After my family leaves in the morning, I'll make my first coffee of the day and then I head upstairs to go to work. At least, that's my plan. I'm not going to check email. I'm not going on Facebook, or sneaking a glimpse at my Instagram feed. No. I'm not going to down that road. But with multiple devices, by the time I get upstairs [to my study] I may well have heard my iPhone ding and - it's Pavlovian.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

We don't choose what's going to wake us up.

Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same.

I never troll for material. It simply presents itself, and is always unmistakable. This is why I want to roll my eyes when people interrupt themselves in the middle of some story they're telling me to say, "You know you can't write about this."

When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.

It's not gender-specific, but I do think it's women who tend to start having that sort of little whispering voice of "I want more here" and "I want more for my family."