As to my enthusiasm for writing the article about London... Actually, that's an interesting question. But I don't know whether I can provide an interesting answer.

What's interesting is the question of how I actually go about writing something. Often the way it starts is that there's something I know I want to write, but I don't really have, as I said, much heart for it. And at worst, I finally just sit down and force myself to get words on the page (i.e. on the computer screen). And if they seem fairly dead, then maybe afterwords I can go over what I've written and find a way to bring it to life.

But at best, what happens is that for days or weeks before I actually write anything I keep going over the whole thing in my head and I start realizing that there are certain things I definitely want to say. And then eventually I reach a point where there are a whole lot of sentences in my head that I definitely want to write, and then there are so many that my head will not tolerate having them all in there any more, so I absolutely have to write them all down as soon as possible. And at that point it's usually not too hard to figure how to sequence all these little pieces to create a coherent structure.

Then there's a third possibility, which I don't manage to use very often, but which was the original reason I started the Ramblings section of my web site. (Although only a few of the articles in that section are really ramblings. My favorite, very rambling, is On Models and Creativity. People say to me, rather puzzled, "I don't quite see that point you're trying to make." There is no bottom line to that article. Just a number of thoughts that seem like they ought to somehow make some sort of pattern, but the pattern will be different for different readers.)

[We now return you to our regularly scheduled paragraph.] And this third path is that I have some particular idea of some particular thing I want to say and then just sit down and start writing without any idea of what's going to come next. I sometimes think of it as free-associating at the keyboard. Now this seems to be the process that a lot of writers recommend (Nathalie Goldberg in particular) but, as I say, it's not my usual way.

So as I write this now, I realize that what hangs me up usually, and what is undoubtedly the reason that I don't manage to write more than I actually do, is that I have something in my head that I want to write, but I'm not able to really see a structure for it, and it's hard for me to force myself to start writing until I see that structure.

And also it can be that I have general things I want to say, but I don't have any words. I don't have any sentences. In that case I could just sit down and put one word after another, "The horse went up the hill and it was very steep," but this is not interesting to me and it doesn't make me want to write, because the sentence is not alive. It's sort of the difference between writing, "Human beings are really stupid," as contrasted with "What fools these mortals be!"

As a writer, I'm not a very good hired gun. When I have something I want to write, I write it, but if the desire isn't there, it's really hard.

Anyway, in writing London Part One I did have certain things I wanted to say and I did have certain words and sentences in my head, for instance describing the tube map as a glob of spaghetti. But I didn't really seem to have as many of these as a needed, and I didn't see it all as fitting into a structure.

When I finished writing the article, I was glad that it was done, and it didn't seem completely dead, and the structure was perfectly okay, and I didn't and don't have any second thoughts about sending Part One out. But I also didn't have the sense that I'd written something which had been really important for me to say.