Why do we writers find ways to obstruct the very thing we want to do – which is write? I’ve been deliberating over this question a lot recently, and I am using this blog space as a way of trying to work it out on the page – which is often the way I work things out. So bear with me if this feels somewhat random and unprocessed.

I’ve wanted to write since I was a child. I should rephrase that. I have been writing since I was a child. Writing on everything and in every spare hour, in notebooks, on scraps of paper, backs of napkins. I’ve written stories which turned into novels. I’ve written endless diaries. I’ve written when I’ve been happy; I’ve written when I’ve been sad. I’ve attempted to get the bad thoughts out of my head and for years would write them in black ink – big and ugly on a scrap of paper, carried around in my work diary or the back pocket of my jeans, so I could look at them throughout the day when the thoughts haunted me again. I imagined if I made them big and black and ugly I would somehow master them.

Then I stopped writing because I worried about what I was going to write next.

The ‘want’ in the writing child is significant – I wanted to be the world’s youngest novelist: I had a vivid fantasy of being interviewed by Terry Wogan on his TV show. But I also simply wrote.

Since my book came out, I’ve been keen to get another book underway. I’ve written lots of notes, and have plotted a couple of books. I’ve written proposals. But I haven’t actually been writing. As in entering into a new world. Creating that world in prose. I’ve been stuck in the ‘wanting’ phase.

And then I got a dog.

But not just any dog. This is a crossbreed, working dog, a triple herding dog. This is a clever dog with lots of energy.

But I was led by a feeling. I’ve never been very good at following feelings, as I never really trusted them – but I have learned to trust them now I’m in my 40s. And there was something about this feeling that I wanted to follow. The feeling was about coming back into the fold. It was about engaging with my loving self, and embedding myself in the world of my creation, my family, my home. It was not about contracts, or stardom, or literary events… or Wogan. It was about simply fur, and soft paw pads, overgrown ears, and a curious face, and seeing the joy my son has each time she runs to him, the sweet smile on my daughter’s face when she sits on her lap, the relief from the chronic fatigue that has been tailing her this year. Something shared with my partner, their step dad, who has before now been on the periphery of this family of three. But now has put his spade in the sand in the form of a wriggling, biting, barking bundle of curiosity.

I have made my life more difficult in lots of ways. I have lost my twenty minute cup of tea in bed in the morning, and I currently work only when she sleeps. The writing is getting squished. But for the first time in months, the writing is happening. Nothing grand and ambitious for now, just those things that move me, that bring tears to my eyes. Those things I want to spend time with on the page.

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