There is a scene in Alice Through the Looking Glass which I have carried with me my whole life. Perhaps it is my primal scene as a writer because I am still stuck there: stuck with Alice in the wool shop with the White Queen who has turned into a sheep who is bleating all sorts of strange and peculiar things I am still trying to work out. This is my perpetual writing project; where I write from. I am trying to work out what is ‘better’ or ‘much better,’ and why. This, I believe, is what art is for: a sense of self-improvement which only I —- or my internal White Queen —- can determine the value of in the end.

“Oh, much better!” cried the Queen, her voice rising to a squeak as she went on. “Much be-etter! Be-etter! Be-e-e-etter! Be-e-ehh!” The last word ended in a long bleat, so like a sheep that Alice quite started.

She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up in wool. Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again. She couldn’t make out what had happened at all. Was she in a shop? And was that really—was it really a sheep that was sitting on the other side of the counter? Rub as she could, she could make nothing more of it: she was in a little dark shop, leaning with her elbows on the counter, and opposite to her was an old Sheep, sitting in an arm-chair knitting, and every now and then leaving off to look at her through a great pair of spectacles.

“What is it you want to buy?” the Sheep said at last, looking up for a moment from her knitting.

“I don’t quite know yet,” Alice said, very gently. “I should like to look all round me first, if I might.”

“You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,” said the Sheep: “but you can’t look all round you—unless you’ve got eyes at the back of your head.”

But these, as it happened, Alice had not got: so she contented herself with turning round, looking at the shelves as she came to them.

The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things—but the oddest part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.

“Things flow about so here!” she said at last in a plaintive tone, after she had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing, that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-box, and was always in the shelf next above the one she was looking at. “And this one is the most provoking of all—but I’ll tell you what—” she added, as a sudden thought struck her, “I’ll follow it up to the very top shelf of all. It’ll puzzle it to go through the ceiling, I expect!”

But even this plan failed: the “thing” went through the ceiling as quietly as possible, as if it were quite used to it.

And then there is the scene just a few scenes before where Alice finds herself on a train travelling the wrong way without a ticket. Somehow the shop and the train have merged in my imagination. In both spaces the signifier and the signified are wildly at odds. The Queen is now a sheep but behaves as though she were still a queen; and the passengers are ‘people’ even though Alice identifies them as a Beetle and a Goat and a Horse. Somewhere surely there must be people making sense of these encounters? Perhaps the drive to write emerges from a need to make sense of nonsense. I wish to move forward not backwards; to order and govern some sort of plot; to tailor some kind of narrative rule or governance. I suspect I will always be in the role of Alice trying to put right the wild disorder of the world by writing up my own set of cardinal points.

There is something liberating about permitting characters to appear and disappear willy-nilly, and a train carriage is a useful metaphor for the writing project because of its neatly ordered caterpillar-style segments, what you might call an achievable form. My forthcoming book (The Green Lady) has several train journeys which appear repeatedly in my dreams as versions of ‘The Writing Dream’. In my dream, I can hear the sound of typing next door to me in the connecting carriage, but I am separate from that typist and her clickety-clack, which is also the sound of the train hitting the metal tracks, the sound of forward movement, of locomotion, the writer’s progression.

Train journeys occur in my new project, Pond Life, through David Lean’s magnificent film, Brief Encounter, built from the exquisitely structured screenplay by Noel Coward. The screeching, smoky train signifies the impossibility of the lover’s romance plot which is never consummated because it must remain a fantasy in order to survive as a perpetual possibility. It is also a summary of any writing project which can only ever move along into the next carriage (progression being fundamental to the writer’s sense of hope) hoping that in this portion of the journey the fellow travellers — the readers —- will be sympathetic companions. Amongst all the motley disorder of Wonderland, Alice is looking for some sort of harmony; a chorus of voices, a song, some shared experience with communal reference points. I suppose the writer is also looking for this: a way of joining up with a set of people she imagines as readers whose individual responses may be unique but with whom she travels - companionably - in the same carriage. Readers build communities, and writers too, but the writer’s essential business is a lonely one and so she is grateful not to be told she is on the wrong journey with the wrong ticket or no ticket at all. In the end the experimental writer (and you might say any writing is experimental) must make her own ticket and bring her own cushions and picnic. Settle herself in.

“Tickets, please!” said the Guard, putting his head in at the window. In a moment everybody was holding out a ticket: they were about the same size as the people, and quite seemed to fill the carriage.

“Now then! Show your ticket, child!” the Guard went on, looking angrily at Alice. And a great many voices all said together (“like the chorus of a song,” thought Alice), “Don’t keep him waiting, child! Why, his time is worth a thousand pounds a minute!”

“I’m afraid I haven’t got one,” Alice said in a frightened tone: “there wasn’t a ticket-office where I came from.” And again the chorus of voices went on. “There wasn’t room for one where she came from. The land there is worth a thousand pounds an inch!”

“Don’t make excuses,” said the Guard: “you should have bought one from the engine-driver.” And once more the chorus of voices went on with “The man that drives the engine. Why, the smoke alone is worth a thousand pounds a puff!”

Alice thought to herself, “Then there’s no use in speaking.” The voices didn’t join in this time, as she hadn’t spoken, but to her great surprise, they all thought in chorus (I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means—for I must confess that I don’t), “Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!”

“I shall dream about a thousand pounds tonight, I know I shall!” thought Alice.

All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass. At last he said, “You’re travelling the wrong way,” and shut up the window and went away.

“So young a child,” said the gentleman sitting opposite to her (he was dressed in white paper), “ought to know which way she’s going, even if she doesn’t know her own name!”

A Goat, that was sitting next to the gentleman in white, shut his eyes and said in a loud voice, “She ought to know her way to the ticket-office, even if she doesn’t know her alphabet!”

There was a Beetle sitting next to the Goat (it was a very queer carriage-full of passengers altogether), and, as the rule seemed to be that they should all speak in turn, he went on with “She’ll have to go back from here as luggage!”

Alice couldn’t see who was sitting beyond the Beetle, but a hoarse voice spoke next. “Change engines—” it said, and was obliged to leave off.

“It sounds like a horse,” Alice thought to herself. And an extremely small voice, close to her ear, said, “You might make a joke on that—something about ‘horse’ and ‘hoarse,’ you know.”

Then a very gentle voice in the distance said, “She must be labelled ‘Lass, with care,’ you know—”

And after that other voices went on (“What a number of people there are in the carriage!” thought Alice), saying, “She must go by post, as she’s got a head on her—” “She must be sent as a message by the telegraph—” “She must draw the train herself the rest of the way—” and so on.

But the gentleman dressed in white paper leaned forwards and whispered in her ear, “Never mind what they all say, my dear, but take a return-ticket every time the train stops.”

“Indeed I shan’t!” Alice said rather impatiently. “I don’t belong to this railway journey at all—I was in a wood just now—and I wish I could get back there..