I can think of no better career for a young novelist than to be for some years a sub-editor on a rather conservative newspaper. The hours, from four till around midnight, give him plenty of time to do his own work in the morning when he is still fresh from sleep - let the office employ him during his hours of fatigue.

He has the company of intelligent and agreeable men of greater experience than his own: he is not enclosed by himself in a small room tormented by the problems of expression; and, except for rare periods of rush, even his working hours leave him time for books and conversation (most of us brought a book to read between one piece of copy and another). Nor is the work monotonous. Rather as in the game of Scrabble the same letters are continually producing different words; no one knows at four o’clock what the evening may produce, and death does not keep a conventional hour.

And while the young writer is spending these amusing and unexacting hours, he is learning lessons valuable to his own craft. He is removing the clichés of reporters; he is compressing a story to the minimum length possible without ruining its effect. A writer with a sprawling style is unlikely to emerge from such an apprenticeship. It is the opposite training to the penny-a-liner.

The man who was of chief importance to me in those days was the chief sub-editor, George Anderson. I hated him in my first week, but I grew almost to love him before three years had passed. A small elderly Scotsman with a flushed face and a laconic humour, he drove a new sub-editor hard with his sarcasm.

Sometimes I almost fancied myself back at school again, and I was always glad when five-thirty came, for immediately the clock marked the hours when the pubs opened, he would take his bowler hat from the coat-rack and disappear for thirty minutes to his favourite bar. His place would be taken by the gentle and courteous Colonel Maude. Maude was careful to see that the new recruit was given no story which could possibly stretch his powers, and if he had been chief sub-editor I doubt if I would ever have got further than a News in Brief paragraph.

At the stroke of six, when Anderson returned and hung up his bowler, his face would have turned a deeper shade of red, to match the rose he carried always in his buttonhole, and his shafts of criticism, as he scanned my copy with perhaps a too flagrant headline, would have acquired a tang of friendliness. More than two years went by, and my novel The Man Within had been accepted by a publisher, before I discovered one slack evening, when there was hardly enough news to fill the Home pages for the ten o’clock edition, that a poet manqué had dug those defences of disappointed sarcasm.

When a young man, Anderson had published a volume of translations from Verlaine; he had sent it to Swinburne at The Pines and he had been entertained there for tea and kind words by Watts-Dunton, though I don’t think he was allowed to see the poet. He never referred to the episode again, but I began to detect in him a harsh but paternal apprehension for another young man, flushed with pride in a first book, who might suffer the same disappointment.

When I came to resign he spent a long time arguing with me, and I think his real reason for trying to prevent my departure was that he foresaw a time might come when novel-writing would fail me and I would need, like himself, a quiet and secure life with the pubs opening at half-past five and the coal settling in the grate.

Graham Greene, A Sort of Life