For E, who introduced me to the very wonderful Hanif Kureishi

Writers are often asked - and they certainly ask themselves - what they would do if they were not published. I suspect that most writers would like to think that they would continue as they do already, writing to the best of their ability without thought of an audience. Yet even if this is true that most of the satisfactions are private you might still need to feel that someone is responding, even if you have no idea who they are. Until you are published it might be difficult to move on; you could easily feel that nothing had been achieved, and that by failing to reach another person - the reader - the circle had not been completed, the letter posted but not received. Perhaps without such completion a writer is destined to repeat himself, as people do when having conversations with themselves, conversations never heard by anyone.

Yet father would not stop writing. It was crucial to him that these stories be told. Like Scherazade, he was writing for his life.

Where do stories come from? What is there to write about? Where do you get material? How do you start? And: why are writers asked these question so often?

It isn't as if you can go shopping for experience. Or is it? Such an idea suggests that experience is somehow outside yourself', and must be gathered. But in fact, it is a question of seeing what is there. Experience is what has already happened. Experience, like love and hate, starts at home: in the bedroom, in the kitchen. It happens the moment people are together, or apart, when they want one another and when they realise they don't like their lover's ears.

- Excerpt from 'My Ear at His Heart', Hanif Kureishi's memoir about his father