The strangest things happen when you read your own journals

Catriona Ross was merely hoping for a tidy shelf when she decided to catalogue her diaries – not a harvest of pearls 

When I moved into my new house last year, there were a few things I promised myself I'd do. Hang a mini gallery of photographs around my desk so I'd be surrounded by my favourite people while working. Install a bird bath so I could watch white eyes bathing from my desk. Er, finish writing my novel. And unpack and catalogue my journals.
The first two I did immediately, and after a three-and-a-half year writing journey, I finally completed my sci-fi mystery/romance, The Last Book on Earth. But the journal organising? Man, that was work. Having written in a journal for thirty years, often daily, I had boxes of books containing pages and pages of my thoughts, impressions and experiences. And they were just sitting there, dead weight.
Finally, I mustered the energy to get started. I bought a box of little sticky labels and cleared out two shelves in my workspace for the journals. I decided I wouldn't try to do it all at once; instead, I'd aim to catalogue five books a day until it was done. After dinner one night, I began. I sat with a glass of wine and wrote the label for my first journal, from the year I was age 12: '1/1986-12/1986.' Label stuck onto the spine, the book was placed in the shelf. After a couple of weeks, the job was done.
The sight of all my journals and notebooks arranged in chronological order from the past three decades of my life was unexpectedly satisfying. And the strange thing is how useful they've become. Now that these Books of Me are accessible and visible, I mine this database of wisdom and self-knowledge regularly.
Journalling is a way of staying connected to oneself, recording significant events and tracking one's progress. 'Writing may have healing powers you've never thought of,' wrote Sue de Groot in a piece entitled 'Keeping a journal could give you a happier life' while we were colleagues at Cosmopolitan. 'Writing down your thoughts is a way of releasing unconscious stresses. Writing about your life, your confusions and your desires can be therapeutic. It can help you to see yourself more clearly.' Besides tracking our emotional states, 'you could take the power out of whatever scares you by putting your fears into words. You could use it for goal-setting, writing down where you want to be and breaking that down into concrete steps that will get you to that place.'
Indeed. And now my collection of journals is a living, growing, ever-changing source of inspiration. Recently I opened a journal at random and discovered notes I'd made seven years ago from a Deepak Chopra book. Stirring stuff! It was exactly what I needed to read at that moment. The next day in a second-hand bookshop, I spotted a Chopra book I hadn't yet read, and bought it, and that turned out to be just what I needed to read at that moment...
Looking back can help you let go. I'm able to see how the me of today is wiser than my younger self. I've opened journals and had tears well up to see where I was seven years ago in relationships compared with where I am now. Sometimes the long way round is the only way round...
A certain challenge may come up, reminding me of something I experienced years ago. I can now look it up in the relevant journal and compare notes with myself. How did I handle it then? What will I do this time? It's awoken me to the fact that we always get opportunities do things differently – and reach a better outcome.
Yesterday I looked up entries from the time I left permanent employment in magazines 11 years ago in order to freelance and focus on writing novels. With The Last Book on Earth finally finished, I know that major step has been worthwhile.  
Reading my old journals has given me an appreciation of the difficult decisions I've made – leaving a career, leaving a marriage – and an appreciation of myself: I've opened journals and screamed with laughter over scurrilous tales and hilarious experiences I'd forgotten about.
If you don't write in a journal, consider buying yourself a beautiful blank book and a fine pen and starting. And if you do, it's worth spending time organising those journals and displaying them like treasured books, as a way of celebrating your life – because if you don't, who will? Being oneself, I think, is life's greatest and most underrated privilege.

Nominate The Last Book on Earth for a Kindle Scout publishing contract! Campaign ends 9 November.

Work your diary – you might find a book in it

Writing fiction is a gloriously self-indulgent activity. (Well, the first draft anyway). Why? It allows you to gather the moods, places, characters, issues and items that intrigue you most, and write them into a world you can share with others. All the other stuff you can just ignore. (Well, until an editor has had a look at your manuscript). And one of the easiest starting points is a journal or diary.

John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, offers this practical advice: 'Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end – as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.'

This overlaps a little with the 'morning pages' advocated by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, as a way for burnt-out writers, artists and other creatives to rediscover their inspiration and sense of purpose. She recommends filling three A4 pages with handwriting – just stream of consciousness: thoughts, worries, weirdness – first thing each morning, to release them from your headspace. The idea is that you once you've written about how you're going to sort out your blocked drain, for example, your mind is free to pursue higher thoughts.

