It has been said that the novel is the perfect form to reflect the modern individual’s experience of the world. His take on the interior social, psychological world. In other words, the quality of a novel correlates with the ability of the story, characters, and plot to hold a mirror to the world of full emotional and intellectual experience. If the mirror distorts or warps the experience, the reader may be confused, angry or bored.

At any time there is so much going on in life. The daily information dumps overload our five senses with inputs that we just have the chance to digest before a new batch has our neurons firing like a random madman with an automatic weapon.

One goal of the novelist is to give form, shape and design to the cascade of daily life experiences. 24/7 life is unedited, raw footage. As a reality show, most people’s life (including that of authors) isn’t worth the time and effort to watch. In Thailand, we have something called PandaLive TV (Channel 16). The camera has two shots. One shot is shows the inside the cage; the second shot is an exterior shot, looking through the bars, which makes the cage look like a high security prison. Both shot focus on a couple of pandas. A mother and daughter who most of the time are playing, sleeping, chewing on bamboo, rolling or walking around the cement floored cage. There is no story. No plot. Viewers watch a mother and daughter panda making their way without any plot, development, meaning or purpose through yet another day.

Most human daily lives are only marginally more interesting than PandaLive TV, and that only because people aren’t, for the most part, living inside a cage. Nonetheless, that is a detail. The day-to-day totality of human life is an unorganized mess with a bubble of laughter now and then rising like a belch from a glass of ale to the surface. What makes a novel worth reading is the promise of taking this totality, and showing the bits where the character develops, learns, reflects and pulls the reader into the psychological life of the character. We know what we see but how do we really process our feeling about what happens around us?

When I see soldiers in full combat gear armed with M16s and shotguns on the pedestrian bridge to the Skytrain, like most people, I observe others watching the soldiers. I ask myself what is their experience? What emotions arise from this scene? No doubt people witnessing the same scene experience a wide range of emotions. That’s to be expected. The writer can charge straight ahead with the conviction that his or her emotion is the proper guide. That is usually a mistake. It is sloppy thinking and writing for two reasons.

The first reason can be found in Orwell’s 1984, where Winston Smith, finds an old man in a bar and convinces himself that the old man can explain what life was like before the revolution. To his disappointment, all Winston receives from the old man are endless pointless details that add up to nothing—a rubbish heap of personal details that buries the larger past. Winston is looking for perspective and context and instead finds himself blinded by a hailstorm of meaningless detail. For Orwell, and most writers, the goal is to place the conflicting emotions of the people on that footbridge into a larger context that reveals something deeper about the scene. In other words no one person’s details will explain the larger world anymore than PandaLive Channel can explain the life of pandas. The details of the author’s experience aren’t necessarily a reliable guide as to the experience of others.

The second reason is it takes away the freedom of the reader to draw his or her own conclusion. Books that stack the deck so only one judgment can be drawn are polemical. The best fiction takes the readers in the uncomfortable gray zone where they look out at the black and white adjacent zones, and begin to understand the complexity of problems. It takes time and courage to draw readers with strong emotions into a clearing where they acknowledge the need for mutuality and co-operation. Of course writers can be and often are advocates for one side in a social or political debate. And, of course, readers looking for confirmation of what they already think wish to plug into a book that makes them feel comfortable and smug in their belief. It is unsettling to read something that challenges how you see the world and how you feel about what you see.

If wisdom means anything, it is connected to the ability to remain open-minded. The more open people are to the full range of possible reactions and consequences, the more willing they are to accept the world is filled with differing experiences and points of view. That’s a hard lesson because partisanship is so much easier. But the downside is that unexamined emotions don’t make for better outcomes—in fiction, in marriages, or in political conflict. Instead the unexamined life leads to exploitation, misery, unhappiness and anger. The role of a novelist is to examine closely the totality of experience and bring breath meaning into the rubbish heap of details.

Every couple of days a little alert pops up in my email account letting me know that I can read my books for nothing in Norwegian. My Norwegian’s not so great and I can read my books for nothing any time. But that’s not the point.

