My alarm goes off at 5.30 am, when I’m greeted by Maisie, our rescue dog, as if I’ve been gone for six months. Back in the days before home schooling, I wouldn’t generally have risen before the average sheep farmer, but there’s a lot of catching up to do and this is the most productive time of the day.
The World At My Feet
I get a head start on the novel I’m currently working on before the household wakes. It would be easy to get sucked in to answering emails and updating social media first, but the most important part of an author’s working life is writing, so that takes priority.
At 7am the noise levels rise significantly as my three sons - aged 15, 12 and 8 – get ready for school. They don’t quite greet me with the same enthusiasm as the dog (with the teenager, I’m lucky if I get a ‘where are my clean trousers?’)
After the kids are dropped off, I’ll check social media. I’m on Twitter and Facebook but Instagram has become my platform of choice after I started renovating our 178-year-old house last year. It’s great for inspiration but also for documenting our own achievements so it actually feels like we’re getting somewhere.
For the rest of the morning, I write. If I’m working on a first draft, I’ll aim for 2000 words a day. At this stage, I’m still grappling with finding the true heart of the novel and what I want it to say. I know I’ll change or throw away a lot in later drafts, but that’s all part of the process.
At lunchtime, I go out for a run. The creation of a novel doesn’t all happen while sitting in front of your computer. You need to step away and give yourself thinking time - to untangle knots in plots and determine your characters’ motivation.
The afternoon is when I turn to all the other tasks that being an author involves, aside from writing. This can mean research, of which I did a lot for The World at my Feet, my latest book. It tells the story of two very different women – one, a journalist in the 1990s who reports on the Romanian orphanages hitting headlines around the globe; the other a gardener, with thousands of social media followers who are unaware that she is battling severe agoraphobia.
My final jobs of the day involve anything from writing articles like this, to having meetings about publicity or accounts. I like the days that involve seeing other people. I feel immensely privileged to make a living from creating stories, but I the fact that it’s so solitary isn’t always easy; I consider myself an extrovert.
I’ll usually end the day with dinner cooked by my husband Mark (he’s better at it than me), before I help with homework or take one of the boys to a piano lesson. Then it’s back home to crash on the sofa with a good book or episode of Schitt’s Creek, which is my current obsession.
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1. Taking risks makes you a better writer. I’d had a decade-long career writing romantic comedy as Jane Costello before I came up with the idea for You Me Everything. I dismissed it as being too ambitious at first, not in keeping with the light-hearted style I was known for. But the story took hold of me until I just had to start writing it. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made... to read more click HERE