A useful exercise, after 12 weeks of morning pages, is to take a highlighter and go through them to mark recurrent ideas: these trends show you what keeps coming up for you. For me, buying an easel kept surfacing in my morning pages. What was stopping me from buying one and starting to paint again? They're expensive, duh. And if I bought an easel I'd actually have to, er, paint. But I bought one, finally. Then I wrote a novel.

I've also written in a journal every couple of days since the age of ten. Occasionally I dip into one. Doing this a few years ago, I saw some trends emerge and started writing a list of the things I realised I enjoyed writing about: Cape Dutch houses, farms, history, politics, human rights, self-development, books, sensuality, sumptuous meals, opera, wit, offbeat moments in everyday life, chocolate, lists… In fact, I decided to create a whole fictionalised world around those things I love and write about naturally: The Presence of Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel was the result.

In your diary, you might just find yourself as an author.  

5 tips to get your novel written

Now that we're over halfway through November – NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month – how's your word count looking? While NaNoWriMo enthusiasts try to crank out 1,667 words for 30 days straight, completing a first draft by 30 November, I prefer writing rather more sedately. I'm at the 55,000 mark on my new novel and it's taken me some months to get there, but my plan works and it doesn't require me to press pause on the rest of my life for a month. Here's how.

1. Set aside two writing sessions a week

Just two. For two afternoons a week, I commit to sitting at my screen for at least an hour, opening up my manuscript and typing something. That's it. I write fiction because I find it fun, creative and relaxing, so I allow myself to spend an hour writing whatever part of the book I feel like. But I try to make an extra half-hour to an hour available, in case I get on a literary roll and want to write more. I aim to write 1,000 words at a session but usually write more.

2. Switch off distractions

This really, really works. The time when I'm working on my book is sacred, so before I start, I crawl down behind my desk to unplug my internet cable, then switch my cellphone onto flight mode. People, it's frigging miraculous what you can achieve in an undisturbed hour. A single email or social media check-in can bomb an idea, derail a train of thought, vaporise that mood that could have been the beginning of an amazing scene. Try using a tool such as Freedom to lock yourself out of the internet for pre-set durations, say 90 minutes.

3. Leave judging and editing your first draft till later

Whether what you've written is good or not isn't relevant at this point. Write first; edit later. Your book won't be perfect now, and parts of it may be downright laughable, but it's important to get the story down while you feel that rush of inspiration. Editing and judgement can kill the excitement you need to make it to the finish line of your first draft. As my writing buddy (and fellow swimming-class parent) Byron agrees, unexpected things happen when you're writing. In his case, a sinister character appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. 'I just went with it,' he told me. His book needed this character to the balance the others, he now feels. Half the thrill of writing lies in the unplanned developments that happen while you're writing. Don't think, 'I didn't plan this so it's wrong and it's not going to work.' Leave it in; relook it later.

4. Don't talk about your book too much

Avoid revealing too much about your story to those who ask. Hone a one-sentence description or elevator pitch to give them enough to satisfy them. Don't go into details or they'll give you their opinion, which may ruin the magic for you. It's vital that, while writing your first draft, you stay true to your vision. Once you're happy with your completed first draft, get feedback from trusted friends or colleagues who love reading novels and whose opinion you value, or from a professional editor. But don't open yourself up to criticism too soon, or someone's offhand comment may make you divert completely from the shining idea you really want to pursue.

5. Save your work after every session

I learnt this the hard way. Rewriting a large chunk of my mystery novel Little Diamond Eye that had come to me as if channelled (you know?), three days later, was not nearly as fun as it had been the first time around... Make backups each time you write. Save your work in two different places, ideally emailing the latest version to yourself on gmail.

Let me know how it goes, and share your own tips for getting your novel written, on The Peacock Book Project's Facebook page: www.facebook.com/peacockproject 

Catriona Ross is a journalist and author. Find her books in the Kindle Store: Little Diamond Eye, The Presence of Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel, The Love Book, Writing for Magazines: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, and The Happy Life Handbook.

Getting started: what's stopping you?