Scandinavia is a major center of so-called Cyberpunks who have willfully misinterpreted an old hacker adage that “information wants to be free” to mean “go ahead and steal things from which someone else expects to earn his livelihood.” Such Cyber types have, among other things, loaded electronic versions of my novels in Norwegian onto the internet so that anyone can take them without paying.

It’s a little odd. Anyone who’s been to Scandinavia will see that the locals are perfectly willing to pay through the nose for things which ought to be cheap. Even if they actually bought my novel, it’d still be cheaper than the train ride from Oslo Airport to downtown Oslo or a sandwich and soda by the fjord. And everyone’s so nice. Maybe that’s the problem–they’re trying to be nice to information. As long as they believe that the information wants to be free, then they’re only helping the information out by taking it for nothing…

It’s all the thin end of a disturbing wedge for creative artists such as yours truly who support their families entirely from their endeavors as authors, artists, musicians – and who for the most part would be somewhat better remunerated were they to choose to drive a bus for a living.

Information wants to be free but, as the original coiner of that phrase noted, information also wants to be expensive. If information is the catalogue of the Library of Congress, make it free. Sure, let’s have free access to recipes from Renaissance Florence and the geology of the Grand Canyon.

But not art. Art doesn’t want to be free. Art wants to be labored over by a person whose mind isn’t distracted by other things. Art wants to be made as good as it can be. Art wants creative dedication, it doesn’t want to be zapped out by people in a hurry who have to do a day-job, too.

Art, needless to say, is not just information.

Of course we can all justify a little theft. When I was a teen, I used to steal books. But only from big chain bookstores and only from authors who were long dead. The one time I broke those self-imposed rules, I nearly got tossed out of university for lifting a copy of a book written by my tutor’s wife from the college library before the librarian had even got around to cataloguing it. Anyhow, I gave that one back, because my education was free, so I was content for that particular bit of information not to be.

Others use Ebay to salve their conscience. For example, some penny-pinching Scot is offering for sale on Ebay Advance Uncorrected Proofs of my novels. These are sent out free to reviewers and booksellers before the books appear on the shelves. They’re clearly marked “Not for Resale” in big letters on the cover.

It could be that this person in Scotland would’ve behaved differently had the words “Nae fer resale” appeared in dialect on the cover. But I suspect that this person thinks that selling something dishonestly on the internet isn’t really dishonest. If that person were to walk into a second-hand bookstore and face a bookseller with his clearly marked “Not for Resale,” he’d feel a little ashamed at asking money for it. In selling just as in the writing of offensive anonymous comments, the internet is a shield for our worst behavior.

Well, as they say in Scotland, dinna fash yersel. I’ll manage, even if there are a few such novel proofs flying about. But think of poor Stephanie Meyer. Her blog mentioned not so long ago that someone had posted an early draft of her next novel on the internet and that hundreds of thousands of people had downloaded it.

(An aside: why on earth would anyone read an early draft of a novel unless they had to do so? Novels aren’t flash fiction. They take a long time and lots of work to make them right and until they’re right the reading of them can be pretty dire.)

Hey, you say, she’s not short of cash. Well, what’re you, a communist? Robin Hood?

Okay, Meyer’s no doubt quite rich as a result of her strange subgenre. But she’s not Goldman Sachs. She isn’t selling things to people that are designed to lose them millions of dollars and enrich her in return. She’s being paid for the enriching experience of reading for those who buy her books.

When I mentioned to some friends that this sort of thing went on with books, they were surprised. Each of them noted that they had taken music and movies from the internet in just the same way. Each also said that they figured Roman Polanski was rich enough to let them have a free look at “The Ghost Writer.” That Bono would still be able to afford fancy sunglasses if they ripped off his latest album.

But remember, Cyberpunks are anarchists. Do you really want them to define the way you live? When was the last time you read a good book by an anarchist?

As the recently deceased Malcolm McLaren always noted, even The Sex Pistols with their claim to be anarchists were only in it for the money.

