Sometimes you can be helped towards a greater understanding of your own views on a subject by reading an argument that is diametrically opposed to everything you believe. This happened to me yesterday when I came across the playwright Mark Ravenhill’s piece in the G2 section of the Guardian, a piece which in the print version appeared under the headline “British writers treat audiences as bored channel surfers. I’d much rather be treated as an adult.”

Ravenhill thinks that most contemporary plays, movies and novels infantilise their audiences by attempting to be too much fun. “And so we throw spectacle at you, make sure there are three laughs on every page, grip you with the power of ‘what happens next?’, do what we can to shock you with graphic sex and violence.” (Ravenhill, incidentally, came to prominence with his play ‘Shopping and Fucking’, which, according to Wikipedia, is in part about “drugs, shoplifting, phone sex, prostitution, anal sex, and oral sex in the London department store Harvey Nichols”.)  Ravenhill goes on: “From the worthiest of new-writing theatres to the brashest of musicals, from the Booker shortlist to the BBC newsroom, the assumption is the same – that you out there are very easily distracted.”

If he can find three laughs on every page of the books on the average Booker shortlist, then I want what he’s smoking, but of course the concern that our attention-spans are getting shorter is a real one, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Where we part company is in Ravenhill’s equation of the need to be entertained with immaturity. He describes a visit to Poland to see Polish theatre director Krystian Lupa’s play ‘Marilyn’, a “three-hour work in progress that will eventually form part of a nine-hour exploration of ‘personality’”. Ravenhill admits that the play was occasionally “really, really boring”, but then claims that this was OK, because “I was truly being treated as an adult, someone who didn’t need to be constantly diverted.”

I like to think that I too am an adult who doesn’t need to be constantly diverted – unless, that is, I have paid good money to be in a place of entertainment (and even the theatre, which God knows has provided some of the dullest nights of my life, can still, at a stretch, be described thus) – in which case I demand diversion, every single second of the evening. Anyone who is currently constructing “a nine-hour exploration of ‘personality’”, it seems to me, has completely forgotten about his audience, or at least the conventional notion of an audience, full of people with jobs and worries and dependants, people who are tired after a hard working day or week. My suspicion is that the policeman and the teacher and the nurse who works in a hospice does not feel infantilised in the least by someone’s desire to keep them entertained and diverted; rather, they are grateful for it. The job of providing these diversions, however, can occasionally seem less than adult: writers sit around in jeans and old T-shirts for large parts of the average working day, eating biscuits and watching some of the funnier acts from ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ on YouTube, while their friends and contemporaries don suits, rush off to meetings, save lives, keep entire transport systems running. Perhaps inevitably, there is a desire to compensate for the lifestyle, produce plays and books and films that are no fun whatsoever in an attempt to convince the world outside our offices that a day in front of the word-processor is the equivalent of eight hours down a Siberian salt-mine.

One of the joys of my job is the unpredictability of some of the requests received. To my great delight, I have been invited to draw a picture of my own a***ehole, as an appropriate way to mark the passing – as it were – of the great Kurt Vonnegut, who drew his own in ‘Breakfast of Champions’. Eric Spitznagel, who extended the invitation, runs a website called ‘Vonnegut’s A**ehole’ (and it’s an American website, so only two asterisks are necessary), and he claims that there is serious publishing interest in a collection of similar self-portraits. On the one hand, I can’t draw to save my life; on the other, the subject – unless I possess a particularly complicated and/or beautiful one – would require really very little talent. And how long could it take, really?

My current projects….Actually, there are no current projects. I have just finished dealing with the copy editor’s last few queries relating to SLAM, a novel that is about and hopefully for teenagers; the nth draft of the screenplay I’ve been working on for the last couple of years, an adaptation of Lynn Barber’s autobiographical essay AN EDUCATION, is out in the world looking for a director. Martin Amis once said that you should never talk about a film you’re connected to until you can rent it from your local Blockbuster. I don’t mind talking about it, but you must understand that anything I say is likely to look like preposterous bullshit in a couple of months, maybe even in a couple of hours. A few weeks ago, AN EDUCATION had a director, but no cast and no money; now it has a pretty good cast, it’s just about financed, and our director has gone. This is what happens in independent cinema, and it makes you yearn for the comfortable and gentlepersonly reassurances of publishing. If I write a book that I’m happy with and my editor is happy with, then it will get published. If I write a screenplay that I’m happy with and the producers are happy with, there’s probably a ten per cent chance that the film will get made. So now I’m making up my mind what I want to do next. Penguin is planning a series of illustrated novellas, and I’m pretty sure I’d like to have a go at one of those – there’s something I’ve been thinking about that my work in this form. And I have an idea for an original screenplay. If I start on both now, then one might see the light of day next spring, and the other in four years’ time, if it even lives that long. Meanwhile, it’s hot, and there are books to be read, films to be seen, bets to be made….

Update: Penguin’s plans for an illustrated series have collapsed. And the film business is insane. And I’ve temporarily given up betting, because I know nothing about summer sports. There are still books to be read, though.