No doubt you will have heard many people speak of how difficult it is to write book number two. This is down to many factors, mostly expectation, either publisher expectation – maybe you’ve signed a two book deal – or personal expectation: will it be as good as the last? But what I am discovering is that every book is different, and so those early stages of feeling yourself into a new work are often a necessary weeding out of all the unhelpful thoughts of expectation or comparison, before you get into your stride, and you are guided by what your heart and soul, and the book, are trying to tell you.

I have written more than one book. In fact, I have written four books to date. My first novel was published many years ago, and my first child was born just before it was published, and I then wrote two novels when my children were very small. Sins of My Father was actually my fourth book, but only my second published book. (Both novels almost got published – the second made it to acquisitions and the third was picked up by a small press but only once my memoir was on the road to publication, and I decided to focus my energies on writing nonfiction). So, now that I am venturing into writing my second memoir, it is actually my fifth book – sorry, it will be my sixth book, as I have another in the pipeline, yet to be announced! – but none of this makes it any easier.

Soon after Sins of My Father was published, I felt an urgent need to have another proposal on the table, and so sent my editor a sketched out idea. My editor came back and said it wasn’t really a book. Then I had another idea, which was a follow-on from Sins: interweaving stories of some of the women and men who had grown up in the communes of the cult my dad was involved with, a kind of polyphonic memoir. This was a book, according to my editor, and a good one at that, but the publicity department felt they had exhausted the publicity avenues on my previous memoir, and so my publisher wasn’t the publisher for it! I could have taken this idea elsewhere, but the sticking point for me was that I had struggled to envision how I was going to write it. Just get the proposal accepted and then worry about that later – I told myself, but actually this didn’t sit right.

I went out for lunch with a writer friend yesterday and we were discussing our working practice, and she suggested that I was the kind of writer who takes time to find my structure. The writing comes first, and the structure comes later. This rang a bell. She said, we all need to understand our particular process, and then work with that. This then becomes our strength. Yes! This was why I have found it so difficult to write another proposal, even though I have a really strong idea! I don’t really know what it is I am writing until I start to write it.

I went away to a house on a headland with my dog to write a proposal for my next memoir, and was really pleased that I managed it… but I also simply started to write. And as I started to write, the book veered off in another direction. I returned home and realised that my proposal was wrong. I didn’t yet know why it was wrong or how I was going to put it right, but I did know that something was driving me to the page each morning and when I sat down with my notebook the words kept flowing, until I had pages and pages of the stuff. I have never worked like this before. I have written blindly, and let the words lead me, but then I have typed those same words onto a screen and fiddled with them, trying to get them into some sort of shape. This way I am simply writing in long hand and filling up the notebook, only to pick up a second, and a third. When I do come to type it up it’s going to be a mammoth task! But what’s exciting is that something surprising is emerging and I am not sure exactly what it is.

I realise that this book is different, simply because my life is different, and my experience as a writer is different, and a lot has changed between the then of writing Sins and the now of writing the next. It’s also different because it is a product of me and so will never replicate memoirs that are out there, or bend to the desires of a given publisher. It might be tweaked when an editor decides to take it on, but it needs to know its heart by the time it gets there. Memoir is not straight nonfiction and it is not easy to conjure from an idea. It feels too alive for that. Too dependent on the nuance of experience and story, and the surprises of the imagination. And this, for me, is where the art comes in… and the fun of discovery.