You know you want to write a book. You have a notebook full of scribblings and 4am insomnia ideas that could just work. You even possess that fabled hour every weekday to write, and the knowledge that if you actually used your daily hour, you'd have written an entire book by the end of this year. And a book might get you a pulisher, and a movie deal, and, and, and.

So what's stopping you?

Truth number 1: Writing is scary.
Yes, uh-huh. You actually have to put words down, and some of them might be crap. A lot of them. Maybe even all of them. The author's ego is delicate. Thoughts of being a writer who writes crappy words causes intense pain. My advice is that it's better to write something than nothing. 'Something' you can at least work with - say, edit it, polish it, give it a nip and tuck or even a whole makeover; 'nothing', however, will remain nothing.  

Truth number 2: Writing is hard work.
I've just finished reading a novel by one of my favourite authors – On Green Dolphin Street by Sebastian Faulks – and a wry passage on the process of writing fiction rang true.

' … From what he could gather from novelists' own diaries and letters, the urge that was common to them all was a need to improve on the thin texture of life as they saw it; by ordering themes and events into an artistically pleasing whole, they hoped to give to existence a pattern, a richness and a value that in actuality it lacked. If after reading such a novel you looked again at life – its unplotted emergencies, narrative non sequiturs and pitiful lack of significance – in the light of literature, it might seem to glow with a little of that borrowed lustre; it might seem after all to be charged with some transcendent value.
These poor writers depicted themselves engaged in this heavy task: from people they knew or met, they gathered characteristics for their imaginary humans; from conversations, they pulled out thoughts that could be developed into themes; houses they had visited were relocated and refurnished; other writers were absorbed, assimilated for what they could unwittingly donate; from some less recognizable source the power of pure invention was mobilized, while over it all the artistic intelligence shaped an entity that would thrillingly exceed the sum even of these rich parts.
To Charlie it looked like very hard work. …’
  

Writing is the best sort of work, if you ask me. A week ago I started writing my new interactive novel, The Last Book in the World (um, hopefully not), and every time I sit down to write – in that precious hour before I fetch my daughter from daycare – I feel anew the rush of creating a whole world, of having the freedom to write what what I like. But it’s still work. I always have to force myself a little to sit and write (after all, it’s not compulsory, not like freelance journalism deadline) but I find it’s always worth the effort because of the way it makes me feel: mischievous, empowered, mysterious, interesting, interested, alive.

The trick to getting started? Start anywhere – at the end, at the beginning, somewhere in the middle, or with a key scene that keeps squatting in your mental space. Go, go, go! Sorry to have to remind you, but one day you’ll be dead and you won’t be able to write. Nope, not at all. So sit at your PC every day. Make it a habit. And start writing anywhere.

Write the novel of your dreams with The Peacock Book Project: www.peacockproject.net

What writers can learn from the lives of artists

I've been reading about the life of Impressionist artist Edouard Manet this week past. His paintings delight me with their clean lines and satisfying contrasts, their masterful brush strokes and perfectly considered daubs of light and dark. But what really struck me were his letters, which reveal the reality of life as a creative person: translating idealism into practicality; trying to create something beautiful and meaningful; and frequently dealing with cash-flow problems. Manet was from an affluent family but many of his fellow artists were not, as this letter shows:

To his friend, artist Theodore Duret, he wrote, circa 1875,

'I went to see Monet yesterday and found him in despair and absolutely broke.
He asked me to find someone who would take between ten and twenty pictures of their choice for 100 francs apiece. Shall we do the deal ourselves, putting up 500 francs each?
Of course no-one, and least of all he, should know that we're in on this. I thought of trying to find a dealer or collector but suspect they might refuse.
Unfortunately, it takes people as knowledgeable as we are to do a good piece of business, in spite of the repugnance we may feel, in order to help out a talented artist. Send me an answer as soon as possible or suggest a rendezvous.'
E. Manet 

From 'Manet by himself' (Macdonald Illustrated) Edited by Juliet Wilson-Bareau

Monet! Broke! If only Claude had known the international stardom he'd later achieve, the zillions of office walls his avant-garde poppyfields and haystacks and sunrises would populate more than a century later. But thank heavens for his friends, no? As creatives following a personal vision, we all need a community of supporters. We need those people who'll give us a pep talk when our work's not selling, who'll convince us not to throw in the paintbrush or pen or PC but to continue doing what we love. If you're feeling broke and desperate today, phone a fellow creative. There's no such thing as an overnight success in art or writing - or anything worth doing, for that matter. Keep going, people. Keep doing what you're doing. The hard times are as valuable as the successes in turning you into the person you will become one day.