As I am sure everyone knows, a volcano with a name which contains a lot of ‘i’s’ has exploded in Iceland. No-one has, as yet, been hurt by the eruption, which is a result as far as I am concerned. To the great joy of people who live underneath one of the flight paths out of Manchester International Airport, the curtailment of flights into and out of the UK has brought with it some welcome peace and quiet. Other people are, of course, stranded here or abroad and that must be very worrying, inconvenient and expensive. I have only sympathy for those caught up in what is a very trying situation. It is, as ever in this country, the coverage of this event with which I must take issue.

As usual, this story is covered in every newspaper, on every TV channel and radio station ad nauseam. Yes, we do need information about the volcano and the effect it is having on aviation and business, but do we really need words like ‘disaster’? No-one has died. Do we really need hours of speculation (with whizzy diagrams) about how the eruption may progress? It’s up to multiple ‘i’ volcano as far as I can see and he/she ain’t saying a word.

Another thing that rankles is that the media keep on calling on the British government to ‘do something’. Do what? I have no great love for PM Gordon Brown or his government or the opposition, but what, realistically, can they do? Desperate to win votes in the upcoming general election, Gordon may be persuaded to hurl his entire cabinet into the mouth of the volcano in lieu of some sort of plug. But ‘i’ volcano will just spit them all out again. I’m sure the conservative opposition would be prepared to chuck in the odd hereditary peer as a sop to the electorate, but it wouldn’t actually make any difference. Natural events happen and ‘i’ volcano will carry on doing what it does for as long as it does and it won’t give a damn what Gordon Brown, Easyjet, Nicholas Sarkozy or some girl with fake tits on Britain’s Got Talent might think about it. Maybe if I were able to go somewhere myself I might think differently. But I am confined to the UK because of my broken leg until the end of May. Accidents too can be seen as quite natural although again ‘disaster’ would be overstating the case. I broke my leg and now I have to get it better again. ‘i’ volcano is having a bit of a bad time with fire and magma. Let’s all hope he/she gets better soon and continues not to kill anyone. In the meantime, lets cut the hyperbole and help the stranded as best we can.

PS. Yes, I do know that Volcano ‘i’ doesn’t in fact have any ‘i’s’ in its name, but the first time it was reported here and I saw it, it was misspelled. Now, in my head, it remains, sadly, Volcano ‘i’.

No, wreally! Those of you unfamiliar with the word, ‘wrotten’ shouldn’t feel too badly because I made it up. (I shall be covering made-up words in a blob futuredatedly). Wrotten, as you’ve probably guessed, is a cross between written and rotten. And, like many accommodating particles it allows itself to be used as an adjective. But, haven’t we all at some time or another?

I have recently returned from a horrible place where I locked my door and windows against the awful Thai New Year water abuse festival. I filled my refrigerator with microwave dinners (Only to discover the place didn’t have a microwave. Warning! Those little plastic trays do not, I repeat do not retain their shape in a gas oven.) I had the owner remove the television and I ran in intravenous drip from a five-liter box of South African red. And there I sat, wrotting away for three weeks only to emerge onto the damp, talcum powder-stained streets with my hand-wrotten book under my arm in four Tesco notebooks. The book is, I don’t hesitate to say, truly awful. But I love it anyway.

It reminds me of a day in 1961 when I was walking home from school and I bumped into Hilary Swank. No. Not that Hilary Swank. That Hilary Swank wasn’t even born yet. This Hilary Swank was 16 and I was surprised to see her pushing a pram along the pavement. Hilary had vanished from our street a year earlier and nobody seemed to know where she’d gone. She was a sixteen-year-old girl so I expected her pram to contain a pretty porcelain dolly with chubby cheeks. But, no. Snarling and burping in that old perambulator was the ugliest baby I’d ever seen in my short life. It had all the charm of a squid.

‘Hello, Colin,’ she said. ‘Look what I did?’

There. She admitted it. I was wondering whether I should call George the local bobby because that child had obviously been abused. But Hilary yanked the little crustacean out of its mobile crypt and held it to her miraculously expanded bosoms. And it was quite obvious that she loved that child despite its deformities.

