What’s on my mind: Tom Lamont

Fridge notes: 10% 
Once, in the 1980s, when guests arrived at the Connecticut home of Philip Roth while the author was out, they found a note on his fridge: “On the top shelf is soup to be warmed up. There’s some parmesan cheese in a little envelope, grated, on top of the soup. Add.” I love fridge notes. Whether described in biographies or glimpsed in the wild in people’s kitchens, I try to make a record of good ones I come across. Roth’s note seems representative of the man, who by most accounts was fussy, hospitable, droll, details-obsessed. His confident one-word command to “Add”… what a revealing bit of writerly flair that was. It sent me back to my own fridge, to look again at the years’ worth of notes, magnets and pictures that have accumulated there.

My nearly career as a sock designer: 5%
Under a postcard from Japan, and loads of blocky magnetised letters arranged into nonsense phrases (“Milky Despair”), I keep an old letter from the 1990s. It was sent by Sock Shop, the British retailer, to inform me I’d narrowly not won their annual Design-a-Sock competition. In lieu of my design being realised in polyester, they were enclosing a goodie bag. I was 13 at the time. That was about the age I realised that I’m good, not great, at certain things. Whatever talent I’ve developed as a writer is capped below that of my heroes. I don’t have Janet Malcolm or John Lanchester’s genius for burrowing deep into the molten core of a non-fiction subject. My imaginative brain is more cramped than Hilary Mantel’s was, than David Mitchell’s is. I think I could have written a chapter or two of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. But not all of Cloud Atlas. A lightly fictionalised Thomas Cromwell, as written by me, one of 20 runners-up in the Design-a-Sock competition of 1995, might never have left the Putney forge.

Book titles: 50%
I have been trying to find the right name for my second novel. The manuscript’s been finished for weeks. It’s about finding love and affinity in the early days of text messages and instant-messenger chats. When I read out a list of possible titles to friends, someone described them all as “a bit remainder-shelf”. Getting worried, I looked in books about great writers’ lives, like Virginia Woolf’s. I read John Steinbeck’s letters to his editor, written while they worked together on East of Eden. What a title that is. Steinbeck didn’t care for the process of finding it. “I have never been a title man,” he wrote, adding his belief that only three things were crucial, “two great words and a direction.” The title of my favourite novel, James Salter’s Light Years, has almost nothing to do with the contents of the book. It does have two good words and a direction; and we know from Salter’s papers that he was grateful to hit on it, having trawled through “Years Later”, “Years After”, “Years In”, “Years Out” and “Tortoise Years” first. When it comes to titles, a tortoise-like patience seems necessary.

Hitler’s bath mat: 20%
I’ve been thinking, too, about artistic presence of mind – that ability to realise you’re in or entering a moment that’s worthy of capture, then to act accordingly. A recent exhibition of Lee Miller’s photography at the Tate sent me home reeling. In April 1945, Miller and a colleague, David E Scherman, visited a newly liberated Nazi death camp, shortly after which they were granted permission to enter Hitler’s requisitioned home in Munich. Setting up equipment, they took pictures of each other bathing in the dead Führer’s tub, their camp-muddied boots on his mat. The immortal portraits that resulted drew the biggest gallery crowds when I visited. I noticed the portraits had been given plain, purely descriptive titles. Perhaps, when it comes to naming pieces of art, you don’t need the most polished or perfect cherry – not if you think your cake’s enough.

Free association: 15%
Eventually, in desperation, I wrote to an established author whose titles are always brilliant. Free association. That was her advice – free association, plus a good stiff drink. I tried it, ordering a whisky with my editor and trading ideas. He was calm, full of faith that we’d be OK in the end. I was turning frantic. Harmony…? Not quite right, he thought. Communication. . . ? Bit robotic. R U Awake? Not after hearing that suggestion. I was on the verge of suggesting Milky Despair when my agent saved the day, offering the right prompt at the right time. We’re calling my second novel In Touch. I like it. I’ll take it. The cake matters more.

Tom Lamont’s second novel will be published next spring, with a title and everything. His first novel, Going Home, is available now in paperback.