"He was a writer before he was a breakfast food. He was a writer almost before he was a man."

What makes someone a writer? Is it a keen awareness of those people and events around you, and the extraneous cosmic influences that put them in their place? Is it an unrelenting hostility towards traditional ideals that governs an individual, directing them to change the way people perceive in a holistic sense, thereby separating themselves from the shoals of conventional disciples of other bygone writers? Is it simply having a talent for words?

What Cheever's son says about his father being a writer before anything else is irrefutably true from the point of view of someone whose eyes have seen life through Cheever's in his journal entries: "To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness...to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world." Cheever was destined to be a writer, this was his reason for existing.

I dip in and out of doctrines, but one constant stream I swim in is the notion of predestination, that a person's purpose is understood by forces alien to our consciousness before life has even been realised. Writing is the only act, besides those I find to be involuntary (breathing, thinking, dreaming etc.), that offers me a sense of empowerment. The power that finds a path to my thoughts and channels its way into my work is comparable to when a fledgling bird asserts the gift of flight on its maiden voyage; nothing but the power inherent in the very moment of the fall could be responsible for the saving grace of flight.

Writing was Cheever's predestined source of power and I don't deny that it is mine also - now if I could just learn to control the bloody thing!

What inspires and influences you as a writer?

Love; hate; frustration; exhilaration; comedy; drama; emancipation; incarceration; affairs; fidelity; fornication; celibacy; stardom; anonymity; obsession; apathy; intoxication; sobriety; wildlife; humanity; order; chaos; fat people; thin people; compassion; contempt; men; women; children; pensioners; war; peace; avarice; charity; white chocolate; dark chocolate; biology; chemistry; dubstep; folk music; dancing; sitting; artwork; officework; the tranquility of a spring morning; the devastation of a nuclear war.

This is only a microscopic summary of what can and should inspire the most perceptive and dutiful of writers. Anything and everything is the shortest possible answer (or 'nothing' if you're a pessimistic rebel). To make the most of your talent as a writer you should never close your door to the infinitely dissimilar arrivals to your doorstep; what you choose to invite in over the threshold of your imagination is entirely personal and unique to any particular author.

In the beginning, before adult tendencies start waging war on liberal artistic instincts (in most), a child's mind is an open skylight to the myriad influences of the world that pass by their eagerly absorbing eyes. This is the level of curiosity that I adhere to or, rather, arrests me as I go about the day-to-day drudgery which we all have to wade through before our short visits to paradise. Though, it probably occurs less than when I was a child, this curiosity control still possesses an inordinate degree of power over my senses, and when I'm attracted to something I will be lost to its capacity to inspire in me as many ideas as it can.

A protagonist that embodies the flaws and weaknesses of the writer distracts the reader from the narrative itself (agree/disagree).

Cheever, in his journals, claimed he resolved to avoid becoming 'the kind of writer through whose work one sees the leakage of some noisome semisecret'. Yet it was in his journals that his wealth of well-concealed self-excoriation exploded onto the page, disregarding the sacrosanct narrative of which his New Yorker material was evidently in keeping with. This, as with most sheltered creative minds, was to be expected, especially when you consider how easy it can be to make allusions to Cheever's private life through his professional work as a writer. But herein lies the argument.

That a writer does provide insinuations as to the nature of their own existence behind the published material they proffer is feasible, but not immutably true; that a reader who, with prior knowledge of a particular writer's past and personality, has formed a set of preconceived opinions pertaining to said writer uses them in judging the relationship between the writer's words and their own personal world - a privilege they would not have been entitled to otherwise - is more likely.

Without having read up on any disclosures about a writer's personal life, how is a reader to relate a passage of words written on the psychological toll of alcoholism to the potential suffering of the author from the same condition? Whether or not a protagonist such as Neddy Merrill in Cheever's The Swimmer embodies the personal afflictions of Cheever himself is irrelevant to the reader's undertaking of the narrative. As mentioned already, without prior knowledge of Cheever as a person the reader's focus will be purely on the narrative, as the story of Cheever's life belongs to another curiosity as yet uncultivated in their minds.

A short story: Competence

I turned to my girlfriend and told her there was no way. A look of startled offence swirled into expression on her face, as if the very bedrock of our relationship had been shifted (and women say that sex isn’t everything; it isn’t, of course, until it becomes nothing).

“Is it me?” Oh, there’s the line, without fail like the sighs of picnickers as the obnoxious overcast weighs in above.

