So far they are conforming to pattern, alas! I mean I am suffering from the usual delusion that the play was ready before we went into production. It happens every time. I give my publisher the finished text of the play so that it can be published not too long after the opening in London, but by the time the galleys arrive they’re hopelessly out-of-date because of all the changes I’ve made during rehearsals. This time I gave them Hapgood and told them that it was folly to pretend it would be unaltered, but I added, “I think it won’t be as bad as the others.” It turned out to be worse. Yesterday I realized that a chunk of information in the third scene ought to be in the second scene, and it’s like pulling out entrails: as in any surgery there’s blood. As I was doing it I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA—the double helix. There was only one way all the information they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the same. So the answer to your question is that the rehearsals are going well and enjoyably, but that I’m very busy with my pencil.

Instead, I’m here to tell you finding your purpose isn’t enough. The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.

I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

I’m a rather slow writer and I have to go to a coffee shop. I turn my back to the crowd in the cafe, so that everyone’s chatting and the noise of the place rises behind me, and then I just keep my head down and churn out my screenplay. I can’t write at home, because I get too lazy. I’ll just want to watch TV or fall asleep. But I’m not allowed to lie down and fall asleep in the cafe, right? So it kind of forces me to work.

Many creative people, especially the young, may feel their chaotic or disordered relationship with the world is indispensable to their creative freedom. The more anarchic, the better! However, after considerable fieldwork in this area, I have yet to find it so. I have come to understand that the muscle of the imagination is strengthened through resistance, discipline and order.

As many of you know, I observe specific protocols to open the creative mind – I sit at a desk in my office and write, working exclusively between 9am and 5pm. Within ‘office hours’ I find my mind becomes genuinely free, and I feel a creativity that is qualitatively richer than anything I may experience outside of this time, in the disorder and distraction of the ordinary world. For me, what must appear to some as forced labour is where all the imaginative mischief, beauty, and love are free to happen. Freedom finds itself in captivity.

I’m envious of people who don’t need that. There are people that just wander round the world and ideas fall down from wherever, and they sit and they strum a guitar one day and they write a song, and then they carry on living. I could never work in that way.