On one side, the novelists I studied, or whose interviews I read, proclaimed their disdain for the lowly grubbers and hacks from (as it then was) Fleet Street. On the other side, the journalists who profiled and wrote news stories about these novelists constantly questioned their artistic integrity: it was alleged that they had plagiarised, or used “real people” as characters, or shamelessly enriched themselves. (It intrigues me that stories about publishers’ advances should still command so many column inches – why should a journalist on pounds 40,000 a year find it outrageous when a novelist receives pounds 100,000 for perhaps five years’ work?) Beneath the fighting and backbiting lay an old enmity, a disagreement over which side has the better claim to be telling the truth: novelists, with the subjectivity and imaginative authority of fiction, or journalists, with the objectivity and verifiability of fact.Literature versus journalism Fiction versus non-fiction The picture remains one of mutual antagonism. But as a teenager I thought the categories fluid, and I still think that’s nearer the truth. Many novelists, dramatists and poets (from Defoe, Whitman and Dickens to Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn and Brian Moore) have worked in journalism before flying free of its nets A few have confessed to learning useful tricks there Most continue to write for newspapers from time to time.

Equally, journalists commonly refer to the articles they write as “stories”, and the best journalism borrows many devices from traditional fiction. A few tabloids fly higher and more daringly still, into the realms of magical realism. Even the more scrupulous broadsheets are commonly approached with scepticism. “Never believe what you read in the papers” goes the old adage, which Malcolm Muggeridge amended when advising a young colleague “Never believe what you write in the papers”. Every media studies graduate knows that reality is constructed. One can imagine a sturdy pragmatist disputing this, like Dr Johnson taking issue with the philosophy of Berkeley by kicking a stone: the Gulf war did happen; Princess Di was killed in a car crash; I refute Baudrillard thus. But even the pragmatist can’t deny that when the media report events there must always be a line, an angle, a spin In effect, a construction Or story.We grow up on stories.

From infancy onwards, they’re a means of intellectual understanding and emotional recognition, a way of making sense of the world. At some point during childhood we become aware that many stories are made up, are fairy-tales. To hear the phrase “It’s only a story” is one of childhood’s crushing moments, like learning Father Christmas doesn’t exist. But children persist with fantasy long after the dawn of disenchantment Adults do, too To believe in stories is an essential human need. When Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, he helped invent the novel, but he also hoped that readers would believe his story was true. He posed, as many novelists have since, not as its author but as its editor, and presented it as “a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it”.

Here is an early definition of fiction: the pretence of being “a just history of fact”.In this century, as the realist tradition has lost its monopoly, much fiction has advertised its unbelievability. Magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, neo-fabulism, metafiction, “surfiction”, postmodernism, the nouveau roman: these are forms that let you know “This isn’t strictly – or even remotely – true”. Non-realist fiction is no less concerned with reality: often it assumes the form it does (allegory, fable, satire) in order to say the unsayable, or avoid censorship, or get at truths in ways that realism (and journalism) can’t. But it isn’t interested in making readers think that the events described took place, that the people portrayed exist. The 18th-century and 19th-century realist novel did sometimes work this trick. There were those who fell for the delusion – just as some in this century, have fallen for Coronation Street, confused by where acting ends and life begins Modern novelists don’t expect to be taken literally They don’t want to be taken literally.