Disappointment flickers as he goes offline. Now I must apply my mind to my op-ed for The New York Times.

Op-ed for The New York Times. My op-ed for the NYT. I’m writing an op-ed for the NYT. Hello, have you met my girlfriend, Lucy? She’s writing an op-ed for The New York Times. Opinion-editorial.

If you are writing an op-ed for The New York Times and no one commissioned you to do so, can you be said to be writing it? An op-ed for the NYT only becomes an op-ed for the NYT when it has been submitted and accepted. Until then, it is just words on a screen.

Except it isn’t even that yet, because I am looking at the screen and there are no words on it. Now that I have to put them into sentences, my deeply held convictions are bleeding away. They are evaporating. I started off determined to consider both sides of the debate—mine and Coetzee’s. But mine has disappeared, and Coetzee’s is the only one I can see.

There is a slogan that gets printed on T-shirts and coffee mugs: “Be careful what you say to a writer. She’ll save it up and put it in a book.” Here’s another one: “Don’t annoy the writer. She’ll put you in a book and kill you.” I can barely open my Facebook feed without seeing these maxims. They frolic across the pages of my friends who consider themselves to be writers, which is all of them.

Did you notice the “she”? It is not there by accident. There’s a reason why coffee-mug slogans use the feminine pronoun.When women write things, it is cute and funny. When men write things, it is serious. For a woman to put you in her book would be flattering and amusing. For a man to do so would be life-changing. I throw words at the screen to this effect, to see if anything sticks. But Coetzee’s perspective remains uppermost in my mind. It is part of the social contract that everything is fair game when it comes to fiction. Nothing is off-limits. Nothing is beyond the pale. If real life weren’t allowed to be the inspiration for fiction, we wouldn’t have the works of Shakespeare, Austen, Adichie, Naipaul, or Didion. It is not just important for authors to be able to write without fear or favour: it is vital. Hurt feelings cannot be permitted to intrude. The only post-publication discussion that has any validity at all is a critical one. A piecemeal breaking down of a text into its real-life inspirations is an ignoble enterprise, fit only for women and children.