, for a moment, of your own family. Almost everybody has one. You might never need to go beyond them. You could keep them all in a kind of mental aquarium, sketching them into stories all your writing life. Change their names, of course, their hair colour, their tattoos; move them from that little town in the south you grew up in to a little town in the north you once drove through and wondered about ... But a writer is not confined to such a tactic. It may even be that such a tactic is not particularly common. In my own work I have very rarely set out to present a character who is knowingly based on someone familiar to me, someone whose name I might find in my