Art & Creativity Quote by Helen Dunmore

Research, for Dunmore, is the seductive part of writing: the sanctioned procrastination that feels like virtue. The line has a poet's precision and a novelist's confession. She frames research as "enjoy[able]" and "engaging", then lets that pleasure tip into danger: it would be "easy to go on for years" and never write the book. The comedy is dry, but the stakes are real. Research becomes not just preparation but refuge - a place where the work is always safe, always potentially perfect, and never vulnerable to judgment.

The intent is less anti-research than anti-avoidance. Dunmore is naming a trap that creative people rarely admit out loud: the way mastery can impersonate progress. "Never write the novel at all" is the knife twist. It's not that the material isn't interesting; it's that the gravitational pull of facts, archives, and background can become a substitute for the risky act of choosing a sentence and standing by it.

As a poet who also wrote historical fiction, Dunmore is speaking from a particular craft position. Poets are trained to prize exactness and texture; historical novelists are expected to earn their authority. That pressure breeds a distinctive anxiety: if you just learn enough, you can outrun the messiness of invention. Dunmore punctures that fantasy. The subtext: research is infinite, but a novel only exists when you accept finitude, make cuts, and commit to the imperfect, human act of writing.