THE OTHER DAY I WAS WALKING down the street when a lady hailed me from the other side: “Hey, are you famous?” “No,” I replied. “Oh, OK,” she said, “so where's the post office?”

I didn't entirely follow this train of thought; is it part of the new etiquette not to ask celebrities for directions? And if so, is that because they travel everywhere in stretch limos and never post their own letters? Maybe she was psychic, because I was brooding about celebrity and its impact on creativity.

We've all watched The X Factor, and American Idol, “created” by Simon Cowell and owing everything to that earlier horror Opportunity Knocks. (At least that show had singing dogs and men who played the saw.)

When the classical music industry got involved, claiming to be looking for the big undiscovered classical talent, my friend Natalie Clein, the cellist, who had refused to be one of the judges, told me that she feared personality would overshadow giftedness. She is certainly gifted — she won Young Musician of the Year when she was 16. What she didn't do was win it on promotability or personality; she won because she is as good as was Jacqueline du Pré, though a very different kind of player.

I know that classical music thrives on sexy stars, and nowadays Natalie Clein is one of them — but having the right looks, charisma and ambition shouldn't be how we judge serious musicians. Yes, they have to be able to perform as well as play, but the cult of personality is affecting and, I believe, infecting, all the arts — and not just the performing arts. Gifted people are often introverted people. Is that a reason to dismiss their work?

The theory goes that writers can be as solitary as oysters if it suits them to be so, because writers are not performers, and are judged only on what they write.

We all agree that it is much better to read The Waste Land, or hear Fiona Shaw read it to us, than to listen to Eliot's sepulchral recording, which would have had him kicked off The X Factor before anyone could say Nobel prize.

The trouble is that in our media-mad age writers must do more than write the stuff, they must appear around the world at literary festivals, entertain their audiences, have opinions on everything, and even open their studies to the public. Guardian readers are enjoying peeking into writers' dens — how long before we get in the guidebooks and start charging? I live in the Cotswolds. I could do teas.

Byron would have loved it. Blake would have been arrested — not for lounging naked in his garden with Mrs Blake, but for beating up the photographer crouching with the long lens. Poor old Wordsworth, who wrote “the world is too much with us” before cars, e-mail, mobile phones, would have had a nervous breakdown or gone to join D.H.Lawrence in Mexico. Gertrude Stein, who always wanted fame, would have had her own talk show. Virginia Woolf would adore the gossip and hate the trivialisation.

As yet, writers submit their work, not themselves. How long before a group of aspiring writers has to compete for a publishing deal? My new TV show, The X-Word, will feature hopefuls from creative writing programmes, alongside home-taught scribblers, and put them in front of a top literary agent, a shark-nosed publisher, a bookseller with attitude and a PR guru, and make them tell us why they should be on the nation's bookshelves. Of course they will have to be able to write, but they should be good-looking, funny, talkative, personable, the right shape for an Armani suit, and a bit of a psychopath.

Dickens might have made it. Emily Brontë would have had her Round 1 rejection slip sent by second-class post to The Parsonage in Haworth.

It is happening already. Internet self-publication is also self-promotion. The ones such as the callgirl Belle de Jour, who get picked up (sorry), are the ones who have more to offer than the words on the virtual page. Look at Facebook or MySpace and you will see that there is a whole new generation of literary hopefuls who are selling themselves as well as their work.

I don't believe that literature or any of the creative arts are about celebrity or personality. When anyone makes something significant it is not really about themselves — no matter how intimate it seems. Flamboyant like Hemingway, shy like Emily Dickinson, the work should be there long after the PR people have gone home.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist