I am writing this from that place of excitement. Do you know the one? When you suddenly feel as if you have made a breakthrough after what feels like months, even years – thousands of years! – in the dark. I’ve been writing a journal these past months, page after page, which I have barely glimpsed at as I’ve moved through it, not wanting to ruin or interrupt its flow, as a kind of experiment – to try to feel myself into a new project, a new book. As long as I am writing everything will fall into place. Judging by this weekend, I think I was right.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted to write about, and it’s the obvious second memoir from Sins of My Father, as it’s what happened to my life, the bits that were hinted at – the failed marriage, the ship that I wrecked, the relocation, and the creation after a lot of stress and heartache, of a new family, my daughter’s fatigue, and the challenges of all that – but I wasn’t sure of its edge. Not to mention the fear that is thrown up when you write about your children, your new relationship, the challenges of living in a blended family. How could I write about it without exposing those people that I loved, and how could I write about an everyday occurrence in a compelling and interesting way?

I have been throwing ideas out into the ether, asking questions on Twitter – should I just simply write the story first and then work out how to pitch it to a publisher? Or should I try to think of it in conceptual terms, should I begin to create a selling document, in the hope I could get a publisher on my side, support me through the next few years so I don’t need to take on so much teaching work and I can go back to doing what I love, which is writing, and writing another memoir – which personally has become kind of addictive. Clover Stroud, you will know what I am talking about!

And then this weekend, I landed on something.

I have been confined to the house for the past five months looking after our baby puppy. I had no idea that having a puppy was so like having a baby. We have been consumed by sleep routines, diet, discipline, we’ve struggled to get back to work. Our social life has gone to pits. I spend most of my spare time looking at training videos rather than reading the latest literary memoir! … Thankfully puppies do grow up quicker than humans… But I have missed those evenings when me and my partner go out and do something cultural – watch a movie, go to the theatre, out for dinner. Mostly, actually, because it’s often when we do this that ideas are formed. We witness something, some emotion, some theme running through a film, and might have an ah-ah moment.

But this weekend was different: this weekend we had a night out. We went to see the new Complicité production directed by Simon McBurney, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead, adapted from Nobel Prize-winning author Olga Tokarczuk’s novel of the same name – and it was powerful and compelling and wonderful. The play is narrated by a woman who reminded me so much of my grandmother: fierce, single minded, independent spirited – and I don’t know if it was this that nudged my mind into the right space, or the pure creative power of the performance, and its beautiful and surprising soundscape, and visual stimulus, light and image and physical movement, but the next morning I was given a gift. As I described it on Twitter: a memory led to a word, led to a question that has an answer, that fed into a metaphor that has massive resonance for me and will help bring story to an otherwise potentially mundane subject. It was this metaphor that made it for me, and for the first time I got a sense of what we memoirists need to do if we don’t have an extraordinary readymade subject: ie, my dad the sex addict who joined a cult and died of drink and prescription drug overdose. We need to work extra hard to create an aesthetic, and this can be done through metaphor. Was it the spirit of the central character in the play on Saturday night, or was it that I was sitting behind a friend and she reminded me of a moment years ago when we were swimming together in Cornwall and she was talking to be about fractures and how they affect our children and I wasn’t ready to hear it, I wasn’t ready to face the truth. Was it any of these things? I don’t know but I know I have now landed my idea and it is multi-layered and everything points to this, and suddenly all the scenes are rushing to occupy my mind and I have more material than I know what to do with …  and I must get out more often.