Alan Coren

Were you to look up the word ‘peripolitan’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, you would not find it. Though the thing weighs three tons and preens itself on containing every word jotted in English since the language first dragged itself out of the primordial alphabet soup, peripolitan is not there. This irritates me no end, because I coined it, 20 years ago. I have, furthermore, deployed it at every subsequent opportunity, often in bold or italic the better to catch the lexicographic eye; but whenever I ring the OED to ask them when it’s going in, some snooty philological time-server tells me that they already have a perfectly good word to describe those who live on the edge of cities: they are suburban.

High on the teetering list of all the things that, down the long arches of the hacking years, have dissuaded me from trying to cobble a novel is the dreary business of describing how the characters look. You have a picture of this person or that in your head, and your reader, having coughed up his £15.99, has every right to know what so-and-so looks like when he or she walks into a room, feels cheery or glum, gets on top or underneath this or that other person, eats his dinner, rides a horse, lands a fish, strangles his landlady, or any of the hundred-and-one things a character has to do in the course of 300 pages, but how can you be certain that the reader is getting the image as precisely as you intend?