‘Well, done, Hil,’ I said, not yet realizing how a child came into being. I was nine, and gooseberry bushes still featured in my concept of human reproduction. I even thought she might have picked it up cheap at a seconds store in London.

Both the child and Hilary grew up and we later learned that George the bobby had been more than a little complicit in the manufacture of the ugly baby. The moustache should have been a dead giveaway. He was sacked and he and Hilary and Nosferatu Jr. moved to a nearby suburb. I saw them from time to time on Wimbledon Broadway. Hilary went to great lengths to disguise her child who, to my surprise, turned out to be a female. Hilary dressed her daughter in pink ribbons in the summer and pink bobble hats in the winter and I imagine she spent a good deal of money on facial reconstruction because, year by year, the child started to resemble a normal human being. In fact, by the time she was sixteen all that plastic surgery had turned her into a real looker.

I met her in a pub when I was home from my last year at college. To the amazement of my old football teammates, she swaggered over to our table, smiled, wiggled a little bit, and said, ‘Hello, Colin. Do you remember me?’

THE END

No, wait. There was a point to this. What was it again? Oh, right. The book I’ve wrotten. You see, my book is really ugly. It’s stupid and badly wrotten and is fully of mistakes and embarrassing bits and characters get killed then come back to life again, and I keep giving everyone the wrong names, etcetera, etcetera. There’s nothing good about it at all. If anyone could decipher my horrible handwrotting, they’d be dismayed by my rapid decline, my fall from crime-writing superstar to doggy doodoo. They might even call into question my IQ and ethnic background.

But, you see? All my books look like that when I bring them home. They’re all wrotten. I know with a pink ribbon here, a good deal of facial reconstruction, an Oprah makeover and a workout, that my book will stroll up to me one evening and say, ‘Hello Colin. Remember me?’ And she’ll be a beauty. And my mates will dig me in the ribs and go, ‘Whoooa!’

Hopefully it won’t get pregnant when it’s sixteen.

In a recent interview I was asked how I became a literary legend in Asia.

I was a 13-years-old newspaper boy on my route one early morning when a freak snowstorm hit. A car stopped and a small Asian man rolled down the window and asked me if I’d like a ride. At least I think that is what he asked me that morning; I remember that he spoke what sounded like a foreign language. He swung open the car door. It was cold and snowing. I got in. He gave me a cup of hot chocolate to drink. Next thing I woke up in San Francisco. Everything I had was on me that morning. I had lost my small nest egg.

I was without any money and living in a small room in the back of a Chinese restaurant. I was forced to wash dishes. I didn’t understand a word of what was being said around me. I washed dishes until I turned fifteen, saving my money. One day a customer, driving a new BMW, arrived at the restaurant. She pulled me outside and pointed at her car. She was Chinese and old enough to be my mother. I didn’t understand a word she said. Chinese is a hard language to learn and a dishwasher doesn’t get a lot of vocabulary thrown at him.

It didn’t matter about her lack of English, I was used to not understanding anyone around me. But I was getting good at reading expressions and body language. I got into her new, shiny car. I liked her smile. She gave me a nice drink in a bottle, and when I woke up, I was on a boat in the middle of the sea. I had again lost my small nest egg.

Three weeks later, I arrived by ship in Bangkok. I was handed over by an agent to a mamasan, and worked for the next two years washing sheets and cleaning rooms in an upscale brothel in the old part of the city. I saved every baht I could lay my hands on. The mamasan’s sister in San Francisco threatened to kill me unless I paid her an employment placement fee of three thousand dollars. I had until the end of the week. I told a GI who was on RR and a customer at the brothel that I was being held against my will. He helped me escape one night. Someone broke his nose in the fight out of the place. He held off three bouncers with a knife. I lost all of my savings. The GI said he could find me a job in Vietnam.

I got a job stacking shelves in the American PX in Saigon. I lasted almost two years. I had saved enough working at the PX to return home. Two days before I was to leave Saigon, my apartment took a direct hit from a Viet Cong shell. I later found out it was an agent of the mamasan and the woman from San Francisco who had paid the Viet Cong to destroy my place. I was supposed to be inside. But I lost all of my savings.