Start writing the novel of your dreams with The Peacock Book Project: www.peacockproject.net







 

Is this the year you write your novel?

Writing a novel is an intensely personal, intimate experience. It's just you, your imagination and the magic of words. When you sit down to write and find yourself in the creative zone, you may experience timelessness, a feeling of flow, the sense of universal energy swirling around you - and the ability to draw strands of that energy down onto your page or screen, as required...

Sound a bit too esoteric for you? Well, keep writing, keep plodding on, and from time to time you will experience writerly flow. Promise. Don't expect it all the time, though. Mostly, writing a book is a mundane matter of forcing yourself to sit at your computer and write something. Anything. But if you do that, rewards come: the gold dust sometimes descends, making the boring, practical side of writing worthwhile.

As for that blank screen staring back at you while you try to construct an opening line: could there be any greater freedom available to anyone? There you are, poised to create a whole new world using words; a world that is a mental construct filled with sensations and scenes of peculiar significance to you.

And one of the bonus outcomes is the infinite number of ways your work will be interpreted. Each reader of your novel mirrors your creative writing process by using his or her imagination to conjure up the imagery and meaning provoked by your words, turning your book into something of unique significance to him or her. Which, I think, is creative and cool in itself.

Author Jonathan Lethem wrote in O magazine, '...one of the things that defines reading is its intimacy - which is what I love about it. Even if you have a train carriage full of people, all of them reading The Corrections, they'd each be on a different page. It's not like watching a movie; you're not having a collective experience.'

Here's to writing, to reading, and to the personal experience of words. (If you're ready to start writing right now, go to www.peacockproject.net and use the free Writer's Template.) Happy 2013.

What reminds you of your heritage?

A friend and I were talking recently about the importance of heritage - and, specifically, small visual reminders around the home that bring to mind one's ancestors. After all, our unique combination of genetic material is inherited from a vast family tree stretching back to the beginnings of humankind. Each one of our ancestors who survived to reproduce and pass on DNA to us lived a life - a full life of pleasures, pain, heartbreak, loves, losses and moments of transformation. We have our ancestors to thank for our bodies, talents and temperaments, and it's good to be able to nod to an old family photograph or other tangible reminder of this amid the bustle of daily life.

My father lives overseas, and every time he visits South Africa, he brings me a reminder of some of the people who gave rise to me: perhaps a small pepper canister from somebody's kitchen a century ago, or a letter written in copperplate, or a black-and-white photograph with a name and dates written on the back. One such offering hangs in our passage in the farmhouse: a pencil drawing of a bouquet of flowers from 1887 by my paternal great-grandmother, whose nickname 'Nina' lives on in my little daughter today.

Most recently, I was thrilled to discover that my great-grandfather, the Scottish novelist and poet Neil Munro, has been digitised! Yup, his famous Highland murder mystery, The New Road, first published in 1914 by Blackwoods and included in The List's 100 Greatest Scottish Books of All Time, is now available as an ebook from Merchiston Publishing. See http://newroadmunro.wordpress.com/ for details. Thanks, Neil, for the words - and may they live on in those of us who've inherited your writer genes.

What is your soul's theme tune?

I adore music. It's why, when devising The Peacock Book Project , I couldn't help slipping in a theme song for each chapter and adding links to songs that reflect the mood of a particular scene - all of which add up to a personalised soundtrack for my novel. The Peacock Book Project may be an interactive creative writing programme, but it features sound and imagery too. Because it can. Because free technology makes it possible.

Maybe you're like me. Maybe particular songs speak to you at particular times. Over the years, I've realised there's one piece of music that could possibly called be the theme tune to my soul. What I mean by this is that its vibrations touch me on every level, every time. The energy it emits corresponds so exactly to something buried inside me that whenever I hear it, I forget the stresses, screw-ups, traumas and difficulties of life, and reconnect with the pure energy from which we're all originally made. Seriously, within two minutes of listening to the 11-minute first movement (moderato) of Rachmaninov's piano concerto No. 2 in C minor, opus 18, I am changed.

