[Note: as of now, a superior and updated version of this piece with fewer repetitions and better metaphors is available on the Independent website. It’ll be in i on Thursday 13th Nov if you are in desperate need of a paper copy, and features among other things an image of me in which I look like Rhys Ifans as Mycroft Holmes. Which is either cool or really, really alarming.

Also, I’ve just noticed that even in the updated version I somehow failed to namecheck Ian McEwan, which is unforgivably goofy of me. Sorry, sir.

No, he doesn’t read this blog.]

I do a lot of pretending. I’m a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I’m in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven’t created. I pretend I don’t know about the traps and disasters lying in wait for that person, dangers I’ve imagined for them to drag them through the narrative I pretend I’m not creating to the place I want them, often in despite of their own good sense and to their considerable disadvantage.

But more than that I pretend I don’t care.

Perhaps that’s about being a Brit, some kind of cultural aversion to taking things seriously. If you take something seriously, after all, you might have to defend it, fight for it, be rude to someone about it. David Niven, in 55 Days At Peking, makes the perfect British statement of self: having refused to flee the city and thereby compelled the ambassadors of the other national powers to remain also, he is asked how the minutes of the meeting can possibly reflect the situation without causing great embarrassment to his fellows. Simple, he replies. We shall record that in the initial vote on the matter one person was at odds with the others, but that – after some debate – unanimity was achieved.

It’s a posture we love, and one that we share with the Hagakure: matters of great significance should be treated lightly. You can see it in the way we approach sport, at least sometimes. It almost seems as if trying too hard is cheating. It begins young: I remember going on a school sport trip to Holland. The team there practiced every night of the week for at least two hours. We had perhaps four hours a week. We lost, of course, but we just about made it look even, and counted ourselves moral victors because we didn’t practice sport as a religion, but a hobby.

We pretended we didn’t care.

I still wish we could have won that last game – but I also don’t. It would have been glorious, but it would also have been a shame. It would have made a mockery of the hard work of a group of people who cared more than we did. They deserved that victory. Hard work, ironically, is the other virtue the Brits are supposed to respect. In fact, “sweat of the brow” is the basis of copyright here, rather than the US argument from utilitarianism or the German one that proceeds from identity.

And so to the stage. I do public appearances. I’m bluff, hearty, goofy. I wear loud clothes and I read the funny bits. I occasionally get taken to task for one thing or another, and I acknowledge my fault, my flaw, my failure, and I move on. Usually I mock myself to grease the wheels. Part of the job, the show. Prize lists are out and you’re not on them? Nature of the world, means nothing, prizes are a lottery. It’s a problem for your publisher, who needs to sell more copies, not for the artist (and never mind the commercial corollaries, the reflection in the size of your advance, for the moment). Review in some paper or other is negative? That happens. People can respond badly to a book, even a book others like, just a shame it had to be the critic chosen to write about you. Other papers will be positive. Amazon, Goodreads, book blogs. The local paper. Friends.

I never engage negatively with reviewers. If someone says something that enrages me – and they do – I do what I do on stage. I make a joke about myself and move on. Sometimes people say things that are manifestly wrong or even apparently malicious. That’s fine, too. It’s a response. Don’t read it, measure the column inches. Love the controversy. My skin is thick with various forms of privilege, after all. As an example of a type, I can take it. As a person, I can slide it off, as long as I believe I can. I pretend to myself, and leave the hurt behind. It’s not much of a hurt, after all. A brief sting. A day of self-doubt. A chocolate bar, an episode of Penny Dreadful.

An enormous amount of a writer’s life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it. I feel it might be nice to retreat into a more Pynchon-like performance by absence. I love the stage, but it also eats me alive. I’m caught somewhere between introversion and extroversion. Performance is natural to me, joyful, but it is also exhausting. I can feed on it, but the expense is high too, like being a carnivore: I have to chase down my meals. I’d quite like to eat more vegetables, quietly, on a hillside somewhere, and butt the occasional tiger off a cliff with my horns.

This kind of piece, by the way, is completely forbidden. It represents the moment when a duck, running across the surface of the pond to take off, catches one webbed foot in a wave and goes nose-down into the water. It means recommencing take-off, lurching and flapping and spraying mud-brown spume everywhere, quacking and flailing to achieve escape velocity so that I can return to my new book, believe in my own choices, and be the me I need to be do make it all real.

So what brought this on? What on Earth could motivate me to say any of this out loud, break the fourth wall and perhaps more importantly the first one?

Honestly: it was the Goodreads Choice Awards Fiction list for 2014. Tigerman is in there.

Let me just gloss that for you, because it may not seem like much, but it stopped me just now like walking into the corner of a table, and I’m still struggling with it.

Tigerman is listed in the Fiction category.

