Geniuses galore

I am in awe of writers. I can write and I earned my living as a writer for many years. But only of factual stuff. I can organise complex information, make difficult things easy to understand but I lack imagination. I can't invent. Even when my children were small and the cry "Tell me a story" went up, I could do it with ease, but only by having the little boy, little girl, witch or elephant came to a crossroad and I would ask "Which way did he/she turn?" and then, when they came to a house, what happened when they knocked on the door? And so the story unfolded helped along by my children's imagination. Not mine.

But here are all these amazing writers who can create a world of their choosing for me to savour. Just take the last three books I have read: The Siege of Krishnapur by one of my favourite writers, J. G. Farrell about the Indian Mutiny,  An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris, an incredibly dramatic account of the Dreyfus affair and Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver, set in Arizona, about politics, love, idealism and ecology, wonderfully written and a book that stays with one.

What these writers have in common is not only a rare gift for stringing words together beautifully but of making one want to turn page after page and preferably not put the light out to go to sleep. Before reading those books, I was riveted to nearly a thousand pages of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Not a page too long!

Where do these wonderful novelists get it from? How can they imagine themselves to such a believable extent in other people's shoes? In other lands? In other centuries? With other beliefs? I just don't know.