I walked into the Canadian embassy and told them I wanted to go home but I had no money. The second secretary got me a ticket on the black market and took me aside and told me that unless I paid him back within six months he would fly to Vancouver and kill me with his bare hands. He had big hands with large blue veins like a living killing machine. I thought he might know the mamasan or her sister. I was careful about places and dates.

Twenty-years old, I arrived in Vancouver, promising myself never to take another free ride from a stranger, when a car pulled up and an Asian man asked me if I like a lift. I get in. Why? I thought he’d been sent by either by the embassy guy in Saigon, the mamasan in Bangkok or that woman in San Francisco. One of them had sent a hitman who’d finally caught up with me. I thought my life was over. Accept karma, I told myself. At least I hadn’t saved anything. I had absolutely nothing to lose. But I was wrong.

The driver spoke perfect English. He’d been born in Canada and said he didn’t know anyone in Vietnam or the Canadian Embassy. So I told him my story. He asked me if I let him make me into a literary legend? I asked him if I got to keep the money I saved? He said, you bet. I said I had no money to bet with. He said it was a figure of speech and a writer had to learn to live with it just like Hugh Heffner had learned to live with a bed full of blondes.

I said I could do that and I also told him that he was the first person since I was 12 that I’d had a real conversation with in English. He said Conrad (Joseph Conrad, not Conrad Black) had a problem with English as a second language. I said I had a problem with English as a first language. He said that he was Chinese Canadian and he fully understood and offered to be my agent. He got me a contract to write a radio play for the CBC and then a book deal in New York.

I stopped saving and spent every dime as it came in. A couple of years later, my agent introduced me to his father, an old Asian man. The father smiled, and I smiled. Even though the father was quite old but I remembered him—the man who had stopped his car in a snowstorm when I was thirteen and offered me a ride and a cup of hot chocolate. He winked and asked me if I’d like something to drink.

Robert Harris has been one of my favorite authors since I first laid hands on “Fatherland,” his “what if the Nazis had won” thriller. “Enigma” and “Archangel” were even better. His first two Roman ventures “Pompei” and “Imperium” were by no means the worst books I read in the years of their publication.

Then came “The Ghost.” The story of a hack writer hired to ghost the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister — transparently Tony Blair — was diminished by two things. First, Harris clearly dislikes Blair’s political decisions so much he lost some of the power of empathy that had been important in his earlier books. Second, it was one of those times when the first person narrator simply didn’t work.

Now that the novel has been made into a movie – with Harris co-writing the script with Roman Polanski – the “I” has been dropped. Significantly, the story now works much better. What is it about the change of voice that completely shifted the emphasis of the book, and improved the storytelling?

Voice – “my” voice or “his” voice – is a key element in writing a novel. “I” can give you something quirky or, more significantly, immediacy. “His” gives you detachment.

Harris wanted his narrator to be increasingly compelled, against his better instincts, to investigate something seedy he appeared to be uncovering about the former Prime Minister as he worked on the memoirs with him. In fact, it robbed him of detachment and left the narrative cluttered with the kind of outrage about Iraq and terrorist rendition the Ghostwriter probably wouldn’t have felt – but which Harris clearly did.

By taking the story out of the first person, Polanski and Harris avoided the internal outrage. Instead, they made the unnamed Ghostwriter’s actions almost entirely the result of external events. Only once or twice does he make a choice that takes him deeper into the action – to call a political foe of the Prime Minister whose phone number he finds in a dead man’s effects, for example. That’s far less than in the novel, where he’s constantly talking himself into doing something we all know he shouldn’t…and which a man being paid a quarter of a million pounds for a month’s ghostwriting surely would avoid.

There’s an alternative to the immediacy of “I” and the all-knowing narrator of the Victorian novel, however. Think of point of view. Each chapter – even the entire novel – should be from the point of view of particular character. That way you get the immediacy of first person without sacrificing the detachment of third person. (Third person also gives you more descriptive power as you can use language that might seem verbose in the mouth of your character.)

