Creativity has its own ebb and flow...

ICAN’T come and see you today. I am too busy with work.’ I am ringing my mother. My mother is very independent. She is busy herself and does not expect me to go and see her every day.

She knows that the real reason I’m ringing is just to give out about my writing. So she asks, ‘How is the book going?’

‘Terrible.’ My relief is palpable. ‘I am way behind.’

‘That’s what you always say.’ Wrong answer.

‘I’ll never get it finished. I think this could be the first book that I won’t finish. It might take me ten years. And it won’t even be that great.’

I can hear her raise her eyes to heaven. Somehow, if I can get her to worry about my book not getting finished, I can stop worrying about it myself. Then maybe I will be able to get on with the business of actually finishing it.

‘This time it’s different,’ I say. ‘Really. This one is really, really hard going.’

There is a pause into which she says, ‘ you always say that as well and yet somehow you always get it done.’

‘How do you write a book?’ people often ask me when I tell them what I do for a living. I shrug casually and say ‘It’s my job. No big deal.’ Inside I am screaming, ‘I DON’T KNOW!’

I am a full-time novelist and always have a book on the go. Yet even after publishing 15 books, each one feels like an impossible task that will never end. Why keep going? Answer – I have to. I am compelled to write. It’s like breathing, but I can’t say I enjoy it.

I enjoyed hairdressing – my job before I started writing. Completing a glossy blow-dry or a perfect set of highlights made me feel satisfied and happy. Writing never gives me that satisfaction. The writing itself often makes me feel nervous and insecure.

Being published offers very little release. Even while getting great reviews, part of me is always fretting about the next one. I don’t write books because it’s fun. I write because I have to. Because it’s the only thing I’m good at.

‘You’re a born writer,’ my mother says, ‘you’ll get there.’

‘Thanks,’ I say. But I put the phone down feeling unsatisfied. I know I am making a meal out of this one.

‘I can only write early in the mornings,’ I announced to my husband last night. This is the latest thing. Being precious about my ‘routine’.

‘You’ll have to start getting up earlier for the kids in the morning because I have to be locked in my office from 7am. Otherwise the book won’t get written.’

In other words, if I can’t write it’s not my fault. It’s yours. I have to start writing before anyone as much as speaks to me in the morning, otherwise the muse will desert me and ‘my writing day is gone. Gone!’ Honestly, if I was married to me I’d kill me.

I am spreading the misery between my husband and my mother. Lucky them. I put the phone down and get back to it. I strain out two sentences when I hear a strange noise. A quack?

I look out of my office window and there are three ducks pottering about on our front lawn. They have walked up from the end of the road where Killala Gun Club have bred a gang of ducks as permanent pets for the local community.

THEY are, of course, an impossible distraction. So I go to the kitchen and get some bread.

I sit on the ancient old wall that hems our front lawn and throw the ducks some crusts. They come right up to me and would eat out of my hands except I’m a bit nervous when it comes to wildlife.

But they are so close I can see the flat silk of their neck feathers contract as they swallow. When they’ve had their fill, the ducks flap back to their corner of the sea and I go back to my computer.

‘That’s their life,’ I think. Swim, potter – eat when you want. Nobody standing over them telling them what to do or when to do it. Not so different from mine.

I get stuck in, write greedily and have a chapter finished by lunchtime. No big deal. That’s how writing goes. Like life, there is an ebb and flow. You just have to make yourself available to go with it.