Frequently Asked Questions     Do you plan it all before you start? Yes: in detail. I couldn't just set out without knowing where I was going. But I don't particularly enjoy the planning. The real pleasure in writing comes when you've done that preliminary work - when you know exactly who your characters are and what their world is like. So when you sit down to write you're re-entering a world that you've created. Do you have a daily writing routine? I write from about ten till two: I've never been able to write in the late afternoon or evening. I have a gardenia on my desk, I always drink my coffee from the same green coffee cup: and I write with smudgy 4B pencils. It sounds eccentric - but I think a lot of writers need to have everything exactly right before they start. There's something elusive about writing - sometimes it flows, sometimes you can't write a thing - and these little rituals are about trying to make it happen - conjuring up the magic, if you like. Where do your ideas come from? It might be an image in my head - like the woman with long dark hair who slipped into my mind one day and became the heroine of Alysson's Shoes. Or it might be that a friend will tell me about something that happened to her, and I'll think - I could write about that... When an idea comes that's going to work, there's a moment of real excitement, and I feel a kind of certainty, however unfocused the idea may be. And sometimes this happens when I thought I was going to write about something else entirely. When did you start writing? I wrote obsessively as a child - Alan Garner-style fantasy stories - but gave up writing entirely in adolescence when music became more important in my life. I started writing again quite suddenly one day in my twenties. I was doing a course in Music Therapy: I'd done a percussion session with an autistic boy which had gone badly wrong, and I'd been told off by my supervisor - and I was upset. I went home and wrote a poem - the first time I'd written for about fifteen years. Since then I've never stopped writing. Interesting, perhaps, that it was a negative experience that got me writing again. One of the things that's great about writing is that you can use and transform what happens to you: and bad experiences often make for good writing. Which writers do you most admire? I love Helen Dunmore for the lyricism of her writing, and I was delighted when she gave me an endorsement for Trust. I also admire Joanna Trollope immensely - for the psychological truth of her writing, and those wonderfully real children. Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca is the quintessential emotional thriller: it's a perfect book, just as gripping when you pick it up for the third time. I suspect the shade of Rebecca lurks behind Alysson's Shoes. How did you get published? How can I get published? Sometimes people come into your life just when you need them, and that happened to me. When I was learning to write in my twenties, I was helped by Nigel Gray, who was writer-in-residence in Northampton, where I was living then. He read my writing and found me an agent, and my first commission came out of that. If you're serious about writing, you need to seek out someone who will help you find a way in.