In other words, stay “with” a single character. From time to time, let us into his head with a “he thought.” But don’t stay inside that head and, by the same token, don’t switch heads from paragraph to paragraph. Let things happen to the character without the reader seeing it entirely through the character’s eyes.

That’s what Polanski and Harris did in the movie “The Ghost Writer.” Ewan McGregor, who plays the Ghostwriter, is in almost every scene. We see everything unfold from his point of view. We just don’t have to follow every trivial thought or angry impulse. And we end up with a lot more sympathy for the former Prime Minister.

It might seem less hard-hitting as political commentary. But it’s a much better story.

For years I’ve been tormented by the notion that I might be able to do stand up comedy. I have no reason to believe I’d be any good. But then I’ve never actually tried going to an open mic night at a comedy club in order to find out. I tell myself I have no time, the truth is that I’m totally chicken. Occasionally however I become tormented by some imaginary ‘routine’, always in the middle of the night, which haunts and distorts my sleep. Just such a thing happened last night. I call it ‘Riffing on Food’. I’m doing it on paper and sitting down like all cowardly comics.

Television is all about food these days. We’ve got ‘Masterchef’, ‘Come dine with Me’, Jamie Oliver telling us we’ll all die if we don’t stop eating chips with curry sauce and of course Heston Blumenthal making Elizabethan Beef Wellington out of a dead gnu, an electric blanket, a gun and the head of Alfredo Garcia. And even when it’s not on the TV everyone talks about food all the time. Gossip amongst yummy mummies at the school gates can go something like:

Mum 1: So, what’s the plan for tonight then?

Mum 2: Well I thought we’d start with seared scallops in a champagne jus, followed by slow roasted belly of pork on pot herbs and then finish with a strawberry ganache enrobed in Belgian chocolate.

Lovely, and how different from when I was a punky mummy back in the 1980s. Then ‘the plan’ was usually to get the baby sitter in and get down the pub with a mate as quickly as possible. Sink four pints of bitter and smoke twenty fags straight off and then pause briefly for some salt and vinegar crisps before getting into an argument with some National Front moron. After rescuing my friend from the clutches of several pissed and randy squaddies I’d then repair to the off licence for some cheap red wine in a plastic bottle. Then home James, via the chip shop, new romantic big haired people on the telly and unconsciousness. What was not to like about that jus and ganache free experience?

I think that all of this food business has come about because nobody smokes any more. Deep down everybody is annoyed and resentful because they can’t have a tab. So in order to make up for it they just MUST have chocolate flavoured knickers with home made custard, rats arse stuffed with quail or tapir placenta with marmite. It’s obscene! It’s childish pique! No wonder everyone west of Baghdad is so fat. Great tubs of blubber panting away in the gym (because it is good and because Madonna does it) can barely make it to the high street to actually buy their buffalo mozzarella themselves! In years to come when all the oil runs out and we haven’t got any electricity, someone is going to resurrect the sedan chair and really clean up because of these foodies. Of course the chairs will have to be quite wide and will have to come with their own champagne mini-bar and olive oil drizzled canapés, but it will be a nice little earner, trust me.

I know that in a way I am just as bad with my complete disregard for ‘good’ food. My love of Bournville plain chocolate, fags and chemicals will catch up with me in the end. But at least the poor undertakers boys will be able to carry my coffin. When I go into hospital to have a limb removed they won’t have to put me on a specially constructed supersize operating table. I will never suffer the indignity of having my dinner party ruined by a failed chocolate fondant. There will be no dinner parties, there will be no experimentation with calves liver and gold ingots. I am never going to be a foodie and as far as I am concerned Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsey and the rest of them can deliver their tough love message about food until the end of time. I am never going to eat curly kale. You can dress it in a crinoline and call it Mary, but it’s not for me and I’d rather give birth to punch bowls than put it in my mouth.

Then, as they say in fairy stories, I woke up. There was no more. The midnight theoretical comic had left the building to midnight theoretical thunderous applause. What utter lunacy.

