Aidan Smith: Quiet, kids, don't you know I'm creating great art?

Rather rubbishing the theory that you cant write books with kids about, JK Rowling penned the first four Harry Potter novels as a single mother.

I’ve written a book but am worried about the final page. Not the story’s end - my characters walk into the sunset, their epic task successfully completed - but the acknowledgments page which comes after it. This is where the author thanks all the people, besides his brilliant self, who’ve helped in the creation of the masterwork: agent, publisher, editor, proof-reader, other writers he’s ripped off, the owner of the cafe where the book was written, the willowy girl who walked past the cafe where the book was written, same time every day. Or in my case, the wife and kids.

I’m worried what I’ve said isn’t sufficiently fulsome. I don’t do gush because I didn’t go to private school. My messages in greetings cards are sparing and to-the-point. The highest praise I generally offer is to say that something is “fine”. But I won’t be able to get away with that this time.

The Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville has claimed that writers make terrible fathers. He reckons most would “sell their children” for a crowd-pleasing turn of phrase. Talking about the impact of writing on his family, Banville said: “It was very hard on the children. I have not been a very good father. I don’t think any writer is.”

Banville, of course, is echoing Cyril Connolly who famously remarked: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” Connolly was a man of letters, a critic and the editor of a literary magazine - but not the dazzling writer of fiction he wanted to be. These days he’s remembered for this quote. You could get away with that sort of thing in 1938. not so much now, and Banville has taken a fair bit of stick.

His fellow Irish novelist, Julian Gough, said he was “giving young writers permission to behave like assholes and never grow up”. Author Ed Caesar dismissed Banville’s view as “balls”. Meanwhile TV dramatist David Simon tweeted: “Speak for yourself, f***nuts. Family is family. The job is the job.”

Now, before I go any further, I should stress that I don’t for a minute think my humble football book is art like Banville’s The Sea, which scooped the Booker in 2005, is art. Or Simon’s The Wire. But all summer long it consumed me. Every morning I got up at 5am (still do; the bodyclock hasn’t re-adjusted). Life - and celebrity death and the Olympics and great telly and nights down the pub - passed me by. I managed a fortnight’s holiday with the family in Fife but wasn’t really there in spirit. Sometimes, indeed, I was in Rochdale.

It’s brutally honest of Banville to admit to being a rotten father. And I’m not so sure the writers who’re appalled by his “sell their children” remark are being quite as truthful. Of course Banville doesn’t actually mean being prepared to trade his offspring in return for the inspiration required for words which reverberate down the years much like Cyril Connolly’s - he’s simply deploying artictic licence. But surely all writers are questing for that killer phrase, sometimes getting so lost in deep space while searching for it that they aren’t actually listening to what the most tedious guest at their mother-in-law’s garden party is telling them. That was me this summer but I stress: my tome concerns one little football team’s attempts to win a trophy which had eluded them for 114 years; it doesn’t quite reveal the secret of life’s inner meaning.

Really, though, would you want to read any kind of book where this kind of “sacrifice” hasn’t been made?

Connolly has garnered plenty of support for his stance, including Doris Lessing: “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.” But consider these words from Zadie Smith: “I refuse to be bullied by the idea that you must have mental peace to write.” Consider, too, that JK Rowling wrote the first four Harry Potter novels as a single mother. Then there’s JG Ballard.

“I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror” - that was how the brilliant chronicler of dystopian worlds once described his ambitions as a writer. You might not have thought that suddenly finding himself a widowed father of three would have been condusive to apocalyptic imaginings, but it obviously was. “My children were at the centre of my life, circled at a distance by my writing,” he explained in his memoir Miracles of Life. “I kept up a steady output, largely because I spent most of my time at home. A short story or a chapter of a novel would be written in the time between ironing a school tie, serving up the sausage and mash and watching Blue Peter. I am certain that my fiction is all the better for that. My greatest ally was the pram in the hall.”

Ally or enemy? When the kids are around and you obviously can’t sell them - when you have to juggle family and book-writing, oh, and I almost forgot, journalism - then the mind is fully concentrated. There’s no time for faffing around and you crack on. My father, when he was writing his plays, was once interrupted by a protest outside his study window - in the spirit of the strike-torn 1970s his brood held up placards demanding “Play with us!” I told my lot about this and, naturally, they followed suit. You can’t be irritated by children but hopefully you’ll be inspired.

’Persevered: How Hibernian Smashed the Biggest Curse in Football’ is published by Birlinn on 10 November.