Authors Electric

Yesterday morning, my husband woke up from a particularly vivid dream in which he was driving a traction engine. He had no clue about what might have triggered it. His conclusion: ‘My brain has a mind of its own!’ Oh yes, Papa Freud! The brain/the Muse is a funny old duck. Capriciousness isn’t in it.   Sometimes walking wakes the Muse up, especially in a special place, like the salt marsh at Keyhaven, which I’ve written about before. There’s something about the rhythm of the movement and the air in the surroundings…but it’s never predictable and can never be forced. Sometimes there’s an out-of-the-blue inspiration that doesn’t seem to relate to anything. Sometimes a long fallow period that can’t always be accounted for either. Thank goodness I now have the inestimable luxury of writing for pleasure rather than trying to earn my living by it (although, in fact, I never did. It was always the jam in the sandwich rather than the bread). Now, we are giving books away as fast as we ...

I don’t believe in the muse any more than I believe in writer’s block. I believe in hard work, regular hours, good diet and plenty of exercise. I believe that in a well-ordered life there is room neither for inspiration nor despair but only solid graft, ruthless discipline and a robust attitude to failure. If   I got up early and sat at my desk for a solid eight hours a day, I am quite certain I would write a lot of books and I would be much more successful.      It is perhaps surprising then that I struggle with the well-ordered life and am quite prone to apparent moments of inspiration, and then months of arid days when putting one word in front of another seems like a long, forced march to nowhere. Obviously, this isn’t surprising if you have ever met me or read any of my previous blogs, but even I find the gulf between what I believe about creativity and what I experience slightly disconcerting.         About four years ag...

As I type, the fearsome Beast from the East leaps from the sea, rises through the thermals (what thermals? The only thermals around here are my underwear) and tears at the window like Tove Jansson’s Groke, desperate for warmth and light and immediately blotting out any source of heat it encounters. In a few minutes I will venture out, take a brief walk along the cliff top (no danger of being blown over – only further inland) and hurry home to the sanctuary of my cosy flat. And yes, I’m aware of how fortunate I am – that there are rough sleepers out on the streets in these awful conditions, and yes, I’m ashamed to live in a country where this is allowed to happen. I’m also lucky to have the time and opportunity to write. And wow –   for some reason the muse has decided to pay me a few visits recently, after making herself scarce for quite a while. Having finally finished the second draft of a novel I’ve been working on for about two years, I seem to be inundated with new i...