‘Everything is negotiable,’ says Michael Donaghy, talking on a BBC tape about writing poetry, which means he thinks you ought to do a lot of negotiating if you want your writing to be successful. Margaret Atwood, trying to explain the writing process in The Writer on Her Work by Janet Sternburg, makes nine attempts to answer the question: Why do you write? as a way of showing that the answer itself will need the same kind of redrafting. There’s always ‘the laborious revision, the scrawled-over, crumpled-up pages that drift across the floor like spilled litter … You look at what you’ve done. It’s hopeless. You begin again. It never gets any easier.’