MOST people reckon that writing, whether it’s poems or sermons, is a solitary occupation. It is true, of course, that a little solitude is helpful when you are engaged in the physical task itself — putting pen to paper, or tapping away on your laptop, although, even then, once you’ve got the bit between your teeth, it’s amazing how much distraction you can put up with, how much background noise you can ignore.

But when it comes to writing in the larger and fuller sense of taking the blank piece of paper, and the corresponding open space, the place of pure potential, in your mind, and creating something that was not there before, then writing is anything but solitary. Writing would not be possible were it not for the incalculable contribution of all you’ve read in so many other authors, all you’ve absorbed from your own community, all the people around you, and, of course, language itself, the very medium of your work, the language you drank in with your mother’s milk.

All this you have inherited from the creative labour of others. You might imagine that you are writing a monologue; but, in reality, you are making your own small contribution to a long, continuing, and unfinished conversation.

Even Shakespeare works with source texts, and with the inheritance of the English language itself. As he modestly says in one of his sonnets: “All my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent.”

This is, perhaps, a little too modest; for Shakespeare also contributed about 1700 new words to the language — at least, new to us. We do not know whether he coined them all, but we do know that his is the first recorded use of them. He was the first to write “bedroom”, “downstairs”, “fashionable”, “gossip”, “nervy”, and, surprisingly, “kissing”. Even the use of the word “traditional” is a tradition that starts with Shakespeare! And that’s not even mentioning the phrases which he minted new, and which, now, none of us can do without: “The be-all and end-all”, “What’s done is done” (both from Macbeth); “Wear my heart upon my sleeve” (Othello); “The world is my oyster” (The Merry Wives of Windsor); and “A tower of strength” (Richard III).

All these words and phrases we have inherited from another writer, and we take our inheritance so much for granted that we do not even pause to acknowledge the debt.

So, when I sit, apparently alone in my study, or now the weather is a little more clement, in the Temple of Peace, my little writing hut, I am never alone. Even as I uncap my pen, Shakespeare and his fellow poets — Spenser, and Donne, Hopkins, and Eliot — are all pulling up their chairs, or standing behind me and looking over my shoulder, watching my pen move and ready to make helpful suggestions.

And yet (and here is the miracle), what I write, once it is finished, will be completely new! I will have made a new arrangement, a new pattern of meaning, a new net to catch our fleeting apprehensions. There, in my old notebook, in the words of an old language, is something that has never existed before, and would never have existed had I not had the temerity to take up my pen and have a go.