"It made me recalibrate how to be a writer. I ended up relearning the way I ran my life, and it released me."

"Getting an agent isn't the end of the journey."

"I became bolder in my words and, crucially, in my determination to write them."

Suddenly those 20,000 words were much more than a modest start. They were a teaser to the book I’d almost finished. I ended up interviewing agents for two solid weeks.

The best ideas are the ones that drag you to places you never expected to be.

You don’t switch off Kramer vs Kramer because of Dustin Hoffman’s brown flares...

"There is a difference between liking a character and finding them interesting enough to keep reading about them."

"I had realised that if I wanted to write, I needed to banish the thoughts of that potential reader and their imagined judgements."

'The storyline has to be a product of the concept setting as much as possible.'

"I could not extract one positive comment from the eight page report, but do you know what? It made me even more determined to write a publishable novel."