If he wrote what he knew, it would be a sparse novel about a man in a Swiss sanatorium in the grip of hopelessness and existential dread. Who on earth would want to read that? Ramsay certainly wouldn’t. “All you have to do,” Shirley advised, “is write one sentence after another and—voilà! A novel.” It would be easier if he had a title. If he had the right title then the rest of his novel would start to flow naturally from it. Could you be a writer if you hadn’t actually written anything? An artist if you hadn’t actually produced any art?