The movement begins with dark, deep, rich chords that build and swell. Unashamedly passionate, outragiously opulent, the sounds thrill and rejuvenate me. Somehow, Rachaminov's harmonies and lyrical themes inject me with the frequencies of freedom, power, infinite possibility, happiness. Recently, I've been listening to the moderato at night, lying on the floor of our sitting room, spread-eagled on the Persian carpet, while the old floorboards creak with the music's vibrations and my one-year-old daughter climbs all over me. It's as if the cells of my body are thirsty and need to drink in the sound. This is therapy of the quickest, most pleasurable kind. Not bad for 11 minutes at home alone - and all I needed to do was press 'play'.

What, I wonder, is your soul's theme tune? Feel free to share it on the the Peacock Book Project's Facebook page. And look out for the Rachmaninov in Chapter 5, appearing next month...  

Author Marina Lewycka on sudden fame, the seriousness of comedy, and her new novel, Various Pets Alive and Dead

This interview with the best-selling author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian originally appeared in the Sunday Times Lifestyle section, 24 June 2012.

When she appears on my Skype screen, Marina Lewycka is lying in bed. ‘Excuse my hair; I’ve just been for a swim,’ she says with a sheepish look.

Lewycka (pronounced ‘Lewiska’) not only conducts interviews from her bed at home in Sheffield whenever possible, but writes her novels there too, on a laptop. ‘It’s comfy and cosy in bed, and you can shut yourself off. It’s much nicer to sit back and have cups of tea at your side and a hot water bottle under your knees than to sit at a desk. I could spend six hours a day in bed, but it does get a bit hard on the body,’ confesses the writer, now in her mid-sixties.

Dismantling the webcam, she takes my eyes on a quick tour of her bedroom, past an antique mirrored cupboard and a shelf stuffed with books to the window, where I peer down a few storeys of red-brick house to her spring garden, momentarily lit by a pale English sun.

The tale of Marina Lewycka’s late-in-life literary fame has become legend. ‘Until my mid-fifties, I was really a housewife who stayed at home,’ she says with self-deprecation. ‘But I’d always wanted to be a writer. I’d tried writing Mills and Boons, and had a go at thrillers. In fact, I’d written two complete novels, in longhand, and got very dispirited.’ A part-time lecturer at her local polytechnic, she was approaching retirement and was invited to take any course offered by the institution gratis. She chose a creative writing course, ‘and that,’ she says, ‘led to my breakthrough.’

Among the external examiners was literary agent Bill Hamilton of A.M. Heath in London, who, after reading her manuscript, signed her up. A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian was published in 2005 and sold over a million copies in the UK alone. The hit comedy about two sisters whose widowed father, a former engineer writing a history of tractors in Ukranian, marries a much younger Ukrainian immigrant, was followed by Two Caravans in 2007, We Are All Made of Glue in 2009, and Various Pets Alive and Dead last month.

Success flipped Lewycka’s life around. She describes not only the fulfilment in attaining her dream – of ‘having always really known I was supposed to be a writer, having worked for it terribly hard for so long, and then it all happened at once’ – but the downside: ‘When something is no longer a dream, it becomes a day job. I’m 65 and I’ve never worked so hard in my life! My friends are retired, and I wish I could relax, like them.’ But for the next few months, following the launch of her new novel, she’ll be giving talks and interviews, doing readings and book signings at the Scarborough Literary Festival, the London Book Fair and other events. ‘Then it will all calm down, and the story that’s at the back of my head will come out – I hope.’

Lewycka’s first literary effort was a poem written at the age of four. Born in a German refugee camp, dark-haired Marina was a year old when she and her Ukranian parents moved to England. Her father, who worked for International Harvester tractors in Doncaster, ‘considered himself a poet, and was actually quite good,’ she recalls. ‘My mother was one of the great story-tellers. She’d tell me about life back home in Ukraine – what people did in the winter, the names of their pet animals.’

The author remembers a stimulating, multi-cultural household filled with her parents’ friends from France, Germany and elsewhere, partly thanks to a warm, embracing mother who liked to invite interesting people home and feed them cake. Lewycka, however, was uncomfortably conscious of her own foreignness throughout childhood. ‘I grew up in the habit of seeing myself on the outside of things. It’s not nice for a little kid, but for a writer it’s nice to be on the sidelines, watching.’