Two years ago, Angelmaker was listed in the SF section. My books are hard to categorize, they’re crossover with elements of the fantastical, so they usually end up in SF. SF is also my natural starting place: it’s what I read as a kid, and it is a literature that challenges the real, which is what I like to do. But even now, with the fantastical waterfalling into the mainstream and the world more SFish than it has ever been, the label still closes doors. Talking to someone the other day, I mentioned that I’ll on stage at the BFI this month talking to William Gibson about science fiction films, and I saw his interest falter. SF wasn’t proper writing to him. In an effort to stop the conversation dying a cold death, I explained the kind of thing I write about. “You’re crossover,” he said immediately. And that made everything okay. I don’t want to think about that right now, about the reasons for it or why it’s absurd.

Tigerman is listed in the Fiction category. It has escaped that moment, at least today.

Tigerman is listed in the Fiction category. That means it will almost certainly lose.

Why? Because Haruki Murakami is listed in that category too: arguably the world’s most popular author of the not-quite real right now, an international bestseller of the kind of thing I do. (I had an urge to write “try to do”, but no. Be honest. It’s what I do.)

When I grow up, I want to be a bit like him.

Margaret Atwood is listed in that category. Shortlisted five times for the Booker. Winner once. Icon. Pioneer of the odd in English language literary writing. If Murakami is Hephaestus the smith in my personal pantheon of craft, Atwood must be Arachne.

David Mitchell is listed in that category. Author of Cloud Atlas. Twice shortlisted for the Booker, listed in 2007 among Time Magazine’s 100 must influential people in the world. Like Murakami and Atwood, someone I need to learn from. My classical knowledge does not extend to a Greek divinity for him. Apollo, perhaps, or Dionysus.

And it goes on. Roxanne Gay; Emily St. John Mandel; Jojo Moyes. Names to conjure with. Names I admire. I cannot imagine losing in better company.

I have to acknowledge, today, that I do care about this. I don’t care about winning, but I care about being seen in this way. I care about my book being alongside those books, been considered in that mode. That is something I wanted, partly without ever knowing that I wanted it because until it happened I was pretending I was just pretending.

So thank you, world. Seriously. Thank you.

A few thoughts about signs and portents…

Robin Williams, on the subject of how to tell if you have a cocaine problem:

you have this dream where you’re doing cocaine in your sleep and you can’t go to sleep and you’re doing cocaine in your sleep and you can’t go to sleep, and you wake up and you’re doing cocaine… Bingo!

So that was moderately gratuitous – I just love Williams’ standup at the Met, it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen – but I was on The Write Lines (@thewritelines) on Sunday and one of the questions people asked was:

How do you know if you’re a writer?

There wasn’t really time to get into it seriously, and of course there’s an element of choice and tautology: you’re a writer if you choose to be one, and if you write. The real question is:

How do you know whether you’re going to be any good, or be able to do it at all?

I’d say writing breaks down into various skills, talents, predispositions and obsessions. The first of these is in a way the most important and the simplest, while maybe also the most imponderable and unteachable: the talent for – and the addiction to – storytelling. The example I gave on the show was sitting in a train carriage looking at a man with a shaved head, bruises on his face, who clasps an open beer can close to his chest. If you’re a storyteller, you look at him and you see narratives. What kind of narratives depends on who you are. You might see the last Templar Knight, desperately trying to reach the Pope with a drop of the blood of Christ in that beer can. How he got there, and why something so precious is concealed in a vessel so mundane, is the beginning of your story. (And: does that make the beer can the Holy Grail? Or a Holy Grail?) If you’re of a more internal bent, you might see a man leaving the funeral wake of a loved one with the last drink, knowing that so long as he doesn’t finish it or pour it away, the wake isn’t over and he doesn’t have to say goodbye to the person he loved.

This isn’t so much a talent as an absence of mental barriers. Most people spend a lot of time not thinking about ridiculous and unlikely possibilities. It’s a life skill. You don’t need to consider what the world would be like if the colour red suddenly vanished. It’s never going to happen. To a storyteller, it’s perfectly plausible under certain circumstances, and interesting because it would generate a vast number of stress situations, conflicts and dramas, any of which could be a narrative. So that one is about taking the brakes off your mental wagon and letting it roll. It’s about not being afraid to think silly things, or sad things, or awful things, or inappropriate things. There was a piece in the paper recently suggesting that creative people have a thinner mental division between what is and what is possible – which would explain why I hate to fly and can’t understand why people don’t see how scary it is. However, since the vast majority of newspaper reporting of science is hogwash, I am prepared to accept that may simply be untrue.

There are ways to counterfeit or stimulate this trait. The easiest is who/what/where, which is a simple game. You pick a profession, and an action, and a location. So for example: dentist, hiding, boxing ring. Question: why is a dentist hiding in a boxing ring? How do you hide in a public place? Is he losing teeth, or is she – as well as being a dentist – also a skilled fighter? If so, why? And so on. Obviously, you get more out of this if you pick conflicting and unlikely setups. If you go with nun/praying/church, you’re nowhere. If you find yourself doing that, this is going to be a long journey, but okay: start by asking other people to pick each bit without letting them hear what the others are saying, then take the result – however ridiculous – and work out what the logic is. Stretch your brain.

I’ve got work to do right now, so I’ll pick up the next skill or whatever later…

Have fun with your stretching.