Even in the age of MySpace and blogging - where innermost thoughts can be made public without the help of an agent or publishing house - every year thousands of people in the UK start writing a novel. It is a journey few will finish, so why do they bother?
There are over 450 people crammed into a room at the Earl's Court Exhibitions Centre on a blazingly bright spring morning. Many are here because of that most potent of writer's fantasies - walking into a bookshop and seeing their name on an upright spine.
At London Book Fair's seminar on novel-writing, the vast majority of questions being posed to authors Joanne Harris and Tim Lott, and agent Simon Trewin and publisher Antonia Hodgson, are about debut novels.
Those gathered here are but the tip of the iceberg. Every day, in front of computers in the study, in coffee shops and cafes, on kitchen tables and in idle moments at work when the boss isn't watching, someone begins a novel.
It remains one of the most long-winded and difficult of contemporary creative endeavours. Unlike that dream of being in a rock band, most of the writing process is done in isolation, without being able to bounce ideas off the bass guitarist or the drummer.
Few of those who begin have the discipline, stamina or patience to complete their tomes.
Beyond that initial flash of inspiration - Stephen King's first published novel Carrie came from a newspaper piece about telekinesis being most commonly reported in girls who had begun menstruating - lies many months, if not years, of research, writing, drafting and re-drafting.
It is a tough process, and even established authors sometimes struggle. Virginia Woolf took five years to write her final novel, The Years, and in the process suffered a mental breakdown.
Mr Trewin sees as many as 6,000 manuscripts a year - most of them novels - and he is just one of hundreds of literary agents in the country. Most of the 12 major fiction publishing houses in the UK are unlikely to publish more than one debut novel a month. The odds are stacked against you, even if you are able to turn watercooler daydreams into a finished novel.
"The truth is that many of us write novels for the same reason that George Mallory gave for climbing Everest - 'Because it's there'," wrote novelist Sheila Doughty recently in the Daily Telegraph. "There is nothing more satisfying than doing the hardest thing, even though you may risk all in the attempt."
One of the most difficult things - after the initial excitement of an idea that lodges in your brain and doesn't disappear after a more critical second look - is to keep it going.
Creative writing seminars and coursebooks will tell the budding novelist to write every day - practice makes perfect, and character development and a sense of pace come easier to those who are writing constantly.
But what if you can't? Even those who have been published find the daily discipline difficult. Douglas Adams' last manuscript was 15 years overdue.
The hunger to write a debut novel should not be under-estimated. It is a lonely job. Social lives, gym routines, families and career plans can suffer in its wake.
And beginning a novel in the hope it will pay off the mortgage is, in most cases, a false hope.
Simon Trewin says: "People shouldn't sit down to write a novel because they want to make money. They've got to wake up with a fire in their belly."
Lott, who won the Whitbread in 1999 for White City Blue, warns that the process of wrestling a novel into shape over many months can be exhausting.
"It's work. As much as climbing up a ladder with bricks on your back. I'd rather run a corner shop, but I have to do it," he says.
Jamie McCabe, 41, a copywriter from East Sussex, has finished the first draft of his comic novel One of Our Clowns is Missing, about a troupe of laughably bad clowns.
"Many of the events are actual things that happened to me in my early 20s. Memory is very unreliable, particularly from a distance of at least 20 years, and I liked the idea of mixing truth and fiction to create something quite other."
For Michael Byrne, 36, a journalist from south London, the question "why write a novel" is something of a mystery.
"Why do you get up in the morning? You don't have a choice, you just have to - it's hard-wired into you."
He has finished his second attempt, a thriller called Snowflakes in Summer, and is already writing another.
"As a working parent, it's hard to write every day," says Mr Byrne, "But when I'm not writing, I'm editing, or taking notes or doing a little blue-skies thinking about where the book is going. The characters and the storyline populate your thoughts day in, day out and it's quite hard to escape them."
But is it fun? "Fun? Is climbing a mountain an inch a day using only fingertips fun? Not fun, but worthwhile. As you create characters, do all sorts of things to them and watch how they react, you learn more about life, and your own place in it."
Mr Trewin's advice is that you don't have to be published to be able to call yourself a writer. Finishing a novel should be recognised as an achievement in itself.
Mr McCabe, still trying to wrestle his novel into shape, recognises that achievement.
"I've managed to make myself laugh out loud at times and that's the best I could hope for. I've loved it when the story has at times taken on a life of its own."
