Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

We are creatures of story.

When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is.