“No, it’s him,” is my reply, a very daring one if I’m honest – and I am, but she doesn’t see it so easily.

“Him? You’re telling me your cock isn’t up for it? Well, that’s gotta be a first for the entire male population.”

“And on behalf of all the enlightened men, I thank you for your notable admiration.” And with my sarcastic rapier drawn to parry her attacking blows she loses her burgeoning gall. An inadequate silence, the sort made painful to the conscience by the unmistakable sound of sniffling, sinks down from the ceiling to hover between us. She rests her hands on her knees, her arms like buckling loadbearing columns as she barely manages to abate the onrush of tears. I’m trying to feel some degree of guilt because of my current impotence, but such a response fails me. How can a man innocent of his body’s functions be to blame? I didn’t provoke this deflation of instinct; I play only the part of the spectator in all this.

The epiphany of my unaccountability for my body’s actions – perhaps ‘inaction’ suits the scene better – does wonders for my mood, and I begin to revel in my abrupt desensitisation, my emancipation from sexual enslavement. I took a hand to my penis and, with unadulterated exhilaration that had escaped my bones since childhood, pulled the foreskin back and forth like a flexible turtleneck, experiencing no sensation whatsoever. There was no feeling in the motion, as if I were the first man in space, an absconder of gravity’s petulant jurisdiction, just another particle of possibilities. Now that the Neanderthal in me had crawled out of the confining quarters of his musty cave and out into the unmapped sprawl beyond, I could be rid of the rudiments of the dick-fisted barbarians who bowed out, balls in hand, before me.

Standing up tall and full of spunk, I muse frivolously that the sudden additional separation from my genitals would in no way impede my intoxicating asexual zeal; in fact, it would probably heighten my reaction. My girlfriend has stopped her blubbering and has begun to masturbate, apparently uninterested in my immunity to sexual stimulation and transcendence of psychosexual repression. I will leave her to discover for herself how dissatisfying such puerile dalliances with her delicates are (I still haven’t the heart to inconvenience an orgasm). But someday I will return to her when she is ready to abandon her fixation on titillation and propensity to be penetrated and ascend with me to the paradise beyond the primitives of that dark and most depraved cave from where there is only moistness and moaning.

Until her time comes I will focus on becoming my own master, no longer the mindless errand boy to the erogenous overlord. My senses will hurtle through the barriers of known physics, reshaping the fundamentals of the human endurance to match the astronomical greatness that shall surely be my will to possess and power for all to behold. There is no stopping he who seeks no climax, no sating that which is not hungry for it is hunger itself in its most indefatigable form, disembodied like the energy a moving object requires to reach its destination. The furious boy I was now rests in an oasis of serenity, saved before he could drown in a deluge of soul-destroying animalism. I will now leave the bedroom, the vigour hereabouts pertaining only to my dreams, and cast a mighty shadow upon faces that grimace as the light from my eyes burns with virtuous supremacy. He would be hard right now, but for all my pride he is but a flop.

'Uniquely American' or just multiculturally ignorant?

"I've been homesick for countries I've never seen, and longed to be where I couldn't be." Was John Cheever's excellence in the observation of the common American as he knew him/her a hindrance on what could have been a more diverse approach to writing America? Did he long to write about what he wasn't as a person?

Judging from his work it is telling that both his work's most strenuous crux and most profound insight was that which delved into the everyday undertakings of the silent sufferer of the suburbs. It might appear he was an sentient entity never quite dedicated to but always verging on self-destruction, and this was perhaps what fascinated him about his fellow middle-class Americans.

But was he so fixated on the pursuit of insight into the lives of these marginals that he neglected the curiosity and responsibility of such an esteemed writer to draw wider attention to the greater injustices of the American cultural strata? As with stories like The Enormous Radio, in which a "pleasant, rather plain" Irene Westcott struggles to come to terms with the destabilisation of her homeland securities, Cheever writes almost exclusively about a particular middle-class realm of post-war America, the kind of social context where those characters featured are ostensibly well-sustained and satisfied but furtively at the borders of some ruinous collapse.

While he wrote his silent sufferers so well, Cheever doesn't seem to have made room in his insights for the marginals beyond his marginals, i.e. the minorities. Perhaps you might say that Cheever felt it wasn't his place to touch on the lives of characters beyond his own knowledge of existence? Nevertheless, Cheever demonstrates beyond the capacity of most to write so assiduously about the abnormalities of being the social norm that it seems nothing less than immature to demand more of his literary legacy.