for no reason, Martin Amis, Will Self

WS: The question you are most frequently asked by non-writers is, 'How do you get your ideas? Where do they come from?' To them, imagination seems to be this separate faculty in the mind that just spews out ideas, doesn't it? I don't know if you would agree with me, but I don't see my imagination in that way at all. I'm not sure I even believe in the idea of imagination conceived in that way.
MA: I agree. I think the real mystery is talent. Because all writers have had those days when it doesn't feel like endeavor, when it feels like you're just clearing away stuff to get at what's there. Auden described writing as scraping away on a dusty stone to see what the inscription is.
WS: There's the alternative idea though, isn't there? There's Hemingway's concept of being 'juiced,' or Simenon's view of himself as just watching an internal film, and copying down the dialogue as it's spoken. A sense of automatic writing and production, do you ever have that?
MA: Kerouac took writing off the top of the head as far as it would go; where you just write down what occurs to you, and trusted to a kind of inner mumble. But the nearest I get to that is a kind of comic flow, a flow of comic invention. Then ideas suggest themselves and seem to come very naturally, the comedy starts to impact and become more like itself, more ridiculous.
WS: That's like being a stand-up comic, isn't it? The timing of each gag suggesting the timing for the next. Presumably when that's happening you bifurcate, forming an internal audience that's giggling at what's coming out.
MA: Yes, I think that's true. And I'm very fond of the notion, which is summed up by the anecdote, that there was a writer-in the days when you still had to put your occupation on your passport-who was going to Amin's Uganda. And on the plane he thought that he would change his passport, just to be on the safe side. So he made a little squiggle and transformed 'writer' into 'waiter.' I do think writing is waiting a lot of the time. Not waiting on table, but a vigil. When it isn't flowing, when there isn't an internal voice dictating what you ought to say, then it's better just to sit and wait." here.