Nobody likes a quitter, right? It’s weak to give up: you’re supposed to tough it out. Otherwise you’re a bad person and a bad role model. Sportsmen, politicians and motivational speakers alike are keen on this subject. (Many of them are American, where the cultural default position is the exhortation.) Good ol’ Bill Clinton is typical: “The main thing is never quit, never quit, never quit,” though even he might have benefited from some judicious withdrawals.

Indelible images of sporting failure: Paula Radcliffe sitting on the kerb in tears at the 2004 Olympic marathon, the boxer Roberto Durán slumped in his corner whispering “No más” . Both serve, for me, as examples of the triumph of sense over cliché. The pain is impossible to bear? It’s nature’s way of telling you that you’ve had enough. Quit.

Three years ago I promised a publisher that I would write some sort of take on the history of the book, from cave art to Kindles. No mention of the actual, dreaded phrase “history of the book” would be allowed, except disparagingly. Instead, I settled on the snappy title The Life and Death of the Book, and envisaged – what exactly? hard to tell until you do it – perhaps some sort of … biography of the book?

I was surprised to find myself agreeing to do such a thing, as I had previously evinced no interest in the history of the book, though I was aware there was a lot of it about. There is now hardly a university that doesn’t have a course or degree in the subject. And we know what happens when universities appropriate a field of study: since it is a prerequisite of university life that academics publish widely and regularly, a vast corpus of work gets produced. This work is largely produced by academics for other academics: the debates and conversations are internal, and seem rarely to escape into the outside world. I know of almost no creative writer or passionate reader who has the slightest interest in the history of the book. How odd is that?

I am not particularly interested in the book as object, or in the technology of the transmission of the text. Cuneiform, papyrus and codex, Linear A and B, the invention of movable type, all that sort of stuff. These have been recurrent topics in the new field since the 1970s, and the focus seemed almost wilfully to disregard the content of the texts that were transmitted. Do these new book historians actually love reading?

One of them, Frederick G Kilgour, has defined the book as “a storehouse of human knowledge intended for dissemination in the form of an artefact that is portable – or at least transportable – and that contains arrangements of signs that convey information. The information may comprise stories, myths, songs, and reality; the signs may be representations of human speech or graphic presentations of such things as maps, musical notes, or pictures.” The definition hardly trips off the tongue. No one, encountering such a formulation, is likely to get excited and set off in search of one of those. Give me Kafka’s definition of a book any day: “the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Admittedly that wouldn’t help you to find one of them in an attic, but you recognise immediately that Kafka gets it, and Kilgour does not. Books matter, books open worlds for us, both outside and within. They amuse, they inform, they delight.

Students who take history of the book courses know this, and sometimes even their teachers acknowledge that there is a problem with the courses they are offering. Several major authorities in the field kindly offered their help to me, and were sympathetic to my project: to try to set the subject back 40 years. To produce a book that focuses on texts not technologies, with which a student might begin. One eminent professor went so far as to say that my proposed book was “the one we have been waiting for”.

So could I write it? I spent the last two years toiling away, increasingly aware that, to subvert a subject, to rewrite and to redefine it, you have to know a lot about it. And there’s too much to know. Try as I did, and read as I did, little caught my attention sufficiently to spark my imagination. I felt as marooned and thirsty as an art lover forced to read nothing but books about paint, and canvas, and the nature of perspective. But of course – and here the analogy between the fields breaks down – you cannot talk about the history of art without reference to works of art, and you can talk about the history of the book without reading many books.

I struggled, tried to learn and to adapt, but I couldn’t find any pleasure in the project. Sometimes it takes more courage to quit than to persevere. Carrying on is for sissies. I rang my publisher, the admirable Andrew Franklin of Profile books, who was understanding but disappointed. Could we not change the angle of vision? Did I need (yet) more time? No, to both. Had the project gone cold on me? Not at all: it never got warm.

Having freed myself from obligation, and repaid my advance, I am now surprised to find myself writing a novel. I have no very clear idea of how you do this, but it’s been stimulating and engrossing finding out. And, for the first time in many years, the act of writing is a pleasure.

If it doesn’t continue to be so, I will quit.