Early feelings of exclusion may explain her empathy for those marginalized by society – the immigrants, refugees and elderly figures who appear in all her novels. Always full-blooded, quirky and indomitable, these characters offer more than mere entertainment value by humanising the people one might unconsciously regard as ‘other’.

Their presence reflects too the years Lewycka spent writing handbooks for Age Concern, Britain’s support organisation for the aged, and Mencap, the charity for people with learning disabilities. ‘I’d interview families for the handbooks and write about them in the first person. I still had dreams of telling their stories in novels one day,’ she says.

‘When I started writing Various Pets Alive and Dead, a Down’s Syndrome boy I knew popped up in my mind. He was so enthusiastic, so full of life, and could do anything he wanted, such as go off to the Special Olympics.’ This case study inspired the character of Oolie-Anna, a lusty, loud young woman with Down’s Syndrome who is desperate to leave home and live in her own flat, while her adoptive mother, ageing hippy Doro, struggles to let go.

The novel illustrates actual situations Lewycka encountered during her work with Mencap. Children with Down’s Syndrome live longer nowadays than they used to, and, as Lewycka points out, ‘What happens to them when their parents grow old or die? One needs to plan for the possibility of their outliving their parents.’ In Various Pets, a perky social worker finds Oolie-Anna a job and irritates Doro with such platitudes as, ‘But in the long term it’ll be better for everybody if Oolie-Anna can spread her wings and learn to fly’.

Various Pets Alive and Dead is a characteristic blend of farce, wit, pathos and social awareness. ‘I’m actually a very serious person, but I’m not good at writing serious things. They come out with a light touch,’ explains the author, a fan of British comedy classics including Fawlty Towers and Monty Python. ‘You think comedy isn’t serious but with comedy you can say such a lot that serious can’t. Comedy can expose the depths of the human soul; funny is what we are when we least intend to be.’

            A wry exploration of modern values, the new novel moves between three narrators: Doro; her son Serge, who’s pretending to finish his maths PhD at Cambridge while secretly raking in money as a City trader in London (a position that would horrify his anti-capitalist parents); and her daughter Clara, a primary school teacher. ‘I’m a bossy sort, like Clara,’ Lewycka laughs. ‘Actually, there’s a bit of me in all my characters.’

The storyline involves two present-day locations, flashbacks to Doro and Marcus’s lentil-infused commune in the 1960s, loads of backstory to inform the present-day plot, plus various pets. ‘It was very complicated to write,’ Lewycka admits, ‘as the backstory and real world had to dovetail together. If I changed one tiny thing, I had to go through the whole novel and change a whole lot of others.’ Yet she clearly thrives on complexity: Two Caravans featured nine interlinked narrative voices, including a dog.

Having taught media studies at Sheffield Hallam University for twelve years, Lewycka acknowledges the rewards of teaching but adds, ‘There are some really, really awful students and you wish you could flog them. There are departmental meetings, and days when you just don’t feel like doing the marking…’

Since retiring from teaching in December, Lewycka has more time for writing in bed. Her daughter and granddaughter live in New Zealand, and her partner, a historian, is based in London. ‘He and I go between the two cities,’ she says. ‘It’s nice to have gaps.’ Her next novel, the second of a two-book deal, will probably be set in Derbyshire, feature a child as its protagonist, and involve animals.

Though something of a celebrity in Sheffield, she remains resolutely down to earth. ‘The good thing about being an author is that, on the whole, you’re pretty invisible. That picture of me on the dust jacket of my new book was taken some time ago, so when I go out looking like a bag lady, as I so often do, I’m not recognised,’ she says with satisfaction. In her spare time Lewycka indulges in low-key, very English pursuits: gardening, swimming, baking cakes, taking a friend’s dog for walks in the surrounding Peak District.

It’s unlikely that Marina Lewycka will ever be accused of taking herself too seriously. As she wrote two years ago, ‘I’ve been a “successful” writer for almost five years now, but I never forget that I was an unsuccessful writer for more than fifty. It helps to keep things in perspective.’

(It's never too late to write a novel. Join The Peacock Project's online creative writing programme at http://www.peacockproject.net/, and get started today!)