Alan Bisset, Nick Brooks and Rodge Glass; William Boyd; John Banville

The beauty of smaller festivals is that contrasts between writers are more marked: the vibrant, energetic, entertaining fusion of Glasgow-based writers Alan Bissett, Rodge Glass and Nick Brooks on Saturday afternoon was later smoothed by the suave sophistication of William Boyd and then stirred up again by the wonderfully curmudgeonly John Banville on Sunday evening. Both Boyd and Banville evinced an elder-statesmanlike status in easy assumption of their fame (Banville referring to himself in the third person); by contrast, Bissett, Glass and Brooks worked hard and didn't make assumptions about anything.

Boyd's cream-on-the-top-of-coffee manner makes writing look easy; the massive success he's enjoyed perhaps testifies to a lack of struggle (although he did confess to failing at poetry writing). Asked if women characters were difficult to do, he said he'd "found a method that works": years of experience had taught him that "you never pay attention to gender issues; you ignore all of that stuff and concentrate exclusively on personality. When building a character, I know exactly what that person is like. I can imagine them walking about, they are so vividly present to me. I don't ask How would a woman react to this situation?' but How would this character react?'"

Someone should give the splendid John Banville his own TV show - perhaps Grumpy Old Writers.

He was wonderfully indiscreet, too - having begun a new career as a crime writer (he read an extract from Christine Falls, his first novel under the pseudonym Benjamin Black), he confided that he'd picked up a crime novel by Ruth Rendell and found it "dull beyond belief" ("I just can't succeed at that. I just can't be that dull.") He didn't spare P D James either.

Good writing (when he's writing as John Banville) is when "you sink down as deeply into yourself as you can, drag up the very dregs". As Benjamin Black he has fun writing; but as Banville "I'm churning up my insides trying to make a sentence". It is a great privilege, he said, "to write a good sentence.

I stand amazed at my own ability to write one."

Suddenly, writing doesn't seem quite such an easy game after all.