Responses to the popular idea that everyone has a novel to write.

I am immediately inclined to go along with this. After all a novel is usually first off an account of a life or lives. And everybody has a life - often a life more dramatic or tragic or adventurous than ever appears in a novel.
A life is a life however, and a novel is a novel. The story of a life does not necessarily a novel make. This is not because it's not exciting or interesting enough - the dullest of lives can make the most exciting of novels while the most exciting life can make the dullest novel. It's because the impulse of the writer has to be novelistic. A novel is fundamentally an exploration, an excavation, while most people - even novelists when they are not being novelists‹naturally prefer to see their lives in the light of obstacles surmounted, heroic escapades or the nobility of loved ones. This perspective has its place in one writing genre or another but that place is not in the contemporary novel.
A novel requires grit and negativity and artistry and, more than anything, the transforming imagination - and this is more than most people are willing or able to give it. Yes, everybody has the makings of a novel in them but only a novelist can make a novel. And you can only know if you are a novelist by attempting a novel.

- Anne Haverty, poet and novelist, author of One Day as a Tiger (1998) and The Far Side of a Kiss (2000).

It's an attractive notion that everybody has a novel inside them. Perhaps it's true. Less attractive, however, is its journey from 'inside' to 'outside'‹that intense, ultimately satisfying process of long-haul writing. Sometimes it's like the old joke about making your first million: you give up because it's too tough, and decide to start on the second.
Novels, stories, poems - as a writer, they all choose you, rather than the other way round. The spark of memory, the shard of overheard conversation, the casual sighting of an old photograph: they stir up the nest of writing vipers that are already curled inside, waiting for the signal.
Poke at them: then sit in a room for two or three years at your peril. They'll keep you company, those writhing vipers, while you inhabit the world where past and present collide, where characters elbow each other off your pages, where you kill your babies with impunity.
But don't worry. It's a novel universe, with its own surreal order. Its warring factions are policed diligently by the twin troops of boundless optimism and crippling self-doubt.
As a writer, you haven't really lived unless you've been there.

- Catherine Dunne, novels include The Walled Garden (2000) and Another Kind of Life (2003).

Schopenhauer's Telescope was my first novel, and when I began it, I thought of it as a short story and kept the focus tight, though as the narrative progressed I began to see more directions opening up than a story could contain. Still, I tried to avoid thinking 'novel' and instead adapted the writing to suit the subject matter. A year later I had the novel done.
I think that most people have the capacity to write a novel if they exercise patience and imagination and bring some craft to the table. It's important to understand the rules for good dialogue and to learn how point of view works. If you don't, you will hold yourself back. As far as attitude is concerned, if you can keep your mind active in the subject matter and your fingers tapping, you will go a long way. Don't obsess with theme or meaning. Most of us learn by doing.

- Gerard Donovan, poet and novelist, author of Schopenhauer's Telescope (2003).

While writing All Summer, the same insidious question kept coming up: who do you think you are, that you believe you can write a novel? (It was actually more like: who the fuck are you to try this?) It's a tremendously presumptuous task to embark on, and I was aware of that all the time. I had no belief as such that there was a novel in me. I just had a suspicion, and that suspicion kept me going for two years, waxing and waning, waxing and waning.
Then I got a publishing deal. And once you get a publishing deal, life as a writer becomes a whole lot easier.

- Claire Kilroy, novelist, author of All Summer (2003).

I tried it once. My motives were as predictable as most novelistic post-coital dialogue. Untitled was to feature a woman who lived in a small coastal / border town in Ireland. How could it be otherwise? I had one collection published and was full sure the difference between poetry and prose was something to do with telling the truth or, on the other hand, making it up.
The proposed oeuvre was to be Beckettian, Proustian, protean and short. My heroine would live a close-knit life - a couple of callers, two solitary meals, possibly a diary and definitely an encounter with the asshole kids who kept ringing our doorbell (oh, sweet revenge). In the event, she never got out of bed. Sixty pages in, she hadn't even ventured out for breakfast, not a word had been exchanged and nothing had happened. I couldn't make the kids approach the door. They were too frightened or too well-brought-up or too busy with their skateboards or their plaits. Every time one thought about breaking in on the solitary thought-flow of my nameless one, he would balk at his presumption and his cheek. How could he possibly scatter such elegant prose with such an ugly, uninvited sound?
Looking back on it, she wasn't a bad sort. If she'd been in a poem, she might have been able to breathe. She just wasn't terribly active, and she didn't want to go to the trouble of having to expand on her carefully limited world. She was nervous of change, that's all, maybe a little lazy too, preferred the single word to clumps of talk. She didn't like the big picture and given a choice, simply opted for her bed. I suspect she was a little self-absorbed. She's still upstairs somewhere, I suppose, thinking several little thoughts, waiting for the bell to ring, not noticing the books of poems I really wrote and left on the locker for her to approve. Not that she would - I seem to remember she didn't trust poets. 'No staying power,' she declared on page 18, 'and so careless with their characters' real lives.'

- Vona Groarke, poet, collections include Other People's Houses (1999) and Flight (2002).

Yes, everyone indeed may have a novel in them, but I'm afraid, from thirty-five years of experience as an editor/ publisher, that's where it should stay.
The other common conceit is that the writer has to have something to say, to which must be added the truism that it's not what you say but how you say it: form and content become one. The underlying passion of every real writer must be informed and honed by reading, reading, reading (Joyce, Nabokov, Borges, Sebald, Vonnegut, etc . . . ) - and the experience of the human heart which, if lucky, comes with age.

- Antony Farrell, publisher and editor, The Lilliput Press.