Don’t worry, I won’t give up the day job.

It’s been three weeks already and I’m starting to miss you both. Here’s the final posting of my old cartoons. This week is my slant on how there were more authors at the 2006 Bouchercon than their were readers, an illustration for Jim Eckhardt’s book of short stories; Thai Jinks, and the love affair with the new pandas at Chiang Mai zoo. If I haven’t starved to death I’ll be back in person next week with lots of funny stories about how I’ve been locked up in a room with a pen and a dozen notebooks.

The jungle is a state of mind, a place where tooth and claw and the skill in deploying them decide who wins the battle. The reality becomes divided into black and white. Live or die. Kill or be killed. Demonize the enemy. Crank up the hatred of the ‘other.’ Tribal emotions pulse through the veins, hot and raging, until they boil over. Tear gas, water cannon, life rounds, anti-aircraft guns, batons, sharpened bamboo poles are among the weapons reported in the press since the Saturday 10th April confrontation at the Phan Fah Bridge near Democracy Monument in Bangkok. That night, the jungle mind crept out on all fours and pounced, devouring those in its path. It is almost a week since that night of killing and death. It is still sinking in. The mind tries to wrap around the implications of so much death and injury. Head shots. Chest shots.

This morning (Friday 16th April 2010) Thai security forces unsuccessfully tried to arrest red shirt leaders who were located inside a Bangkok hotel. Dramatic photographs and video of one leader escaping is everywhere. He eased over the side of the hotel and with the help of friends, used a rope to lower himself to the ground and waiting red shirted demonstrators. The images are like Spiderman meets 007 who meets Benny Hill as he scales down a hotel wall. It is the kind of image that fuels emotion on both sides. It doesn’t encourage demand. It encourages just the opposite the tendency to see things in terms of winners and losers.

That is jungle mind thinking. Knocking out the other side. Crippling them. Ambushing them. Closing down any discussions or negotiations, setting them aside, because the urge for a more powerful response is beyond rational, analytical thought. It is visceral, from the gut, not the head, not for finding a middle ground, but finding the right battle crowd and the right weapon to drive the other side into defeat.

That is the problem with the jungle state of mind: it lives, breaths and dies on high octane emotions and there is nothing to quicken the heart beat than the crack of rifle shots in the air and men and women running for their lives.

The latest call by the government has been to round up the leaders, and the term ‘terrorists’ has become the favoured description of elements within the Red-shirted demonstration. By designating people who are mingling at the protest sites as terrorists appears to be a justification for harsh actions to disperse the protestors.

So far it is a standoff between the government and the Red shirts as the skirmishes continued in the city streets. The state of the jungle mind, in times of crisis, reverts to a more primitive urges—perhaps it is our default setting at times like this—and among those high charge emotions are revenge. Lives have been lost and from the spiral of events it appears that more lives may be lost before anything approaching stability and order has been restored.

What Thailand needs is someone to calm the jungle mind. To reset the default. To find a trail from the ruin, bodies and destruction, to a place where people can see each other as people, worthy of respect, worthy of listening to, worthy of calling brother and sister. The time for such a time has never been greater. The hallmark of a great leader is to step forward at the time when the jungle mind has gone insane with rage, flailing and engorged on its own blood lust, and to bring sanity back. Will such a person emerge who can tame the jungle mind? That is the question many are asking. No one knows. As once the jungle mind infects millions it is hard to pull them back from the brink. The jungle blood lust calls them in a powerful voice. The way to answer the jungle mindset is not to feed the beast with more emotional fuel.

If there’s one thing that authoring a series of novels will teach you, it’s that you can’t wait for inspiration. But you can prompt it, give it little electric shocks that’ll keep it bubbling within you. Here are a few methods I use to do that.

I go to the places I’m writing about. I talk to people who might be similar to (or even the basis for) my characters. I read about them and their world. I engage in the same activities in which they specialize. But I also read about entirely different subjects – so long as they’re extremely well-written.

