Commissioned by the Royal Literary Fund
September 2025
Why I Write
The first book I wrote was called The Panca, when I was six years old. My best friend James had impressed me by copying out, page for page, Enid Blyton’s Noddy and His Car, and I had wanted to do the same with a book called The Pancake King. But in copying out the title I got the spacing wrong, and only managed to fit THE PANCA at the top of the first page. Frustrated, I wanted to start again, but my mother intervened.
‘Why don’t you write your own book, about a panca?’ she said.
‘What’s a panca?’
‘I don’t know. You can make it up.’
The Panca was a purple monster who lived in the woods. One day a hunter caught him and put him in a net. The Panca managed to chew through the net and get away. It was hardly a complex plot but it had a beginning, a middle and an end, conflict and resolution, and a clear moral message. I was pretty pleased with it.
My second book Milky the Mouse was less good, but every writer has their lows.
From there, my creative journey was a case of ‘fake it till you make it’. Aged about ten I shamelessly plagiarised The Lord of the Rings, with stories about a wizard called Riddlin and a ‘quarter-dwarf’ called Boggins, who bore unmistakable resemblances to Gandalf and Frodo Baggins. I also ripped off Tintin, with a character called Combat Fred. As a teenager I tried to mimic William S. Burroughs and Will Self, with predictable results, although in many ways it was better than what I would write as a student. I left the University of East Anglia, where I had studied creative writing, with my confidence in writing much diminished. Learning how to criticise other, more impressive writers, while simultaneously trying to develop something called my ‘voice’, had proved an impossible balancing act. All I had done was turn the criticism on myself.
It took a few years to shake off the things I had learned at university and remember why I had started writing in the first place. I had done it because it brought me joy. Because it was exciting. I had not written The Panca in the hope of being the next Roald Dahl, but because I wanted to know what happened to the purple monster. I had done it unselfconsciously, with no thoughts of an audience. The stories I’d written aged sixteen, navel-gazing though they were, were written to express real feelings rather than to impress people. In its spirit, even Milky the Mouse was better than what I wrote for my dissertation.
This realisation helped me fall in love with writing again. I won’t say I haven’t looked back, because I have, many times. I have doubted myself and got writer’s block and stared at a blank screen for days. But within the frustrations there is joy. I write because it’s an adventure. I want to know what happens next. I still want to see how the Panca chews his way free from the net – and when he escapes into the woods, I am running with him.
Where I Write
In the years I’ve lived, more or less, as a professional writer – I suppose since my first book was published in 2014 – I have never been on a writing retreat or residency. I often see them advertised, and imagine myself in a Scottish castle or eco-cabin by the sea with no internet connection, a desk and empty days to fill, with nothing to do but write. But I’m bad at applying for stuff, and have never been invited. Actually that’s not quite true: I was invited once. Through a chance conversation in a gin bar in Bologna, when I was on a book tour there, I did receive an invitation for a month-long residency in Beijing, with all travel and expenses paid, which would have been extraordinary. That was in spring 2020. Then, well… Covid.
On one level, the thought of having dedicated time and space to write, to do nothing else for days, does appeal immensely. If we think of writing as a flow, a stream of thoughts and imagination that simply wants to run free, but is endlessly impeded by the demands of normal life – emails, phone calls, cooking, cleaning, the entanglements of relationships – then surely taking those things away will lead to better writing? That seems to be the premise on which the whole idea is built. Having never been on one, I can’t say whether or not it’s true – or, more to the point, whether it would be true for me. But part of me suspects that I would struggle on one of these things.
This is partly because writing ‘escapes’ are, overwhelmingly, located in beautiful places. The idea, of course, is that lovely views bring writers inspiration. But I know myself well enough to know that if I found myself in the Highlands, or on a lonely stretch of the Northumbrian coast, or in a forest, or rolling hills – or a crowded neighbourhood of Beijing – all I would want to do is go for very long walks. The outside world is more interesting than the inside of my head. The last thing I’d want to do is stare at a screen all day. And then I can imagine the guilt – the opportunity has been squandered! – and guilt is not a good thing for the creative process. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but beautiful places do not seem particularly conducive to the process of making words.
Never mind the arcadian idyll – I’ll take the Megabus. Some of my best work has been done on the three-hour coach journey on the M4 between Bristol and London. The seats are too cramped to unfold my laptop properly, so I either have to contort my body in a way that makes my legs go numb, or squint at Google Docs on the screen of my phone. It’s difficult, uncomfortable, and the views are mostly dull. Someone is always listening to music at an antisocial volume. There are warm, unpleasant smells and annoying phone conversations. This is surely the opposite of what a retreat is meant to be.
Why does it work? I think it’s due to a lack of expectation. Sometimes when I sit down at my desk, with a full day ahead of me – conditions that really should be perfect – all I am aware of is a huge amount of pressure. With no distractions, the act of writing has an over-important feel, and a sense of self-awareness creeps between me and the words. There’s none of that on the Megabus. It’s a ridiculous place to write. With no expectations at all, I tell myself I’m just having a look, tinkering with a paragraph, doing a bit of editing. But sometimes I find that I’ve written hundreds of good words. The monotonous journey has flown by, the story has magically moved on, and I’m standing in Victoria Coach Station with half a chapter somehow finished. When this happens the writing feels stolen, in a delightful way. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. No pressure at all.
If writing is indeed a flow, distractions, rather than being impediments, are the bumps along the way that keep the current moving. Creativity, for me, works better if it has limits. When I was writing my first novel, I thought it would be a good idea to rent a tiny office space, a white-walled, monastery-like cell in an almost empty building, which seemed like a clean slate, a blank space to fill with words. There was a window, but I had to stand on a chair to look out of it. No one came to talk to me, though occasionally I would hear the tap of distant footsteps. Rather than freeing my creative powers, the blankness and the silence just made me feel intensely lonely, and soon I regarded going there with dread. Unsurprisingly, the novel came to a total standstill. After a depressing few months I did not renew my lease, and took to writing instead in cafés and public libraries. The words began to flow again. Whether it was the rattle of cups, the yelling of kids, or the sighs and throat-clearances of other people working, or at least pretending to, I came to understand that interruptions helped.
Now I have a desk in a shared office space alongside artists’ studios, a gourmet mushroom farm in a repurposed toilet block, and a recording studio frequented by people who play a lot of experimental panpipe music. On a break at the coffee machine I can chat to Pete, who maps pollution from poultry farms in the catchment of the River Wye, or Anthony, about how his shiitake and oyster mushrooms are doing, or Hannah, who works for a socially conscious architecture firm. I don’t find these conversations distracting, I find them interesting – and being interested is the first condition of writing. It’s refreshing to be reminded of the world outside my head. When I get back to my desk, my thoughts flow easier.
So inspiring writing locations, for me, are places where life is happening – even if that’s an aisle seat on the nine o’clock Megabus. But, despite everything I’ve just said, I’m willing to be proved wrong. If any owners of country estates with lonely castles are reading this, I’m open to invitations. I might not get much writing done, but I will enjoy the walks… and I’m sure the journey there and back will be productive.