Confessions

I once set fire to a nun. She had been annoying me since I was ten years old by looking like a horse, and a horse of bad character too: by having long yellow teeth, by being dull and crass and often violent. I'd waited 30-odd years to deal with her, and so when it came it wasn't a small blaze. Seemingly an instance of spontaneous combustion, it didn't kill her, but it put her in hospital and caused a lot of gossip in the parish.

I didn't get the blame, for I was nowhere near the scene. She was one of the characters in my novel Fludd. Mother Perpetua was her name in the novel, but the real-life original was called Mother Malachy. By now she'll be good and dead, but if she has any relatives out there, I'm not apologising. She was a bully and I arranged what she deserved: a tiny foretaste of hell.

Norman Mailer was quoted as saying recently: "No one understands that writers have personalities quite as ugly as the ugliest athlete." I think that's understating it. Athletes don't brood on their tormentors and savour their grievances, and hand out ingenious, long-delayed, personalised and painful fates. I know that writers of the Mailer tough-guy tendency feel undermined by their own trade, and wish it were done with guns, not pencils. But most writers, I'd guess, are slightly reserved, introverted individuals, more used to listening than talking, more used to taking it than dishing it out. They are, almost by definition, people who have been sidelined by life. You can't observe the action if you are part of it. But a clever writer can do wonderful things with a snub. He can rub up a resentment till it shines so bright it puts the original insult in the shade. And almost always, he gets away with it.

My novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which was set in Saudi Arabia, featured a character called Daphne Parsons, who was described as follows: "a sagging soft-fleshed woman, with flushed weathered skin and a Home Counties voice. She wore a flowing kaftan with a batik pattern, and her freckled arms were encircled by heavy antique bracelets of a traditional design; around her neck on a long chain she wore a beaten silver ornament, which bore an unfortunate resemblance to a gym-mistress's whistle. Her manner was benignly poisonous."

In the course of the story, Daphne never says anything that is not trite, malicious, self-serving and faintly racist. Imagine my joy when Daphne's original called me to congratulate me on my book. Why didn't she see herself? Was she misled by the fact that she'd never been near Jeddah: that I'd known her somewhere else? The truth is that people seldom call the writer to account. When you say you're writing a book, people do sometimes ask, "Am I in it?" but the person who could ask that question would not have enough self-awareness to identify himself. If he had the capacity to see himself from someone else's point of view, he simply wouldn't behave in that entertaining way.

Some people, notoriously, use memoirs to get revenge. It's not a good tactic. You're likely to end up pushed off the moral high ground, and involved in fights you can't win except at enormous cost. A memoir of a dead parent has the writer wallowing with living siblings in the mire of disputed facts. Living parents retain more power to injure than you imagine; and the ambivalence so beloved of creative writers plays very badly with family members who are not used to it and who expect words to yield plain and unequivocal meanings. And those who have lived life unregarded are often furious to find that, when notice is taken of them at last, it isn't on their terms. Sliding people into fiction is a more subtle and satisfying art, and much less likely to end in tears.

Sometimes, though, when I am not feeling gleeful about it, I wonder if my relations with other people are not permanently distorted by my habit of weighing them up to see if they make good material. It's true that my characterisations are not always debasing to the original. In a novel called A Change of Climate, I plucked an old school friend out of her time and place, made her 16 again, transplanted her to Norfolk and used her to help create a character of great sweetness and integrity. When I did that, I couldn't know that my friend would die young, to the shock and sorrow of everyone who knew her, and when she did, I felt that at least I had preserved something of her on the page. Strangely, another writer who knew her told me that she also had used her as a character in fiction. Perhaps some people go through life with a sort of mythic shimmer, themselves but more than themselves, and when you see that quality you want to capture it in the only way you can.

On the whole, though, I know more ugly sinners than saints. People would be afraid of me if they knew I kept a diary. Only a few weeks ago, I made a note on a man I had been seated next to at dinner: "Till now I have never met a man who could be completely summed up in one word; now I have, and that word is 'tosser.'" One day I shall find a page for him, and if he reads it, I have no doubt that he will do so with enjoyment.