Ian McEwan’s story “My Purple Scented Novel” appears in this week’s issue. Photograph by Joost van den Broek

You wrote “My Purple Scented Novel,” your story in this week’s issue, to accompany an art exhibit, curated by Thomas Demand, for the Fondazione Prada, in Milan. The title of the exhibit is “L’image Volée,” or “The Stolen Image,” and the works explore the ways in which “__artists have always referred to existing imagery to make their own.” Was the story inspired by a particular work in the show, or were you trying to imagine a parallel for that kind of theft in the literary world?

I met Thomas Demand when I was staying in Berlin some time ago. Last year, he wrote from the West Coast to ask if I would write something addressing the subject of “unrepentant or guiltless theft,” for a show he was putting together. The deadline was a year away, I had no idea what I would write, and I knew very little about his show. But it was simple enough at the time to agree and then forget about the matter. Eleven months later, I was in bed with the flu, and my feverish thoughts kept turning around the various writing obligations I had, including the looming deadline for the piece for Thomas. I was feeling guilty about this “guiltless” project. A high temperature can do things, as we all know, to the mind. As I was lying there, tossing around, an entire short story enacted itself for me. Paragraph by paragraph, it unspooled and required as little effort as watching a movie. I dragged myself out of bed, installed myself in my study, and started writing. That part, of course, was somewhat harder than watching a movie. I think I had what you might call a “Goldilocks virus”—strong enough to prompt the imagination, not so strong as to be incapacitating. If I could bottle it, I’d make daily use of it.

Those interested in the history of science will remember that Alfred Wallace conceived of evolution by natural selection, independently of Darwin, while lying in bed with a fever that lasted many days.

Parker and Jocelyn, the two writers in the story, become friends as university students and stay friends even when one becomes much more successful than the other. Have you seen that kind of friendship endure in the literary world around you? How difficult is it to maintain that kind of bond?

University is, among many other things, a busy marketplace of friendship (though no money changes hands). Many learn, or keep on failing to learn, how to be lovers. Many find, perhaps too soon, their (first) wives or husbands. I’ve certainly kept a handful of friends from those days.

You yourself make a cameo in “My Purple Scented Novel”—as the novelist “with the Scottish name and the English attitude.” Have you ever been tempted to steal anything from another writer? How satisfying would it ultimately be to be known and respected for a work that wasn’t yours?

Borrowing or stealing isn’t quite the issue here. Writers you like, whose imaginations appeal to you, open up opportunities for your own imagination. Some writers—and they needn’t necessarily be great or well-known—can suggest routes to freedom, to a new mental space. A reader, or that other writer, would probably never spot the connection. But the debt remains.

Jocelyn knows that there’s no way he could actually have stolen Parker’s novel. Why doesn’t he speak more loudly in his own defense?

He’s cornered. Nothing he says will be believed. Parker has proof of posting his own version. Also, there’s a possibility that Jocelyn is secretly happy to relinquish his pressured role as national treasure and sink back into obscurity and domestic happiness in the area of London where he spent his youth and that he loves the most. He has also convinced himself of his own theory of how this “catastrophe” happened.

Parker has a few things in common with Tom Haley, the struggling writer in your 2012 novel “Sweet Tooth.” Is it fun to write about writers?

Not so sure about fun. A lot of us do it, partly because it’s what we know, partly because a writer character is, in the most limited sense, a free spirit. He or she doesn’t have to turn up to a job each day and place burdens on his creator to devise a plausible workplace. I’ve been in revolt against this for some time. The work people do can shape their identities. Work is the source of interesting vocabularies, conflicts, engagement with the world. Still, a writer character allows you to strip away the layers and, at least in the mind of the novelist, get to the essentials of the human condition. In the novels and stories of Henry James, private wealth played the same role.

You’re working on a new novel now. Does it involve any literary crimes?

My new novel is a complete break with realism and with everything I’ve done before. That, in itself, may well constitute a crime.