Some of that might sound obvious. I’ve written a series of Palestinian crime novels, so it stands to reason that I’ve spent the last decade and a half in Gaza, Bethlehem, Nablus, Jerusalem, tasting and smelling and talking and looking. I even force myself to read the drivel that gets written about this place in journalism and nonfiction—occasionally I come across something good, but mainly it just gets me down. How many times can you listen to a mediocre pop song? Well, that’s how most Middle East journalism sounds in my ear.

For a novel I have coming out next year about Mozart, I learned to play the piano. I learned that I wasn’t much good at it, but I also saw inside the music in a way I couldn’t have done merely by listening.

Not so obvious, however, might be the wide reading. A number of writers I’ve met or read about say they don’t have time to read anything that isn’t directly related to their research. In other words, if I’m writing about Berlin, it’s goodbye to Raymond Chandler for the next 12 months.

Well, T.S. Eliot wrote that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” I can look back at my literary efforts as an undergraduate and see what imitation there was throughout all of it. Now I’m mature (I try to fight it; I work out; but I concede, I’m maturing…) and I’ve figured out how to steal.

What Eliot meant was that it takes a while, as a writer, to realize how to make things your own. That means going beyond the plagiaristic imitation of youth, which is humble and filled with homage, to the confident sense that whatever you see another writer do, you can do it better. Then when you read something good, it doesn’t appear in your work as the same thing—it spurs you to develop your own spin on the thought that’s provoked in you by what you’ve read.

Let me give you an example. I challenge any one of you to show me a contemporary writer who can build a character in a fuller, more convincing manner than Hilary Mantel, who won the Booker Prize last year for her masterful “Wolf Hall.” If anything, her 1992 classic “A place of Greater Safety,” a novel about the French Revolution, is even more amazing than her now-famous prize-winner.

“Greater Safety” tells the story of the entire revolution through the characters of Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins. From their childhoods to (it’s a historical novel so I don’t have to give any spoiler alerts) their executions. Each of them is built slowly, and we see their character arc in a way that even they don’t—watch their idealism tainted with violence, until it turns on them. Because we take that journey with them, we care more deeply for them, even as they become murderous and unjust.

The “stealing” comes in whenever I see a point that Mantel uses to build that empathy. Robespierre, we learn, always carries a tiny copy of Rousseau in his pocket. Some time later it’s on his desk and Desmoulins notices it. Just one sentence. A couple hundred pages later someone quotes Rousseau against him and only his close friends understand that he’s entirely defeated. We know he’s a man who has bent principles for his friend Desmoulins, but he can’t desert them completely. It’s a choice between Desmoulins, whom he loves, or the book that he keeps close to his heart. Books always win in contests like that.

That doesn’t make me want to replicate the exact same thing in my next book – that’s what I might’ve tried when I was 19. Instead, I think of ways in which to send a signal to the reader. To plant an object that inspires a character, that takes them on the path on which we follow them in the novel. Until ultimately it underlies their collision with another character; makes compromise an impossible undermining of everything they believe about themselves.

That’s stealing, and it’s a good thing to do.

You can find such moments in the small factoids of history books, if you’re researching a period, or in nonfiction. It’s in poems, where a phrase about a frieze on an urn (“Thou still unravished bride of quietness”) will spark a thought about your memories of your own wedding or of a sexual exploit which you can use for a character in your book.

A writer whose obvious focus is character would be the most direct place to start. In other words, not the kind of ultra-bland snoozing that appears in the short fiction of The New Yorker, which always seems to be written as though it were designed to mimic a relatively dull person telling you a story in a cocktail party or at the counter of a bodega.

Choose something with sweep, like Mantel. Someone with an eye for a mordant detail, like Graham Greene in “The Honorary Consul.” Someone who shows you an entire, devastated culture through the eyes of one man, like Martin Cruz Smith’s investigator Arkady Renko.

A novel’s like a marathon. Stop and sit down at the side of the road and no amount of sprinting will get you to the finish line. You have to write every day and once you’re started you can’t stop. “Stealing” is a way of warming up for the long run.