Writing can be a haunting, I said, and you said that was a cliché. I protested. There are few things you can say about writing, I ventured, that are not clichéd. When you laughed again, I persisted. There is something haunting about it, I said, perhaps because of that heightened sensibility, because you spend so much time listening for the words. You make a character from nothing, a few words, fragments of people you know or have seen from afar, and once they are up and walking they don't just come and go at your will; they begin to be demanding, appearing at awkward times, doing things you wouldn't have dreamed they could; they come upon you suddenly when you are asleep or making love. And I'm not talking about the sudden apparition of ideas for plots or new episodes -- that happens too -- I am talking about people who exist only in your head but who appear in your living room when you have temporarily forgotten they existed, when you have closed your study door on them. It's a kind of possession. You begin to feel you are being watched.