I long to be one of those writers who rises at 6am to a lightly boiled egg, writes for four hours then bounces off to play tennis, or perhaps spear-fish a barracuda.

But for me, writing is chaotic and unpredictable. I don’t like working at a desk, I need to be somewhere cosy and comforting, like on a sofa. Sometimes I go to a café – there’s just the right level of distraction, lots of comfort food, and I love listening to bits of people’s conversation. I love the way people talk.

There are different phases with a novel. First I go through the compulsive phase where I’m just blurting out the whole emotional story with no regard to any form of grammar, spelling, punctuation or sense. At this point I’m in a feral, wild-haired state where I suddenly remember I’ve forgotten to pick up the children.

Then there’s an insecure phase, when I think the whole project’s pointless, and am trying to knock it into some sort of readable form to see what it’s like. That’s when I’m at my most distractable – working on a sentence, then looking at Net a Porter, working on a paragraph, then Googling holidays I will never go on, writing a page, then eating the contents of the fridge or deciding to give myself a 'smoky eye'.

My favourite stage is the weaving stage. That’s when I’ve got the material down, and I’m crafting it, working on all the threads which tie in together under the surface, and making the jokes tie in with the themes. At this point, when I didn’t have children, I’d work for 12-18 hours a day. You can’t do that with a family, but they’re very sweet, and will creep down in their PJs and sleep next to me on the sofa while I’m writing.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

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