Ah, Best Beloveds, there are days when you leave me moist–eyed and jolly, there really are. (There are other days when a – very – few of you make me want to change my address and wear a knee–length hat, but we'll let that pass.) You made me proud, you did, Dear Readers, with your ready responses to the last blog – your twunt and your frigbiscuits did my heart good. Thank you for reinvigorating my already enthusiastic faith in your imaginative and pleasing use of language and for making me reflect, yet again, that politicians, advertisers and fibbers of all varieties really don't know how massively they underestimate you and your linguistic sophistication. And hello to Ian Lawther. Both my sainted mother and I are now using fox cakes in our everyday exchanges and it is working well for us.

I feel we must all have another targeted exchange of views soon – perhaps with a real prize for especially excellent involvement. Although, of course, Mr Lawther does in a very genuine way now possess the reward of having made my mother grin. Very few people – apart from noisy children who have fallen over and hurt themselves – can do that. And, naturally, the cash I have available for prizes and postage is limited, so not winning might be less of a disappointment than opening a recycled envelope full of personally signed elm leaves – which is about what this month's surplus would run to.

Meanwhile, I have just – I hope – put the finishing touches to an essay on writing workshops and have therefore knocked away the last major obstacle between me and the novel being welded ever closer as I desperately try to get everything done and as it should be by the end of December. I do indeed catch myself telling those kind enough to enquire about the beast, "It'll all be over by Christmas." And then shuddering appropriately. Not that typing more than anyone healthy ever ought to is in any way comparable to being under fire at the Somme – I am simply squirming under a slightly tighter deadline than I am used to.

In fact, now that we mention it, I've never really had a deadline for a novel. But this time around, the health and sanity of the British publishing scene means that I am already discussing covers and cover blurbs for something which is roughly half–completed and for which I have only just signed a contract. One minute, I am ambling along with my hands in my pockets, flirting ardently but gently and with no legal obligations, and the next I'm roughly handcuffed to what may – I'll admit – develop into a lovely, warm and clean–limbed partner but which I, as usual, fear may turn out to be at best a corpse, and at worst some kind of brain–eating undead gentleman who will embarrass me at parties. If I miss the deadline, I miss the mystically calculated ideal time for novel release in 2011 and my editor has to disembowel a whole field full of goats before he can select another in 2012. (The goats aren't essential to the process – he just gets tetchy when publications don't go to plan.)

I am trying to remain calm and to kid (sorry) myself into thinking, well, if it has a cover and cover copy, then it must exist; all must be right with the novel. I have played a similar trick on myself with my notebooks for years – each book I intend to write has a notebook containing ... well, yes, notes, but nothing that is finished or, as things progress, is massively helpful. The notebook seems to be a way of getting to the point where I can start – and I know everyone is different in this area, I'm just saying how it is for me. Despite it being full of scared nonsense, illegible essentials and unhinged suggestions, I like to stare at the (tightly closed) notebook and pretend that it is, in fact, full of the novel, neatly written down by hand, and all I have to do is type it up and maybe do a spellcheck. There are mornings when this is convincing. Not many mornings, to be sure, but I cling to their spasms of dewy hope.

Turning back to that essay, I am glad I put an end to my major distractions by writing about workshops. This isn't so much because I like them – in fact, much of the essay was taken up with detailing what can go wrong with workshops and how un–useful the standard "lets sit round in a circle and read ourselves and each other with inadequate attention in a strained setting before allowing the blind to lead the deaf" type of workshop can be. But it also allowed me to remember the sheer wonder of a successful workshop. Apart from anything else a good workshop can allow us to see – as near as we ever will – writers writing, writing happening, the thing itself. There are few things better than sitting in a room that is suddenly united in action, that suddenly has that tingly, ozone-y feeling of something on its way – of inspiration taking shape, of words struggling or plummeting or bubbling through. When we work ourselves, we're too engrossed in the process to really be aware of it – to be frank, once we're aware, it tends to have gone away. When we see it in others – perhaps as part of group authorship, perhaps in a series of solo contributions – then there are moments when we can actually grasp the ungraspable, when we can see a very specific type of joy: the way a face clears and becomes beautiful when it is absolutely focused; completely itself and yet open to something other than itself, touched.

Part of what annoys me about the deadline and contract side of publishing is that it really has nothing whatever to do with writing, nothing to do with that beauty – the same beauty you see when someone is really reading, completely engrossed. I always say that writing and readers are misunderstood, because if you glance casually at people who are reading and writing, you may simply see people who appear serious, frozen. But if we happen to glance at people just before they kiss (not in an intrusive or unpleasant way, Best Beloveds) then their expression is the same – oddly solemn, intent. And yet nobody ever suggests that kissing is dull, or pathetic, or a bit of a waste of time. I happen to believe that giving and receiving a kiss operates very much along the same lines as giving and receiving a word – it's simply that the giving and receiving are done in different rooms at different times – they are still an attempt to touch, be touched, be recognised, to exist in passion, to be human.

I was reminded of this when reading Last Words of the Executed – a very fine book edited by Robert K Elder. One fragment records the mass hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux men. The St Paul Pioneer stated, "We were informed ... that their singing and dancing was only to sustain each other – that there was nothing defiant in their last moments ... Each one shouted his own name, and called on the name of his friend, saying in substance, 'I'm here! I'm here!'" It occurred to me that when we write fully and honestly, when we speak from who we are, mortal human being to mortal human being, it comes down to this – that we sustain each other with musics and dreams of motion, that we say who we are, that we reach out to the friend that is beyond us, out of sight – and this is perhaps defiant in the deepest possible way and is perhaps a type of love and is certainly very much alive and – I think it bears repeating – beautiful.

Onwards.