And you write

This beautiful vase is the work of the Trench Town Ceramic Art Centre, part of the Bob Marley Foundation

And you write.  You write when what you write makes no sense and you don’t know why you’re writing about burnt toast and porridge and a man who likes cats.  

You write when the words feel like bricks and nothing’s really flowing. 

You write when you feel like you don’t have anything to write about and so you literally write, ‘I don’t have anything to write about.’  

And you write when you know what you are writing is rubbish until eventually you might just write, ‘I’m just writing rubbish.’  

But you just keep writing.  Because for me, it’s the pushing through that works. Being willing to overcome your fears and just go with the flow or not the flow, even though it might not be perfect, you write.

What really unlocked this novel writing space for me was being able to think of my writing as producing the clay - the basic raw material.  I wasn’t producing a beautifully polished finished vase yet.  Without the clay you can’t have the vase.  Thinking about writing in that way was a huge breakthrough for me.  It was so freeing.   I was writing rubbish.  Let me write my rubbish.

And then this wonderful, magical thing happened when I started to push through.  The characters started talking to me. I could hear their voices and they had so much to say.   The man who was in his flat needed to have cats.  The toast and the porridge both needed to be burnt.

I think the urgent drive to get the words out also helped me to push through the uncomfortableness.  I'd already spent a long time not sending any words to Nelle, partly because I thought that they needed to be perfect.  But without words, well, I’ve got no book and I didn’t want to mess up my new agent relationship.  I didn’t want to give Nelle an excuse to say, ‘D’you know what, I don’t think this is working.’ And I also held onto that slither of something that said, write the words and this might, just might, change your life.