Novelist Richard Koster offers a blanket absolution for what writers ten to think of as ‘wasting time’ – that hour or two of muddled glaring at the page before a word will allow itself to be placed there. In in the process of creating fiction we must divorce ourselves from the real world, he points out. And that is hard. The real world is insistent not only in its distractions but in its brute physical presence. To remove ourselves from that sphere and achieve a state in which our mental world is more real requires a disciplined effort of displacement.